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Ardian Vehbiu
OUR OBSESSION WITH ORIGINS
1. THE NOBLE PELASGIANS
Somewhere around 1970, in a meeting with representatives of the Youth Organization, at one moment Enver Hoxha suddenly asked about the proceedings of research about Albanian remote origins. One of the present started providing some information about archaeological discoveries concerning Illyrian centers. The Great Leader interrupted him, apparently unsatisfied with this, and said: "What about the Pelasgian Studies?" As nobody was able to refer anything substantial about these non-existent Pelasgian studies, it was Enver Hoxha himself who started to explain the importance of the Pelasgian thesis, as well as to describe some books he had read about the argument, written obviously by French authors.
Of course, at that time, nobody from the scientific establishment in Albania was studying the Pelasgians. Besides a lot of descriptive, and almost weightless archeological papers, about the Ilyrian material culture, little was being done in historical linguistics either. The only linguist capable of dealing with older phases of Albanian on an international level was Eqrem Cabej, who was practically boycotted by the regime (young linguists used to write dacibaos against him). Nevertheless, the two Conferences of Albanological Studies (1962 and 1968, if I'm not mistaken), as well as the International Colloquium of Illyrian Studies (1972) were a proof that, on the field of proto-Albanian linguistics, there was more than just interesting promises.
What did the regime do? Give scholarships and send students to distinguished universities of Western Europe, so that proto-Albanian and Illyrian studies could continue? Create a special institute, or at least a department, for the study of Albanian language proto-history, under the deserved leadership of Eqrem Cabej? Of course not.
They invited in Albania the French scholar Zacharia Mayani, who had manage to explain the mysterious Etruscan inscriptions with the help of Albanian. Then the order was issued to publish, in Albania, the most recent of Mayani's books. And the leader Enver Hoxha started speaking about Pelasgians.
Now, who has read Mayani's book, and has even the remotest idea about the method of historical linguistic research, will have immediately seen that what Mayani has ingeniously pursued can be anything but science. And who has spent some time with the problem of Balkan proto-history, knows that Pelasgians represent a mythic entity. Actually today in Europe there are no more than 3-4 scholars entitled to deal with the Pelasgian problem.
Why? Because modern paleolinguistics uses the term "Pelasgians" to name a hypothetical people who inhabited the territory of Greece prior to the arrival of the Hellenic (Indo-European) tribes. It is generally supposed that this extinguished people has left its traces in toponomastics (place names) and in language. Some Old-Greek words, for example, cannot find a satisfactory position in the Greek section of the Indo-European word-root map. Some Old- Greek place names can't be explained with words of the Old Greek, and their sound pattern is dissimilar to the standard Greek sound pattern, etc.
Scholars usually first identify these elements, and then try to find patterns in them, in order to reach to a tentative description of the Pelasgian language. More than one scholar believed to have found these patterns (the Bulgarian Georgiev is the most authoritative of them). None of these serious scholars has ever found in these non-Greek elements of the Ancient Greek language anything substantially similar to Albanian.
The essential point here is that it is PATTERNS that count, NOT words. These patterns have to do with structural features of a language, such as: the evolution of determinate Indo-European sounds, the position of the word accent, the hierarchy of stems within composite words, the declination system, and so on.
Sounds boring? Of course it is, especially because it seems to have nothing to do with our well-known Pelasgians, who gave God names to their Greek neighbors (and presumably the Gods too), and who preceded the Greeks in the Balkans. People don't want to hear about the evolution of proto-Indo-European labiovelars, and neither of the hierarchy of stems. People want clear conclusions about the Pelasgians: where did they go when the Greek chased them away? Where are the lost Pelasgian inscriptions (who has destroyed them)? And on and on.
The Etruscan revelation about the origins of Albanian happened right when the Pelasgian theory was fading away, at least as far as a hypothetical proto- Albanian connection was concerned. Etruscans are generally viewed as an Oriental people, definitely non-Indo-European, with close relationships to ancient Egypt and other arcane civilizations (therefore much beloved by the French freemasonry). Their language remains a mystery, in spite of the thousands of inscriptions found in Italy and elsewhere (one has probably been found in Albania too, and is conserved in the Archaeological Museum in Shkodra -- at least it was there, before 1990). Some charlatans have not hesitated to see in Etruscans and Pelasgians the very same people (there most important proof consists of an apparently Etruscan inscription found in the Greek island of Lemnos). Through this tour de force the circle is thus closed (Etruscans, Pelasgians, Albanians), and Enver Hoxha's remark about Pelasgians comes out to have been far from superficial.
