This article first appeared in New Albania, No 4, 1976. It is reproduced here to give more information about this crucial battle against Hitlerite Fascism in the final days of the National Liberation War – and only a matter of days before the liberation of Tirana and the effective end of hostilities in Albania. Hopefully this will assist in the greater understanding of the analysis of the elements of the lapidar described in Mushqete Monument – Berzhite.
This article is further interesting as it provides a Socialist Albanian view of how they saw this battle against the German invaders.
Contrast this to those reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries who took control of the country in the 1990s. There reaction was to allow the creation of a monument to the German fascist dead and its installation in the hills of Tirana Park. To add salt to the wound this paean to fascism is only a matter of metres away from the original location of the National Martyrs’ Cemetery before it was moved to its present location and the inauguration of the statue of Mother Albania in 1972.
What does this monument stand for? The Mushqeta Monument
This monument has been raised at the village of Mushqeta, some ten kilometres south-east of Tirana. It has been raised in memory of the battle waged in this village on the 14th and 15th of November 1944 against the German forces of occupation.
The forces of the Albanian National Liberation Army were waging the decisive battle for the liberation of the capital. The entire garrison of the Hitlerite troops in Tirana had been surrounded from all sides. To avoid total disaster the German command sent a contingent of 2,000 soldiers, tanks, artillery and other armoured means from Elbasan (a city 50 kilometres south of Tirana) which were to attack the partisan detachments from the rear and, together with the forces of another German column which would come from Durrës (in the west), were to surround and liquidate the partisan forces fighting for the liberation of the capital.
On November 14th the enemy column is attacked by the detachments of the National Liberation Army lying in ambush at Mushqeta. The fighting continued fiercely all through the night. In the morning of the 15th the Nazi column is completely surrounded with the exception of a small part which managed to break the siege during the night with the aid of tanks. Seeing that they had no way out, the Germans launch a desparate counter offensive using their artillery, tanks and all other means of warfare. Bloody attacks and counter attacks continue during the whole day. By 5.99 p.m. that day, the Nazi column had been completely liquidated. The enemy left on the battlefield over 1,500 dead, many wounded and prisoners together with all their military equipment.
On November 17, 1944, Tirana, the capital of Albania, was completely liberated by the Albanian National Liberation Army. The victory at Mushqeta was the forewarning and forerunner of the liberation of the capital.
To give a better idea of what happened during that battle, we are reproducing a description by a military correspondent of the First Division of the National Liberation Army, who passed over the field of battle straight after the fighting had ended. Here is what he writes:
‘From the New Palace on the outskirts of Tirana to the village of Berzhite one can imagine that this great defeat of which so much is being spoken, especially when you see, besides the wrecked vehicles, the quintals of dynamite the enemy had abandoned on the Erzeni and Farka bridges because they had no time to blow them up. Here you can see destroyed vehicles, carts, horses and corpses. You say to yourself that this must have been the greatest defeat of the enemy. After passing this zone, you are faced with a pile of dead horses and overturned wagons, vehicles upturned in ditches, others in good order, wagons loaded with booty the Hitlerites had plundered in Greece and Albania, and armaments you had never seen before. You can count the equipment and corpses as far as Berzishta, but from here on it is impossible to count them even if you walk slowly.
Wherever you look, from right to left, you see real rivulets of blood, decaying flesh, very heavy armaments hurled off the highway as if by some extraordinary physical force, almost impossible to imagine.
You think this slaughter will continue as far as the corner of the road, no matter how great the battle had been fought. It could not possibly continue any further. But on rounding the bend, the heaps become more numerous. It seems as if the vehicles and wagons had wanted to push one another. Overturned material lying all over the place in complete disorder as if there had been a particularly heavy earthquake.
Further away from the road, on the side of the small hills on the banks of the river, 4 high calibre field guns have been abandoned facing each other even though they were used against our army. Further away, there are the number of mobile cooking houses enough for a whole division. Transport trucks complete with trailer, long wagons, vehicles carrying anti-aircraft guns directed towards the sky, small cannons, light and heavy machine-guns, cars, rifles, medical supplies and a pile of other things of every colour and kind. Among them is a baby’s pillow undoubtedly stolen by the army from some family at Elbasan.
Again corpses and dead horses and larger streams of blood. In the distance on the edge of the fields bordering the river bank, one sees horses which have escaped from this slaughter. They say there are also a number of hidden enemies who are giving themselves up to the surrounding villages. Further on, a colonel killed inside a car, the vehicle is completely wrecked, motor cycles abandoned on the road and the same scene as before.
You still walk through trails blocked by material, transport vehicles, dead horses and so on. You walk along the trails of the clearing, and then you are stuck on a sharp bend, below your right, where a small stream flows, the material and bodies are piled up in disorder. The horses lying prostrate on the ground and the bodies give the impression as if they had been knifed rather than killed by bullets. The stream looks like the channel of a slaughterhouse, the body of an enemy has fallen into the water.
