Albanians

Also, search: centuries-old blood feuds that leave elderly men in Chicago dead in their beds with slashed throats.

Why? Because anyone who uses this as the official "welcome to my web site" picture is completely bad-ass...

http://www.president.al/images/presidenca.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/377.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/373.jpg

Control of the Assets? There are assets?

http://www.president.al/album/337.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/326.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/324.jpg

(jbr sez: "R.E.M. publicity shot circa 1995")

http://www.president.al/album/316.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/294.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/277.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/204.jpg

http://www.tvtome.com/images/people/0/0/18-1064.jpg

(Eliza Dushku)

http://www.president.al/album/168.jpg

a) an eastern european music video
b) the presidents of Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia signing a declaration
c) the presidents of Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia starring in a tourist advertisement/music video

http://www.president.al/album/138.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/91.jpg

jbr: i bet there's at least one PiL tribute band in Albania, and that band is my favorite band ever
ckb: agreed. i'll bet Albania has the worst Neil Diamond impersonator too
jbr:: YES

http://www.president.al/album/113.jpg

http://www.banknotes.com/AL64.JPG

apparently once King Zog was on a state visit somewhere. An assassin pulled out a gun and took a few shots at him. King Zog coolly drew his own and fired back at his assailant. This endeared him to the masses of Europe.

Oh wait, not that kind of Albanian. Sigh.

I've not visited them but they tell me that the mayor ordered all the buildings in central Tirana to be painted in bright happy colours to disguise the shabbiness of the town. So parts of it now looks like a Lego city.

Theresa Russell IS King Zog

http://www.lewzworld.com/simpsons/adilhox.jpg

He was slightly mentioned way up above. Then there's the Belushis of course.

http://www.president.al/album/453.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/427.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/422.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/418.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/380.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/472.jpg

I give you King Zog...democracy doesn't look so hot now eh?

dreamy..

The king of Albania always has a seat at Sam’s Place on 39th Street, which is more than he can say for his home country. New Yorker Peter Duffy visits a local society hoping to restore a distant crown.

There’s always a seat reserved for the king of Albania at Sam’s Place, a cozy, East 39th Street Italian restaurant that has been run by Albanians for 75 years. The brother of owner Sami Mulosmanaj was a longtime confidante of King Leka, who has claimed the Albanian throne since the early 1960s but never ruled the small, impoverished nation on the Adriatic Sea. So whenever His Royal Highness visits the Big Apple, he heads straight for Mr. Mulosmanaj’s establishment, which looks right out of a just-colorized, Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s version of New York. ‘Oh, he’s been here many times,’ the restaurateur said of the monarch. ‘He’s sat upstairs, downstairs. Many, many times.’

His attention veered to a spirited gathering of men, chatting among themselves in Albanian and English. Dressed in dark suits and ties, the men, and they were all men, often meet for dinner at the restaurant to talk about life in their homeland. The news isn’t good – Albania is a place of ‘crime, chaos, corruption, concrete brutalism,’ in the words of The Guardian. But the group advocates a picturesque salve to their country’s wounds: a constitutional monarchy.

Article continues at link above

Phrase of the year.

"President Moisiu meets the Albanian students in Poland."

http://www.president.al/album/681.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/615.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/580.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/573.jpg

President's son dies in cliff plunge

http://www.djmkerr-stamps.com/pics/alb179-87.jpg

Are they Albanian?!!?? I hate those guys, but then I don't smoke and I can always just cross over to the other side of the street can't I? Lazy sod.

http://www.hotels-europe.com/info-countries/albania/albania-03.jpg

TIRANA, Albania (Reuters) - While heavyweight pundits ponder the 'real reasons' behind CIA (news - web sites) director George Tenet's sudden resignation, a Tirana newspaper on Friday offered a typically whimsical explanation; he fell victim to an ancient Albanian curse.

The Korrieri daily said the CIA chief's resignation on Thursday fell a day before he had been due to visit Albania.

"If he had not planned a visit to Albania, probably he would have not been struck by the curse of the Pojan jinx," editor Alfred Peza said in his column, citing a supposed evil spirit that jinxed the villagers of Pojan back in the mists of time.