The clash between two fundamentally opposite views becomes thus evident: the one that leaves the origins of the Albanians and the Albanian language to science, and the other one that wants these same origins to be established, so to say, by "divine inspiration". In the seventies, science and myth were still disputing the problem, with no clear resolution in view.
The problem of origins is a constitutive part of any respectable national myth. Ours, who was born in full romantic drift, was rich in pompous assumptions about the Pelasgians, apparently inspired by Von Hahn's theses about the proto-history of Albanians. Arberesh scholars of that time were quite enthusiastic about the Pelasgian myth, and looked at it as a necessary element for the doctrine of the Albanian Renaissance. It continued to thrive for a long time, even after it became clear that the problem of Albanian origins and affiliation was to be resolved between the Illyrian and Thracian hypothesis. The reason for this stubbornness is directly related to the fact that both the Illyrian and the Thracian hypothesis were conceived within a scientific frame of ideas (not necessarily Albanian), while the "origins", as a key element, of the Albanian nationalist doctrine, were more a matter of BELIEF. Traces of this very same attitude among Albanians are abundant today too, though now the place of the mythic Pelasgians has been taken by the equally "mythic" Illyrians.
WHAT ALL THIS "OLD" IS ABOUT?
The basic idea behind this flagrant extrapolation is that the Albanian people MUST appear old. Personally I fail to understand why being "ethnically old" should bear any kind of weight in a cultural or a political dispute. I look into Albanian life, as it is today, and try to find something really old. Traditional folk customs might be old, but it is hard to find strictly Albanian features in there. For that, all cultural artifacts, if very old, are hardly Albanian, and if Albanian, are hardly very old. As for our national institutions, which one is old? The Agency of Privatization is certainly recent. Then what? The institution of selling girls to their future husbands? The proverbial Albanian hospitality? (Never heard of a people who wasn't proverbially hospitable). I know from history that Christian religion is certainly two millennia old, but there is little (if not nothing) Albanian in it. Some cities are quite old too, like Shkoder and Durres, but the continuity can be traced only as far as their names are concerned. Most other inhabited centers are relatively recent. People have constantly moved. When people move, their memories change. We all know that, in spite of the great gesta of our national hero Scanderbeg, his name in Albania was practically FORGOTTEN, until the Rilindja came to tell Albanians about him. A whole area in the North sings to Muji and Halili, and Gjergj Elez Alia, and Krajleviq Marko, and Zuku Bajraktar, and Paji Harambash, but makes no mention of Gjergj Kastrioti. To these noble people, Jutbina seems to have been far more important than Kruja. The first Albanian book appeared in 1555. Then, when people move, some of their memories are reinvented. The Arbresh in Italy generally claim that their communities were created from people coming from Northern Albania. Their actual dialect, though, is strictly Tosk. Was Tosk the language spoken in Kruja and Shkodra at that time? Probably not, because the "Baptismal Formula", or the first written document in Albanian, produced by the Bishop of Durres, has clear Gheg features (not to mention "Meshari"). So much for memories. What is then old? The herbal formulas used by local shamans in the mountains to cure the endemic form of jaundice? I remember having read a very interesting paper, which claimed that these formulas had been transmitted to interested locals by homeopathic Austro-Hungarian army doctors during the WW1. Aren't we calling and considering old what isn't but the result of a failed effort to modernization? Probably not. Then the Albanian language? Of course, Albanian language is old. As old as any other language. From the onset of spoken communication, it is virtually possible to trace an uninterrupted line of generations, from Homo Erectus to Partizan Caushi, between mothers who have been pretty SURE of teaching the very same language to their daughters and sons. Otherwise, historical linguists tell us that the word "dora" is older than the word "doreza". Very much true, certainly, but hardly inspiring. And with what right can we claim things, emotively, about the language, which can't have been created by us (on the contrary, it is the Albanian language who has been determinant in creating the Albanian nation -- therefore, the language, if it could, might have used the right to pretend things about its own people). Our names are certainly not old, anyway. My last name, for example, is clearly Arabic-Persian; my first name is a distorted form of an Illyrian ethnonym, exhumed by enthusiastic and atheistic Albanian massoviks during the fifties. What is then old? The Tomorri mountain? Let's leave geography to the school kids. The way we dress? What we eat? Our matrimonial strategies? Our typical card games? None of that. Nothing in culture can be old and alive, at the same time. As the society reproduces itself, all the old turns to new, though not necessarily in a progressive sense. In the same time, the culture we are immersed in, sets us up in such a way, that we are ready to PERCEIVE the old.