Further across, the same scene over and over again. Horses, bodies, innumerable motor vehicles and wagons, war material and stolen booty in one great mess. The road looks as if the garbage of the city has been strewn along it.
Further on, guns, armaments and ammunition. The flag with the swastika lies hidden inside a wagon like some stolen article barely distinguishable. It reflects the present situation of Nazi Germany which tries to hide its criminal objectives now that the onslaught let loose against the peaceful and innocent peoples is rebounding on its own head.
Two kilometres on the other side of Ibe, two wrecked tanks give the impression as if the enemy column was not heading towards Tirana but towards Elbasan.
When you walk through the place you can’t believe that there had been only 2 to 3 thousand enemy troops. On the basis of the war material and the means of transport, it is calculated that there must have been at least a German division. The booty is so big that it gives the impression not of an army but of a savage horde of barbarians. This is a complicated scene, which reflects the character of the Nazi bands, pirates with modern means.
The destruction of these forces saved Tirana from the peril of devastation and mass massacres.
When comparing the numerous and heavy means of the enemy, their huge army on the march, the ruggedness of the terrain and their fortified positions with our armaments and positions, one wonders how it was possible to smash up and liquidate more than 2 to 3 thousand Germans by only 1,200 partisans.’
The article below was first published in New Albania, No 4, 1977. It addresses the somewhat complex issue of the origin of the Albanian people and the roots of the Albanian language – a language very different from all others in the surrounding area. It is included here to give some background to the obelisk to this topic in Gjirokastra, which was posted some time ago. That post looked at the images and what they signified, this article puts more flesh on the bones of that explanation and answers some of the questions that might arise from the particular images.
The problem of the origin of the Albanian People and their language
by Professor Eqrem Çabej
When the problem of the origin of a people is raised, it will be examined and solved more readily from the aspect of the perseveration and continuity of its language than from the ethnic viewpoint, because language, more than other elements, is the characteristic which distinguishes one people from the others. However for any people of any country or period, such a problem is complex and in the Albanian conditions it is especially complicated. It is complex because, as we know, in the formation of a people as an independent entity with its individual features which distinguish it from other peoples, various circumstances of a geographic nature and multiple historical, ethnical, economical, cultural and linguistic processes, play a part. It is complicated because in this field of Albanian Studies the lack of historical sources and documents is keenly felt. However, despite this poverty of sources, with the constant care of the Party of Labour of Albania and comrade Enver Hoxha, the new Albanian science is striving to get to the solution of this problem with the means at its disposal. And in this field it has achieved lasting results which have taken their place in the field of international science. Because of the complex nature of the problem the method to be applied must also be complex. A number of scientific disciplines must collaborate on it. In particular historical geography, history, linguistics, ethnography and prehistoric archaeology are involved in this. The results in any one of these fields should be taken into account and duly appreciated by the other disciplines, should be combined with their results so that wide range of facts can be gathered together into a few general principles, into a few more reliable facts, in order to arrive at some sort of synthesis.
The Albanians are autochthonous or native to the Balkan Peninsula since they have been living there since early prehistoric times. Together with the Greeks, they are the most ancient people in this region; they are heirs to the ethnical situation of the period of antiquity in this part of South-eastern Europe. Under these circumstances, the question as to where the Albanian people originated can be put in other words: Under what name were the forefathers of the Albanians, that people which has spoken the language from which the present Albanian is derived, known in the Balkans in ancient times? Hence, from which ancient people of this Peninsula do the present Albanians descend?
During the last century the hypothesis was very widespread that the Albanians were the descendants of the Pellasgians. This hypothesis or theory, founded by foreign scholars, was re-echoed far and wide among the Albanian poets and writers in Albania and Italy. It found fertile soil in the ideas of romanticism which spread later in South-eastern Europe, at a time when other literary trends had emerged in the West. Subsequently the Pellasgian theory was refuted. In Greek and Roman documents, the Pellasgians are mentioned as a pre-Greek ethnical stratum no longer in existence during the ancient period. Authors like Herodotus and Strabo speak of them as of a more ancient period and describe them as barbarians, that is, not Greeks, and having a language different from the Greek language. They place them in the zone of the Aegean Sea, principally in Thessaly spreading on one side towards Epirus and on the other side towards Asia Minor, towards Crete and other islands of the Aegean zone. Meanwhile, they are presented everywhere as a legendary people, shrouded in the mists of mythology, a people without concrete historical consistency. Although in later periods there has been some acceptance of their connection with the Illyrians and Thracians, it must be said that such ethnic and linguistic element as may, with considerable reserve, be called Pellasgian, for many reasons, including those of a geographical character, is in no way sufficient to provide any scientific basis for accepting a Pellasgian origin of the Albanian people.
