Enver Hoxha: the iron fist of Albania
Blendi Fevziu, trans. Majlinda Nishku
In Enver Hoxha’s Albania everyone was potentially guilty of everything. As the laconic joke went: “Three men are in prison. One asks, ‘What are you in here for?’ ‘I supported Popoviç. And you?’ ‘I opposed Popoviç. And you?’. ‘I am Popoviç’.”
Under Hoxha’s rule, Albania became the world’s first officially atheist state. All worship, private or public, was made illegal, punishable by prison, torture and execution. Churches and mosques were closed, demolished or secularised. Icons, vestments, religious books were burnt. “At least 40 Catholic priests were executed,” Blendi Fevziu writes, “thousands more were imprisoned, beaten and tortured, many of them dying in jail.”
Travelling through Albania in 1996, 11 years after Hoxha’s death, I interviewed a baba (imam) of the Bektashi Sufi Order in the capital, Tirana, who had been chained between a Catholic priest and an Orthodox priest for 25 years, as they carried out forced labour in an agricultural prison. “We were brothers in God,” he told me. “We prayed together, suffered together, tended each other’s wounds.” The two priests died in prison, still in chains: the Bektashi weighed 20lbs when he was released.
