From here to what has become the Greece/Albania frontier the Byron battalion’s route has become the victim of geopolitics. There are now only two official border crossings, one to the north and one to the south of the track that was the old way into Albania. But here on this Michelin map I am looking at there is a dotted line that joins Orino in Greece and Radat in Albania; clearly the old crossing has to be attempted.
Straight after Orino the road loses its tarmac. A few miles further on it goes from gravel to grass, and then reduces to two lines of rutted earth or mud. I press on, the Smart hire car being ideal for this sort of off road work. Suddenly, after a few kilometres the track stops at a rampart. There’s a feeble wire fence with large gaps underneath it. Fresh footprints are on the earth, heading south.
I was just thinking it would take more than this to keep the poor Albanians out when a helicopter, an angry helicopter clearly on full revs or whatever it is helicopters are full of when angry, appears fast and low over the treetops. It is blue and white with POLICE under the doors. Thank heavens the photographs of the frontier are safely on the flash card. It flies over, banks tightly and descends. Just when you need a Stinger one is never to hand. Does a man alone in a bright red oilskin standing next to an electric blue and dayglo Smart two-seater in the early afternoon look as suspicious as he does conspicuous? He could hardly be a people trafficker, or at least not a very tactical one. The man on the ground opens both doors and the tailgate, and gives the helicopter some gentlemanly English body language. The helicopter hovers just above the ground, not sure of its quarry. The ground shakes, the dust attacks. The driver shrugs and waves, and the car gingers its way back along the track. The helicopter follows, but now higher and better tempered. The car stops outside Orino, and the driver shows more signs of peace. The helicopter turns sharply about itself and flies off without a proper goodbye.
And so to the official southern border. It has been clear for a while that Greeks and Albanians cannot stand each other, in a deep Greco- Balkan kind of way that is hard for others to follow. The Balkans seem prone to finding new ways to divide and loathe each other. You can forget Forgive and Forget, they are just not on the menu; memories are as long as blood feuds. The closer to the border, the shriller and more alarming the warnings. Never go out at night. Never go out alone. Keep your hands in your pockets. Never wear your watch. Everything for sale has been stolen.
The resentment needs no encouraging, but the role reversal they each find themselves in reinforces the mistrust. Under the Ottomans the Albanians had converted to Islam and paid their dues if not their taxes. To the Greeks they had become quasi-Turks. For them the Greeks, the slaves and infidels who had always been nothing but trouble, had somehow wangled their way into the European Union - the underbelly to milk and honey - and now it was the Albanians who had to cross the border on their hands and knees in the middle of the night and work for half the Greek wage. To the Greeks the Albanians are what they always have been: inherently dishonest, congenitally disingenuous, downright disagreeable and much as their own King Zog had described them: ‘a primitive and backward people’. And now millions of them were racketeering in Greece. And they were still camping in the north of Greece’s Epirus - the ‘land without end’ - and calling it southern Albania.
The car has to spend some time in the car park on the Greek side of the border as no Greek car hire company will allow their charges into Albania. Both sides are mighty suspicious of this lone traveller on foot. The Greek customs asks why my two bags were so heavy.
’Mostly my books,’ I reply.
’Open,’ he snarls. Many of the books are those mentioned in Acknowledgements later in this volume. On three covers were pictures of Lord Byron. Others had his name on the cover.
’I’m writing a book about Lord Byron, when he visited here. In Ali Pasha’s time.’
’Byron good Greek,’ he says, smiling. ‘Be careful. Albania strange country. Your case not locked?’
’Well apart from the books there are only clothes,’ I reply.
’Albanians steal clothes.’
’They are old clothes, and some dirty washing.’
’Albanians like old clothes. Better for them,’ he laughs out loud,then turns back into his office and I presume repeats my story and his joke to his colleagues to much shaking of heads and general merriment.
I wheel the two bags through no man’s land, about three hundred metres uphill. Either side of the road are barbed wire fences on top of concrete blocks. There are watchtowers on the Albanian side. I feel as if I am to be an extra in an old John le Carré film. Looking up and beyond the fences, the mountains either side are crisscrossed with paths and tracks. Greece is full of illegal Albanians working where they can. One wonders why no one down here realises what is going on up there, and then the climb over, one knocks on Albania’s door.
The hotelkeeper in Zitsa had warned me that the Albanians would not let me through until I had paid a bribe. How much? €10, but he wasn’t sure. But I have all afternoon and am quite as interested in observing the comings and goings at the border as I am in reaching Libohova, Byron’s and my first overnight stop. The rummage through the big bag reveals nothing but the books and clothes.
’Import tax.’The officer wears an oversized and over braided concave cap. His face looks small and pinched below the adornment above.
’No imports,’ I reply.
’Import tax, €20,’ he insists.’No,’ I say, and sit down pointedly.
He walks off and some minutes later a more senior braided cap approaches. His face is fuller and kinder. ‘Where you go, my friend?’
’Libohova,’ I smile.