Proceeding from a more realistic basis, in order to clear up the problem of the origin of the Albanians, we shall turn, first of all, to history as the continuation of the prehistoric situation in the Balkan Peninsula. In the period of antiquity, this part of Southern Europe was inhabited by a number of peoples, different from the present ones and differing from one another. It is known that the western regions of the Peninsula were inhabited by the Illyrians, the eastern regions by the Thracians, the southern regions by the Greeks, and the centre by the Macedonians, who were different from the Greeks and spoke a language of their own, according to Herodotus a ‘barbarian language’, that is, not Greek. Leaving aside some minor populations, like the Iranic tribes in the eastern part of the Peninsula and certain Celtic tribes in the north-western and central regions, this was the ethnic situation during the Greco-Roman epoch. Hence the question arises: from which of these peoples do the Albanians descend, from which of these languages does the Albanian language descend? In this problem, the Greeks, or the Hellenes as they were called at that time, are automatically excluded as a different people from the Albanians. Likewise excluded are the ancient Macedonians, as a relatively small people and geographically more remote from the Albanian language region, although, because of the territorial affinity, some links cannot be completely denied. Under these circumstances, there are two peoples, the Illyrians and Thracians, who can be considered as the ancestors of the Albanians.
The Illyrians were one of the major peoples of ancient Europe. Leaving aside their distribution in prehistoric times, during the historical period they extended from Istria near Triest in the north-west and from the regions near the banks of the Danube in the north, to the Gulf of Arta in Gameria in the south to a city which at that time, was called Ambria. Thus, the Illyrian tribes inhabited the present regions of Albania together with Qameria, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Croatia, hence, all the eastern seaboard of the Adriatic with its respective hinterland. The Messapians and Iapygians of Apulia in Southern Italy are, by all indications, Illyrian tribes as well. In the east the Illyrian tribes extended up to the banks of the Vardar and Morava rivers in Northern Macedonia, to Kosova, a region which in ancient times was called Dardania, and to a part of present Serbia. In those regions the Illyrians bordered the Thracian tribes and here and there were mixed with them. The Thracians, too, were one of the major peoples of ancient Europe. Herodotus calls them the greatest people next to the Indes. They extended from the borders of the Illyrians in the west up to the shores of the Black Sea in the east, from the Aegean in the south to the Carpathian mountains in the north. Thus they included part of present-day Greece and European Turkey, Bulgaria, Rumania and part of Hungary and Poland. Because of the lack of source material, mentioned above, we are able to discover very little about the fate of these peoples and their component tribes, and the further back we probe into antiquity the more this obscurity deepens. We know, for instance that the concept and name Illyrian came and was spread only after some time, emerging from a population of this name and including tribes with ethnic and linguistic affinity. In Homer’s epics this name does not appear. The names of individual peoples, like those of the Dardanians and the Peonians, who in historical times lived to the north of the Macedonians, appear on the historical scene much earlier than the general name, Illyrians. It is known, also, that under the influence of the Greco-Roman civilization and, especially, during the long period of the domination of the Roman Empire, these ancient peoples of the Balkans were eventually partly hellenized and many of them romanized. In other words, without being wiped out as peoples, they were assimilated, gave up their own language and in some regions adopted the Greek language and even more of them, the Latin language. This took place especially in cities, in administrative and military centres where the Romans had established their garrisons. However in mountain regions this assimilation was not carried out completely. The local population preserved its ethnic character and mother tongue for a longer time. Some of these peoples entirely escaped romanization. Living evidence of this is the Albanian people, who must be the descendant of one of these unromanized peoples or tribes.
The question of the paternity or line of descent of a present-day people from an ancient people, of a known modern language from an extinct ancient language, is quite simple when we have relatively accurate knowledge of the ancient people and their language. But, as we have said, in connection with the Albanians and the Albanian language this problem remains specially difficult. Because of the lack of written documents, the ancient languages of the Balkans are little known or entirely unknown. From the language of the Thracians there are a few inscriptions, from the language of the Illyrians of the Balkans up till now not a single inscription has been found. The inscriptions of the Messapians of Southern Italy can be read but up till now the interpretation of them remains uncertain. From both these languages, Illyrian and Thracian, certain so-called glossa remain, that is, few words quoted by Greek and Roman authors, together with their meanings, given in Greek and Latin. There are also quite a large number of names of places and persons engraved on stone or quoted in texts by classical authors, the majority of them of unclear linguistic significance and meaning, among which modern scholars have found a free field for what are often arbitrary judgements. Thus the two languages in question remain almost unknown by us. We do not know their linguistic structure, grammatical system, or their vocabulary. Under these circumstances the means for comparison are missing. We lack the key to compare the material of the Albanian language with that of the two languages in question.
