Nobody's Kingdom

T.J. Winnifrith

Description

The Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, foreign invasion, communism and tribal conflict: these have been the realities of life in Northern Albania for centuries. In this rich and comprehensive history, Tom Winnifrith examines the many different elements that have shaped this independent and little-known region of the Balkans. He explores the fundamental division between the South of Albania and its mysterious, romantic North - more feudal, more tribal, more Catholic and more prone to Austrian and Italian influence. It is also a region less affected by Greece, both ancient and modern, and by medieval Byzantium or the Orthodox faith. Northern Albania, with a terrain and climate much harsher than the south of the country, has traditionally had little respect for law and authority while its inhabitants remain in thrall to an ancient honour code -- the kanun -- demanding blood feuds and terrible revenge. Nobody's Kingdom traces the history of this ruggedly beautiful region, frequently disturbed by both invaders and internal strife yet retaining a distinct national identity and character. From its origins in the ancient kingdom of Illyria and the Roman province of Illyricum, through Byzantine and Ottoman rule, the granting of Albanian independence in 1912, the rise and fall of communism to its current fragile democracy, Northern Albania can be seen as a cultural crossroads - especially remarkable given its mountainous and difficult landscape. This book, both scholarly and readable, is the first modern comprehensive history of Northern Albania and is a timely and accessible introduction to a remote and inaccessible region.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Europe
• Albania

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909930957
• Langue: English

Extrait

Nobody’s Kingdom
A History of Northern Albania
T.J. Winnifrith




Published in 2021 by
Signal Books
www.don’t forget to create a hyperlink
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 T.J. Winnifrith
The right of T.J. Winnifrith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Signal Books or Andrews UK Limited.