’Taxi here, come,’ he gestures me to repack and follow. Outside is the first of very many old Mercedes that are seeing out their days to the roads of Albania. ‘Pay taxi now,’ says the customs man, ‘€20.’ Seems a bit high but not worth the argy-bargy. I hand the taxi driver a twenty note, and ease into the back seat. I see the taxi driver give the customs man some lek notes. I suppose I have just paid the €10 after all.
We reach Libohova late in the afternoon. In Byron’s day there was no official difference between what is now Greece and Albania,except as one crossed the Epirus the ethnic Greeks gave way to the ethnic Albanians. Once down on the plains of Albania Hobhouse noted the well-cultivated land with ‘English-looking divisions an drivers running through the hills’. There were tobacco fields and snuff factories, fortresses on hills all around them. They rode the fifty kilometres from Delvinaki to Libohova in one day, and stayed in the house of a relation of one of Ali’s wives, the house being set aside for receiving Ali’s guests. Ali’s nephew was the governor, an absent governor that night, and he resided at the castle which sits atop Libohova with his mother, Ali’s sister, of whom more later.
There is a path up to the castle but it has been washed away,reclaimed by a greater Albania. One has to clamber up the last fifty metres, but it’s dangerous underfoot and there is nothing up there but stubs of walls and tangled weeds, and the clamber not really worth the mud and scrapes and bother.
The prosperous town that was is more or less deserted now, and just a dirt-poor village remains. Only the name is the same. The few people there are very old, mostly women, mostly in black, mostly stooping. The only paved street is littered and worn and just behind the street, in the shrubbery, are layers of dirty and dusty plastic bottles and bags. There was a hotel, the one at which the writer was planning to spend the night, but it is closed and doesn’t look like reopening, ever. There is a café serving Nescafe and Chinese wheat biscuits. The owner speaks a little English. Where is everyone?’ Olympic! Building London Olympic!’ he declares proudly. There is no bed for the night. ‘Nothing here,’ he says with a shrug. The nearest one is in Gjirokastra, the capital of the province, just five miles across the valley.
It wasn’t always thus; in B
yron’s day, in Ali Pasha’s day, this used to be a thriving town, made more so by it’s most famous resident, Ali Pasha’s sister and the governor’s mother, Chainitza. She was a proper Ali, a true chip off the old block. After a feud with a neighbouring village she borrowed some of her brother’s brigands and ordered them to massacre all the men and children there and drive the women to her at Libohova castle. She had them stripped, their hair cut and stuffed into her new mattress and then told the brigands to describe, slowly, one at a time, how they had killed the women’s families. She then turned the women over to the brigands’ amusement and issued an order that they were not to be provided with clothes or shelter, and had them driven naked into the woods to be eaten by bears and wolves.
Two hundred years ago Gjirokastra belonged to Ali Pasha’s only local rival, Ibrahim Pasha. In fact it was against the latter that the former was ‘in a small war’ when Byron and Hobhouse came to find him in Ioannina, and this ‘small war’ was the reason they had to make the journey to Tepelenë if they wanted to see him. A short time after they left Albania Ali Pasha would duly capture Gjirokastra too and set about fortifying, and presumably terrorising, it. Visitors wishing to follow Byron’s route now have to divert to Gjirokastra as the track from Libohova to Byron’s next stop, Qestoral, has been washed away and there is no need to replace it as the farms are deserted and the land fallow.
Although Enver Hoxha died in 1985 the Maoists hung on as best they could until 1990. In 1991 the country reacted to the release from communism with anarchy, led by the peasants who had been used as slave labour. They owned nothing, were paid nothing and kept nothing. The punishments for failing to meet targets were descended on extended families; the sentence for owning any form of livestock or taking part in any free trading was an extended visit to the camps. Living had been just plain hard until 1960, but when Russia denounced Stalin Hoxha aligned his country with Mao. He even had his own Cultural Revolution and purges of imaginary class enemies. By 1991 the peasants decided no one should ever be used as field slaves again, and trashed the land so that it could never happen.
Now the towns are spreading as the farmland is returning to from whence it came. One can drive for miles and not see anyone working in the fields. Trees have been felled for fuel and the land washed away in the rains. There are no birds. The land has turned an insipid shade of pale green and looks sad, dejected, defeated by decades of greed and gross stupidity. In many ways a feudal system would be better as at least someone owned the land and was responsible for it. Now no one owns it, or more precisely no one knows who owns it: the communists nationalised it all and since then there have been endless and unsolvable disputes, claims of original and often undocumented ownership complicated by the traditional Napoleonic system of inheritance. As the Gjirokastra hotel owner said, ‘every house and field is owned by a hundred people, and so is owned by nobody.’
Back on the road to Tepelenë, Gjirokastra has recently become a UNESCO World Heritage site and is dominated by Ali Pasha’s enormous citadel which sits brooding over it. The rest of the town spreads down steeply from the citadel. From a distance the setting of the citadel beyond the lake with snow capped mountains looks enchanting, but close up the town is shabby; St. Moritz or Vail it ain’t. There are a number of well-priced hotels in converted houses. It is wise to eat near your hotel at night as a pack of wild dogs roam the streets, and this can be somewhat unnerving. Torches are useful as there are frequent power cuts and the streets are not blessed with neighbours or names or numbers.