The myth of origins restores, within this frame, the missing antiquity.
WHO NEEDS A MYTHOLOGY TO BE ALBANIAN?
There is no doubt, though, that Illyrians DID exist, as an Indo-European people in the Balkans. They are studied by scholars, who might not be very enthusiastic about Albanian nationalist issues, without being, for that, anti- Albanian. These scholars have reached the following conclusion:
To the extent that the Illyrian language remains an unknown entity, it is not possible to establish any form of continuity between this people and the Albanians, though the Albanians probably are the descendants of Illyrians, because IF they had come to their present territory after the Illyrians were romanized, the historians would have recorded such an event.
Of course, the Albanian national mythologues can't accept such a vague and "hypochrite" scientific prudence. Once more, what the myth needs, is immediate proof of absolute certainty. If science has not been able to provide this kind of truth, then the science isn't worth anything: let's call the Zacharias, and resolve the problem NOT within the scientific paradigm, but BEYOND it. Where immanence fails, transcendence will win.
The Albanian ideologues and doctrinaires during the Communist regime did not promptly accept even the scientifically proven fact of the Albanian Indo- European affiliation. After 1960, they would immediately run after any kind of thesis that proved the UNIQUENESS of Albanians, whereas the Indo-Europeism of our origins would simply certify that the Albanian proto-history placed us within a great family of peoples, with whom we would have to share, in last analysis, the most fundamental moments of our history. The merit of the Pelasgian (and Etruscan) theories was that they focused on the arcane, and consequently isolated Albanian origins from European history.
Professional ideologues and manipulators that they were, their only worry was how to put science and culture in the service of politics. After all, science will always be so vague, and so tormented by doubts about truth and knowledge, that the political ideologues will ALWAYS be able to find something suitable to their purpose of the moment. In the 50-ies, for example, it was highly important that the evident cultural difference between Albanians and the great family of Slav peoples dominating the Communist Europe were somehow smoothed away. About this issue, one of the most distinguished Albanian historians had to say, in 1955, in front of an audience of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, more or less the following:
"The bourgeois science has always tried to deny the historic, ethnic and language links between Albanians and the Slavs. We won't fall into this ****. There's no reason to deny that there is Slavic blood running in our veins, and we are proud of it."
After 1960 all this Slavic blood dried out, obviously.
In my opinion, the research regarding the proto-history of Albanian (language and people) is very exciting, and will certainly give further interesting results. Nevertheless, to the extent that these results will be used by politicians, as a support of their activities (which might well be the noblest possible), they can't retain their scientificity. Greek and Serb nationalisms are full of such bombastic stuff, about origins, race and noble languages. With respect to our neighbors, Albanian nationalism has been far too timid, but this doesn't mean that current Albanian culture should now get seriously involved into this comedy of ancestor graves, old God names, and forgotten Sultan-killing heroes.
A preoccupation with Albanian issues, and even love for Albanian lands and Albanian countrypeople have little to do with the mythic and pseudo-historical instruments used by nationalist ideologues, in order to organize their hysterical herd. We all see what they were able to do with the Serbian people, and push them into medieval hysteria, war and genocide. As far as Albania is concerned, yesterday the myth of noble ("old") origins was used to support the delirium of Communist Albania's uniqueness and glory. Today it might be used to consolate (and make up) for the Albanian misery. Fairy tales might be important for children, and immature cultures. Albania, Kosova, and all other Albanian lands today deserve better.
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