Foreword
Tom Winnifrith was born in 1938 into an English professional family with a long tradition of public service and involvement in the main institutions of the state that were bequeathed by the Victorians to their twentieth-century successors. Close relatives served in the Anglican Church, Churchill’s Cabinet Rooms in the Second World War and in education. As a child he grew up in Dulwich, in south-east London, and soon showed considerable academic promise as a boy. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent between 1951 and 1956, before gaining a place to read Classics, Literae Humaniores , at Christ Church Oxford, where he studied between 1956 and 1960. His family had a long connection with the College where he joined the Labour Club and excelled in the literature and ancient history parts of the syllabus.
Winnifrith’s main intellectual influence and someone who was to play a key role in determining the direction of his later academic research and writing on the Vlachs in the Balkan mountains was Christ Church classics tutor and University Lecturer in Ancient History, Eric Gray. Gray was a Philhellene who spoke good modern Greek and who had during the Second World War been attached to the Greek ELAS andartes in the Arcadia region of the Peloponnese in mainland southern Greece. Gray’s gripping descriptions of mountain warfare and the nature of Greek rural society before the Civil War inspired the young student to visit the region.
Nowadays Winnifrith would probably have stayed in Oxford to do post-graduate work but given his circumstances at the time an occupation beckoned, and after a period trying school teaching in London, from 1961 he was appointed to a post in Eton College to teach classics where he remained until 1967. This occurred in the last days of the traditional classical syllabus in major public schools, and when he was appointed, Eton had over thirty staff teaching classics and associated subjects. A major reform was instituted by the then headmaster Anthony Chenevix-Trench in the mid-1960s and Winnifrith, who had always been an avid reader of English literature, transferred to teaching a mixture of classics and English. School holidays, in the days when public school teaching had many fewer responsibilities than nowadays, took him to Italy and Greece, until the onset of the Greek Colonels’ junta after the coup in 1967 reined in his travel and exploration. In 1966 he moved from Eton to a research post at Liverpool University where he stayed for three years, and as the William Noble Fellow in English also completed his PhD on the Bronte sisters as novelists. In 1970 he made a move to the newly developing Department of Comparative Literature at Warwick University, where he remained until he retired in 1998. In the earlier part of that period, he finished his first book The Brontës and their Background , [1] and for a time became very active in the Brontë Society before becoming disillusioned by the intractable conflicts in that organisation.
When democracy returned to Greece after 1974 he concentrated his research in the northern mountains, encountering numerous Vlach pastoralists who then were still living according to ancient transhumance traditions. He became fascinated, as a serious Latinist, by the roots of their language, and began to teach himself Vlach, so following his nineteenth-century inspiration, Gustav Weigand. [2] It was many years since the Edwardian scholars Wace and Thompson had laid the foundations of Vlach scholarship in Britain, [3] and much had changed in the Vlach world in northern Greece and neighbouring countries since then but little had been published about it. His research during this period, before the end of the Cold War and almost exclusively in far northern Greece, was brought together in his first ‘Balkan’ book The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People , a pithy and engaging study saturated with classical knowledge that cast light into an area of Greek life that up until then had only been the academic terrain of anthropologists like John Campbell, who had little sustained interest in the Vlachs. [4] His sections on the Vlachs in late antiquity and their relationships to Byzantium were ground-breaking in their time.
The end of the Cold War in 1990 and the opening up of Albania and Yugoslav Macedonia to reasonably easy (if uncomfortable) travel and research led Winnifrith to explore the Vlach presence in first southern and then northern Albania, and in what was then south-west Yugoslavia. He brought together various experts on Albania in an edited book Perspectives on Albania , [5] and then published his own Shattered Eagles: Balkan Fragments , [6] with seminal papers focused on the region such as ‘Minorities in the Prilep- Bitola Area’ and ‘Albania and the Ottoman Empire’. In the chaos of the time in both countries after the independence referendum in Skopje in September 1991, and with the ex-Yugoslav wars just beginning not far away to the north, Winnifrith was a resourceful and active traveller into old age, willing to rough it in order to speak to the people on the ground in often remote localities. He was a great admirer of Nicholas Hammond’s scholarly researches that embodied practical fieldwork, particularly his pre-Second World War study of ancient and modern Epirus, with Frank Walbank, and both had common forebears in classical human geography in Strabo, Procopius (in his study of Justinian’s buildings) and Pausanias. [7] He stood for the centrality of antiquarianism and the subjective factor in Balkan history research, and was often a critic of some academic historians of the modern Balkans.
The post-Cold War period and the subsequent Yugoslav conflicts also brought new research priorities. The explosive questions of Balkan minority rights and associated nationalism immediately came into focus, and Winnifrith spoke at a notable conference on the subject at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1992, which was also where we first met. The political identity of the Vlachs had long been uncertain and their loyalty divided largely between Greece and Romania. Mainstream Greek historiography, however, saw the Vlachs as Greeks, while Romanian historians viewed the Vlachs as Romanians, and it is this conflict that has defined the recent history of the Vlachs. Winnifrith became involved with a new movement among the Vlach diaspora in the United States that rejected this Manichean approach and asked why the Vlachs could not simply define themselves as Vlachs, regardless of the nation-state they happened to find themselves in, or pledge loyalty to. Tom was presented with a Mayoral Proclamation of ‘Vlach Cultural Awareness Day’ in New York City in honour of his visit and in the ensuing years contributed many articles to the Newsletter of the Society Farsarotul , a membership publication of the oldest and largest Vlach association in the US. [8] A traditional classicist and Hellenist, Winnifrith was soon faced, as many other scholars were, with profound dilemmas about the emergence of a new Macedonian national entity in the region, and this is also reflected in his work at the time. As a moderate socialist veering towards liberalism in his personal outlook, he sympathised with many of the real achievements in the ex-Yugoslav republic in areas such as health, public transport, literacy and education compared to the absence of social facilities in pre-PASOK mountain Greece, and was concerned to see that as far as possible the peace in both Macedonias, Greek and Yugoslav, was kept and involvement with the conflicts to the north avoided. He became an active supporter of the Friends of Albania humanitarian relief organisation and its journal Besa under the leadership of Primrose Peacock, and an active member of the Anglo-Albanian Society.
In his next book, Badlands-Borderlands: A History of Southern Albania/Northern Epirus , [9] Winnifrith returned to familiar terrain. In preparation he spent a good deal of time in the library of the British School in Athens, drawing in particular on the papers of
S.S. Clarke (1897-1924) whose fieldwork in the region preceded that of Hammond and Walbank in the early 1920s and who died an untimely death in a drowning accident at a young age after a brilliant military career in the First World War. Clarke – or at least his largely forgotten and unpublished materials – is in many ways the guiding star of this book, and it ends with Winnifrith’s observation that in terms of field research on the Greek-Albanian border, ‘a new Clarke is still needed for our age’, although many of his friends and colleagues must feel that Tom was to fulfil that role very well himself in Vlach and associated scholarship. He is in some senses a writer in the tradition of the scholar gypsy of nineteenth-century literature, with pro