'I never thought I'd go to Albania,' said a member of an Australian tourist group during the crossing from Corfu. I never thought I would, either, but while his reasons for doubt involved not being in the right place at the right time, mine were different, coming from transplanted race memories that meant little to me, but much to the Greek family into which I married.
My generation of Australians grew up with bigotry: the cordial loathing that existed between Catholics and Protestants has faded only recently. But when I began moving in a Greek world I discovered old prejudices that were, however, new to me. I took the Greek hatred of the Turks for granted, but the bitter and complicated antipathy for Albanians I had to learn about.
It came as a shock, for example, to realise that it is a deathly insult for a Greek to call another an Albanian. Albanians have been in Australia since the 1920s, but I was totally ignorant about them, and about Greek attitudes towards them.
Prejudice may well be hard-wired into our systems: certainly we tend to be automatically suspicious of difference. (As an immigrant myself, I learned this lesson very personally.)
And we dislike being in the power of others, especially when that power is used against us. The Greek War of Independence, which started in 1821, was not over in the Peloponnese, where I live, until 1828. In 1825, attempting to crush the revolution, Ibrahim Pasha invaded, bringing 20,000 Albanian mercenaries with him. They pillaged, killed and raped, devastated the land, and sold thousands of Greeks into slavery. Being Muslim, they also often tried to force the Orthodox to convert. Greeks have forgotten none of this.
In our time, the Albanian border was the scene of the gallant defence of Greece against the Italians in the harsh winter of 1940–41, events of great suffering commemorated every 28 October. When the Greek civil war ended eight years later, Albania was one of the destinations for the victims of the notorious paidomazema (the gathering of the children) in which retreating Communists kidnapped approximately 28,000 Greek children: they were taken to the countries of the Eastern bloc, with the hope that they would eventually form a new Liberation Army.
During the 50-year Communist control of Albania, the country was sealed off: rumours of bandit tribes and unremitting barbarity swirled about monotonously. And when