In late January 1945, the new communist rulers of Albania began a campaign to prepare and sensitize public opinion in the country for the Special Court for War Criminals and Enemies of the People. The daily newspaper Bashkimi decried the leaders of Balli Kombetar and Legality as traitors, noting on 2 February: "All without any exception will give accounts before the Albanian people and before Albania. Today or tomorrow the sword of Albanian justice will fall on their necks..." The Special Court, set up on 25 December 1944 by order of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, opened its...

This volume presents the literary work (prose and poetry) of the northern Albanian writer Migjeni (1911-1938). The main theme of his literary work was misery and despair. Previous generations of Albanian writers had sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the sacred traditions of the nation, whereas Migjeni now opened his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling level of misery, disease and poverty he discovered all around him. He was a writer of despair who saw no way out, who cherished no hope that anything but death could put an end to his suffering. "I suffer with the...

Der Albanienforscher, Palaontologe und Geologe Franz Baron Nopcsa (1877-1933) war einer der schillerndsten Forscher und Gelehrten seiner Zeit. Er kannte die Berge Nordalbaniens und ihre befehdeten und schwerbewaffneten Bewohner wie kaum ein anderer. Seine hier vorgestellten Lebenserinnerungen, die die Jahre 1897-1917 umfassen, geben einen einmaligen Einblick in das Albanien vor hundert Jahren sowie in die Machenschaften der Politik Osterreich-Ungarns."

'Behind Stone Walls' is a sociological, or more specifically, a social anthropological study of traditional Albanian society. It focuses, in particular, on the formation and evolution of household and family structures among the Kosovo Albanians and was written on the basis of field work carried out by the author in the village of Isniq in western Kosovo in 1976. The study provides the reader with a fascinating glimpse into an exotic world which will soon belong to the past, as the author predicted.

The folktales of this collection were gathered and translated into English by the noted Scottish anthropologist Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948) in the late 1920s and 1930s. She collected them, for the most part, not from experienced storytellers, but directly from the children, young people and elementary school teachers she met during her long years of stay in Albania. The narratives are accordingly simple, taken, so to speak, from the mouths of babes. The Hasluck Collection of Albanian Folktales comprising 115 tales, is by far the largest ever to appear in English.

The Kosovo Albanian poet, Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), is considered by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and is certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation. His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct, terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts. The present selection of verse is designed to provide the reader with an overview of the poetic evolution of Ali Podrimja. It touches upon the early years of dynamic optimism in the 1960s, visits the haunts of anguish and personal solitude in the...