Aging on the Run, Nationalism
In Montenegro, I think of sandwiches. Not the mustard/mayo, whole wheat-or-rye kind. I think about rivers, lakes, and bays, sandwiched between mountains. These are waterways of unsurpassed beauty. From where I sit overlooking the Bay of Kotor, one can get to...
Aging on the Run, Public History, Sustainable Economies
“I accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the [1997] Albanian civil war could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by longstanding animosities between ethnic groups… its plan could be disrupted only by outside...
Aging on the Run, PTSD and Historical Trauma, Public History, Radical Hospitality, Social Movements
Berat— Albania’s oldest city —has 1,000 identically-shaped windows in its Ottoman-era old town and a Byzantine city on top of one of its mountains. The Osum River runs through the town with buildings hugging the slopes. A green ridged range covers its north side....
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Sustainable Economies
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken came to Tirana, Albania. He did not stay long. Not long enough for a state dinner. He would eat in Munich, his next stop. The Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama chastised him for this diplomatic slight. While Blinken was in...
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Sustainable Economies
I read To The Lake: A Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova, about her roots trip circling two ancient lakes that border Albania, North Macedonia, and Greece. Kassabova rejects the nationalisms that poison the region while celebrating the magnetism of a Lake...
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Public History, Sustainable Economies
In Albania, time folds, though the marching chronology of the country’s last 130 years appears stark with fundamental change: The Ottoman Empire, Nationalist Monarchy, Italian Fascism, Enver Hoxha’s Stalinism, Enver Hoxha’s Maoism, Enver’s Hoxha’s Enverism— a...