Tenet was clearly felled by the jinx, wrote Peza, as were the late Soviet Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, former West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and others who were demoted or quit after becoming involved with Albania.

Tenet's resignation, the paper said, had prevented him visiting the Albanian birthplace of his mother who, by his own account, escaped from southern Albania on a British submarine just as the Iron Curtain was closing after World War II.

But it might not have been his first trip to the former Stalinist bastion. Previous reports, also unconfirmed, say Tenet twice visited Albania, incognito, in the early 1990s.

Queen Susan of the Albanians
(reprinted from The Telegraph, 22.07.04)

Queen Susan of the Albanians, who has died in Tirana aged 63, was the level-headed Australian wife of King Leka I, claimant to the Albanian throne.

It is unusual, though not unknown, for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of dispossessed monarchs. But when in 1975 the petite Susan Cullen-Ward married Leka, son of King Zog I, she became consort to a 6ft 9in tall, six-gun-toting giant who has never shaken off the aura of his country's bandit culture.

Leka was born at Tirana just before the Second World War and left with his family two days later when Mussolini invaded Albania. After his father's death in 1961, he was crowned in Paris, from which he was expelled because of the ill-effects he was having on French relations with Albania's Communist regime; he was once arrested on suspicion of arms smuggling in Thailand. In the course of his restless travels, he met Susan Cullen-Ward at a dinner party in Sydney.

They discovered that they both had claims of royal lineage; she was descended from King Edward I and he was a ninth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II. When later she was on holiday in London, a courtier suggested that she visit the King in Madrid.

Leka's mother, Queen Geraldine, realised that the couple's friendship was turning into love, and proceeded to groom the Australian girl as her royal successor. This involved teaching her to speak Albanian and steeping her in the history and customs of the country.

Leka and Susan were married in a civil ceremony at Biarritz, then held a reception at a five-star Toledo roadhouse, which was attended by members of other exiled royal families, loyal Albanians and Spanish friends. An Anglican clergyman flew from Australia to give the couple a blessing. Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulations. Queen Susan looked suitably regal in a 200-year-old gold embroidered Royal Albanian shawl and the guests cried "Long live the King".

A grazier's daughter, Susan Cullen-Ward was born at Waverly, a suburb of Sydney, on January 28 1941 (Australia Day). She was brought up on a New South Wales sheep station, where she remembered practising to curtsey to Her Majesty The Queen before a royal visit, but also being taken with the achievements of Colonel Harry Llewellyn and his showjumper Foxhunter, which won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics.

Young Sue went to the Presbyterian Ladies' College at Orange, then Sydney Technical College, before teaching art at a private studio and contracting a brief marriage.

After returning with her husband to Spain, she told the press at the reception, "I don't feel like a queen. I feel a happy bride. Nothing has changed except I have the responsibility of helping His Majesty back on to the throne of his country."

The couple returned to Madrid, where they were befriended by King Juan Carlos and continued to enjoy the attentions of Albanians while awaiting what they knew must be the fall of Communism. But when it was discovered that Leka not only retained some Thai bodyguards but had what was described as an arms cache in their home, the Spanish government asked him to leave.

That Leka had some reason for his fears was proved when he arrived at Gabon to find his plane surrounded by local troops, who were said to have been hired to capture him by the Albanian government; he saw them off by appearing at the plane's door with a bazooka in his hand. The couple went on to Rhodesia. But after Mugabe took power they settled in a large compound at Johannesburg, where they were given diplomatic status by the apartheid regime.

There were always questions about how Leka lived. Such good friends as the Shah of Persia, President Richard Nixon (a distant cousin) and the CIA are thought to have helped.

The royal couple enjoyed a close personal relationship. They both had a keen liking for smoking. He affectionately called her "Roo", and showed some signs of allowing her to check some of his more outlandish instincts. For more than a decade she tried to lead as ordinary a life as her roles of housewife, mother and queen permitted.