The citadel is massive, worthy of its UNESCO status, and hidden in the nooks and crannies are Hoxha’s tanks and guns and Ali’s cells for the prisoners and animals. This is where he liked to keep his menagerie, whose main purpose was to eat the prisoners. One tigress became so sated with human flesh that she lost her appetite so Ali Pasha let her free to hunt in the town as her appetite dictated; apparently the bears weren’t so fussy and their appetite never diminished. He kept his hunting dogs here too, and fed them on boiled prisoners. Even the prisoners unwittingly ate other prisoners, disguised in the stew. Word around the campfire was that the Italians tasted best, but that’s just a rumour the writer cannot verify.
Byron and Hobhouse could not stay in Ibrahim Pasha-held Gjirokastra and instead stayed in Qestoral and then the next day Ereend, about fifteen kilometres further on. I left my bags in the hotel in Gjirokastra, took the bus to Qestoral and walked to Ereend and hitched a ride back. The villages are more or less deserted: there are only old men, old women and ‘honorary men’, these being women who refused their father’s choice of husband and so were obliged to spend the rest of their lives as spinsters, or ‘honorary men’. People are living in hovels, dressed in rags, with a standard of living barely higher than the chickens that cluck around them. In the fields you see what you think is a scarecrow, then it starts to move; but there are no crows to scare anyway; even the flies have stopped bothering to breed.
The country has been ravished but the setting remains magnificent. One is in a valley alongside a careering river and on either side hills unfolding higher and higher to become mountains. Back in the day, with the moors and lakes and kilts and clans and the music and food, it again reminded Byron of his childhood Scotland. King Leka had once described Albania as being ‘like Scotland in the Middle Ages’. The following week I was to ask him if the description still held good.
’Yes,’ he replied thoughtfully, ‘although the communists destroyed a lot of our traditional life. Purges, forced movements, gulags. Hoxha was as much of a mass murderer as his mentor Mao. The last seventy years have not been kind to Albania.’ Indeed they haven’t. History has passed them by and not even noticed.
By the end of the next day, 19 October 1809, they were approaching their destination, Tepelenë, and Ali Pasha’s palace there. Byron himself now takes up the story:
I shall never forget the singular scene on entering Tepelenë at five in the afternoon, as the sun was going down. It brought to my mind [Sir Walter] Scott’s description of Branksome Castle. The Albanians, in their dresses, (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver-mounted pistols and daggers) the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans, the soldiers and black slaves with the horses, the former in groups in an immense large open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with the despatches, the kettle-drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, altogether, with the singular appearance of the building itself, formed a new and delightful spectacle to a stranger. I was conducted to a very handsome apartment, and my health inquired after by the vizier’s secretary!
Unfortunately the castle is no more, and just the base of the walls that used to surround it remain unreclaimed or unplundered. At its peak it must have been magnificent as it takes a full ten minutes to walk around its perimeter. On one corner is an unpolished plaque to commemorate Byron’s visit. What was once a glory is now but a shell, and the shell is populated by hovels and surrounded by mounds of rubbish. The structure of the main northern gate can still be determined, but access is restricted by heaps of used plastic and tin. The hovels house reluctant gypsies, who would much rather be out and about but have been told to stay put. I paid an urchin 50 lek to show me around, as much to ward off the others as to enquire within. Actually the Roma in the castle lived in better shacks than the Albanians in the countryside around, and were more cheerful too.
The main point of interest now in Tepelenë is the enormous statue of a reclining Ali Pasha, its most famous son. He is seen with pistols and daggers in his belt and an unforgiving scowl on his face. Behind him is a communist-brutalist hotel which is open but empty and decomposing. The main street sells only oversized bright plastic flowers for the road
death shrines. Ali Pasha and Lord Byron, even the less fanciful John Cam Hobhouse, even the reluctant Fletcher, would be heartbroken to see what humankind - the Italians, Germans, Stalinists, Maoists, anarchists and now the gangster ‘democrats’ have done to their beloved Tepelenë in particular and Albania in general.
But let’s cheer up for a moment. Two hundred years ago the two legends, Lord Byron and Ali Pasha, did meet right here in this castle. The evening before Byron had met one of Ali Pasha’s secretaries called Ioannis Colletti, whom Hobhouse rather breathlessly reported as fluent in German, Latin, French, Italian, Greek and Turkish. Colletti would have prepared Byron for the meeting, the procedures extant, the courtesies to follow. Ali Pasha would be using his physician as his interpreter, addressing them in Turkish, which the physician would translate into Latin, the language Byron would use. Byron took considerable trouble with his preparations. He was clearly nervous: he even ticked Hobhouse off for not being respectful enough of the British nobility. He was here on a diplomatic mission, an important and secretive affair of state. It had to be done correctly. This was his maiden voyage as a diplomat, his first time doing anything responsible, consequential, like this at all. Ali Pasha’s reputation alone demanded caution. The tyrant was almost fifty years older and in total control. Byron had no political weight to throw around, and had to win the day by his personality and bearing alone.
Joy Unconfined Page 13