This being the case, the criterion of the language must be considered together with the geographical and historical situation. From the standpoint of historical geography it is known that the present Albanians inhabit those regions where the Illyrian tribes used to live in ancient times. From the historical point of view, it has been rightly pointed out. as far back as two centuries ago, that there is no fact, no historical reference, to show that the Albanians come from somewhere else, that they settled on this territory at a given historical period, for instance, towards the end of antiquity or during the early mediaeval period. Under these circumstances, common sense urges acceptance of the idea that the Albanian people is native, autochthonous, in these regions, if not as far back as the dawn of prehistoric times, at least since the period of antiquity. These two reasons, that of their inhabiting the former Illyrian territory and that of autochthony, automatically give rise to the idea that the present Albanians are the descendants of the Illyrian tribes of the south and that the Albanian language is the continuation of one of the ancient Illyrian dialects. Indeed it can be said that the burden of the argument falls more heavily on those who deny the Illyrian origin of the Albanians and of their language rather than on those who accept it. In this connection, it cannot be accidental that the name of the Illyrian tribe, the Albanoi, which the astronomer and geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria in Egypt, mentions during the second century of our era in the region between Durres and the Candavia mountains in Central Albania continues to exist in the form of Arbër, Arbën, Arbëresh, Arbënesh, the name by which Albania and the Albanians were known in the Middle Ages, is alive to this day. From the linguistic viewpoint, to these circumstances must be added the fact that the continuity of the names of cities, mountains and rivers of the Albanian territory of the ancient days in their present forms has developed in conformity with the phonetic rules of the Albanian language. These include such comparisons as Scardus – Shar, Scodra – Shkodra, Drivastum – Drisht, Pirustae – Qafa e Prushit, Lissu – Lesh, Isammus – Ishëm, Ishm, Dyrrachium – Durrës, Aulon – Vlonë, Vlorë, Thyamis – Çam and others. This also is evidence of the Illyrian autochthony of the Albanian people, because this development from the ancient forms of these names to the present forms cannot be explained except by means of the Albanian language. It cannot be explained either by means of the Roman or Slav languages or by any other language of the Balkan region. There are also other data from the field of linguistics of the Illyrian continuity, such as the identity between a number of names of early Illyrians and present-day Albanians. Apart from this, those few words which are known from the Illyrian language can be clearly explained by the Albanian language. And many words in Messapian inscriptions can be explained by our language. In this way the date of historical geography and of the language supplement each other. There are also a number of parallels of an ethnographic character which we shall not go into here. From the field of archaeology it is worth mentioning that in certain prehistoric settlements on the Albanian territory a continuity of the material culture can be seen, a continuity from ancient epochs to the early mediaeval period. This fact adds weight to the geographical, historical and linguistic arguments already mentioned.
As regards the Thracians and their language, on the evidence of certain historical and linguistic data (place names with Thracian features), the presence of Thracian elements in the north-western part of the Balkan Peninsula and especially along the southern Adriatic coastal regions was pointed out long ago. They must have long been mixed with Illyrian elements, but we are unable to tell from the Illyrians and the Thracians who were natives and who newcomers. In conclusion, for historical reasons also, one can say that the Illyrian element lies at the basis of the formation of the Albanian ethnos, although there may have been a Thracian component also, but certainly of smaller dimensions. At the present stage of knowledge it is difficult to determine how the process of this ethnic and linguistic formation took place and in what territorial and historical circumstances it took place. The result of the process, which is the Albanian people and their language, can be seen more clearly than the course of development which was traversed until the present situation was brought about.
Eqrem Çabej (1908-1980) was a linguist and academic specialising in the origin of the Albanian language. His name was given to the University of Gjirokastra when it was declared as such at the end of 1991.
New Albania was a political, social and cultural illustrated periodical appearing bi-monthly in Albanian, Chinese, Russian, French, English and Arabic. It started its publication in the early days of the Socialist Republic, in 1947, and was published until everything fell apart in Albania in 1991.
Through the use of pictures, cartoons, stories and short pieces about the people and the lifestyle of ordinary Albanian workers the magazine sought to provide a view of the country that was otherwise never publicised in the rest of the world. This covered such aspects of Albanian society as Socialist industry, collectivised agriculture and education. Also it sought to give an introduction to the history of the country with articles on archaeology, linguistics, folklore and traditional dress and activities, literature, cinema and the history of art in the pre-Socialist era.
The magazine, which was lighter in its presentation, preceded the publication of ‘Albania Today’ (from the end of 1971), which was much more of a theoretical magazine that made a contribution to the various debates in the International Communist Movement.
At the moment we only have access to a limited number of issues and they will be posted as soon as possible. As with the request made on the ‘Albania Today’ page we would always welcome the loan of missing issues so that they, too, can be made available to a wider readership.