Out shopping, she often called herself Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones because shop assistants were so bamboozled by her title that they would ask "Queen? That's a funny name, Mrs Susan." When her son, also called Leka, was born, her hospital room was declared part of Albania for an hour. The boy used another name at school, though she once heard him tell a friend: "You can't say that to me, because I'm a prince." Entering the room, she said: "Well, I am queen, so I outrank you. Bend over."

But as Communism looked increasingly shaky in Eastern Europe, she felt lonely with Leka so frequently away; and she was always delighted to receive visits from old Australian friends, replete with gossip. Her relationship with the dominion's government proved a problem when she wanted a passport.

The Australian authorities declined to recognise her as a queen, and eventually, after a friend had a word with the Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock, the document described her as "Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan". There was also trouble when her son, aged four, had wanted to visit a dying grandfather whom he had never met. He was asked to sign an undertaking not to address any dissident groups.

By the time it was clear that Leka's dream of returning to his country was to be fulfilled, she showed signs of preferring the simple life, saying she had no desire to live in a castle and was sometimes tempted to laugh when grown men, in their confusion, had curtseyed to her.

But she duly went to Albania where a referendum was held on his offer to become king in 1997; it was lost. But he was invited to return by 74 members of parliament in 2002; and it is thought that the royalist party could join a government after next year's general election, thanks to proportional representation.

After her death on Saturday, Queen Sue lay in state at the royal palace outside Tirana. Hundreds paid their last respects before she was buried yesterday in a grave next to her mother-in-law and bridge partner Queen Geraldine.

Beautiful.

!!!!

Also, their flag kicks ass:

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/icitap/albania.gif

Some day I will start buying Albanian music.

Why, yes! Great local public access programming!

http://southsidecallbox.com/images/alb2.jpg

http://southsidecallbox.com/images/alb.jpg

WHICH IS TOTALLY AWESOME.

u b the judge:

fashë = bandage
fushë = area, field
kofshë = thigh
lafshë = prepuce of penis

TIRANA, Albania -- Near the end of his 40 years in power, Enver Hoxha prepared his tiny country for an invasion he warned was sure to come. The Marxist dictator built 750,000 concrete bunkers in the 1970s and 1980s and imported large quantities of weapons to repel an expected attack by Americans, Soviets, Yugoslavs or perhaps all three at once.

But his most prized weapons acquisition was a state secret known only to the Albanian leader and his closest advisers -- a secret that only now is coming fully to light.

In the mid-1970s, U.S. and Albanian officials now believe, Hoxha arranged the purchase of several hundred canisters of lethal military chemicals to be used in weapons against invading armies. The chemicals included yperite, or sulfur mustard, one of the chemicals used by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to slaughter thousands of Kurdish civilians in the 1980s, as well as lewisite and adamsite, which are based on arsenic.

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I61981-2005Jan09L

http://www.president.al/album/1395.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/1338.jpg

Like I said, don't mess with Albania.

http://www.president.al/album/1330.jpg

Similarly unpronouncable names...

http://www.president.al/album/1102.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/1108.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/1070.jpg

The prospect of an Albanian/Moldovian alliance, it must be said, does not make me tremble.

http://www.president.al/album/895.jpg

The New Yorker on Tirana mayor Edi Rama

Rama has been in office for nearly five years (he was elected in 2000, at the age of thirty-six, and reëlected three years later), and the first thing he did as mayor was to order paint. He blasted the façades of Tirana’s gray Stalinist apartment blocks with color—riotous, Caribbean color—turning buildings into patchworks of blues, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, and reds, and the city itself into something close to a modern-masters sampler. (Art in America put a Tirana façade on its December cover; it looked like an abstract painting.) It was an extravagant gesture, but Rama thinks in extravagant gestures. “The city was without organs,” he says, meaning that it was a dump, and that nothing in it functioned. (“Kandahar” is how he usually describes it.) “I thought, My colors will have to replace those organs. It was an intervention.”

^albanians

The playwright was just as outraged by NATO's 1999 air war in Kosovo. Though the bombing was essentially a last resort in the face of Slobodan Milosevic's savage campaign of ethnic cleansing, Pinter described it as "a criminal act" - the U.N. Security Council hadn't approved - designed to consolidate "American domination of Europe." He complained, in fact, of "the demonization and the hysteria" that accompanied the NATO campaign against Milosevic and the Serbs.

