Aging on the Run, Former Yugoslavia, long term travel, Nationalism, Public History, Sustainable Economies
I began this essay in Montenegro, where people speak a local Serbian dialect, and finished it in Wales, where Welsh is visible on every signpost, yet English is undeniably dominant. Such is the language of empire. Living in countries with idioms foreign to me, I have...
Aging on the Run, Balkans, 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, 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, Balkans, Former Yugoslavia, Nationalism, Sustainable Economies, war and peace
I read To The Lake: A Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova, about her roots trip circling ancient lakes that border Albania, North Macedonia, and Greece. Kassabova rejects the nationalisms that poison the region while celebrating the magnetism of Lake Ohrid,...
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...
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Sustainable Economies
First impressions are precious and dangerous. Precious because you see things that later you gloss over. Dangerous because you make quick assumptions based on slim evidence. Shqiperia at first glance looks to me like an in-between place: part Southern Europe, part...