President Moisiu handing the flag to the Albanian team participating in the Winter Olympics.

http://www.president.al/album/2774.jpg

Note: that guy IS the Albanian olympic team.

:(

Albanian arms blast toll rises

At least eight people are now known to have been killed by massive explosions at an arms dump in Albania, as rescuers continued to search the site.

More than 240 others were injured in Saturday's blasts, which struck outside a village near the capital Tirana.

Sometimes the headlines just write themselves...

Cat and mouse blamed for blackout

Albanians may have found a new villain to blame for the frequent power cuts that have been blighting their lives.

The country's main electricity company says a cat chasing a mouse caused a 72-hour blackout in parts of the capital, Tirana.

The animals ran into an area of high-voltage cables and were electrocuted, a spokeswoman for the firm - Kesh - told Reuters news agency.

"We took pictures because we've never had anything like this," she said.

Power cuts have been endemic in Albania for many years.

The authorities usually blame drought and the dilapidated state of the communist-era grid, which appears to be buckling under the strain of the extra demand caused by the Albanians' recent access to modern amenities.

Is Al still president?

http://www.deadprogrammer.com/photos/worker-and-parasite.jpg

Worker And Parasite was the first thing I thought of also

Is Al still president?

Nope. He retired from public office at the end of his five year term. Dr. Bamir Topi is the new president...

http://www.president.al/album/4976.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/4803.jpg

http://www.president.al/album/4725.jpg

That one story wasn't kidding about the building colors.

Here's Alfred handing over power. Looks like he's got a speedboat waiting to take him to a beach resort or something.

http://www.president.al/album/4154.jpg

In Albania, Einstürzende Neubauten isn't just a band but an urban design principle.

The city of Tirana and an international jury announced MVRDV winner of the competition for the urban masterplan creating a new dense urban neighborhood with a park and public facilities at the shore of Tirana Lake, in the south of the Albanian capital.

Tirana Lake is one of the highly valuable green areas of the city. The project foresees the regeneration of a 20ha site on the north shore of the lake by creating a dense urban neighborhood liberating space for a park, recreational facilities, new public spaces and ecologic interventions.

The cantilevered and leaning buildings allow for a great variety of apartment types, shopping and offices and ‘echo’ the Tirana typology. The stacked and twisted volumes create spectacular public spaces and provide dramatic vistas. Clad in local stones the buildings turn into a series of ‘rocks’, the ‘Tirana Rocks’.

http://bustler.net/images/uploads/tirana_rocks_mvrdv_04.jpg

Reclaiming the concrete mushrooms

http://cache-04.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2009/10/500x_mushroom04.jpg

"Not Your Typical Picnic But an ALBANIAN PICNIC!!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MuVNe_mhA

King Zog of Albania - with His Three Sisters in Uniform. Tirane, Albania, April 25, 1938.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/4321e1d816b688c57c255583fb18f63c/tumblr_mojlgcn5YH1qz4txfo1_1280.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sworn_virgins

https://resources.koha.net/images/2023/March/10/Capture1678439916.jpg

I remember when they disguised Albania as a white space on an Interail map which I guess is fitting with that name.
Maybe thought nobody'd notice it or something. But they were expecting everyone to get a pass/ visa whatever to go across the border so hered a bu7nch of people off the train I was on and made them spend the night in the waiting room .

🇦🇱 Opposition MP Flamur Noka from the Democratic Party tried to set the Albanian Parliament on fire.

For weeks, the DP has been disrupting parliamentary sessions with smoke flares, following corruption charges against Sali Berisha, their de facto leader, who has been sanctioned… pic.twitter.com/y7vT6fgzCj

— kos_data (@kos_data) December 4, 2023

Flamur Noka living up to his name

I hope all the locals systematically loot, rob, and grift him up and down the line...

"Jared Kushner wants to turn a wild stretch of Albania into a luxury resort"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/ar-AA1oXrd0

soccer in the good old days

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/may/16/football-in-stalinist-albania-inside-the-hermit-kingdom-book