Albania

The Balkan country that took the same history and produced a completely different result, including the most extreme isolation in Europe. Albanians descend from populations predating the Slavic migrations and speak a language forming its own branch of Indo-European with no close relatives. Skanderbeg's resistance to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century is the national epic; conquest followed anyway and lasted four centuries, during which most Albanians converted to Islam, unusually for the region. Independence came in 1912 as the Ottoman position collapsed, with borders drawn by the powers that left around half of all Albanians outside them, in Kosovo and Macedonia. Italy occupied the country in 1939. Enver Hoxha's partisans took power in 1944 and he ruled until 1985, breaking with Yugoslavia in 1948, with the Soviet Union in 1961 and with China in 1978, declaring the world's first officially atheist state in 1967 and closing all religious buildings. Several hundred thousand concrete bunkers were built against an invasion that never came. The regime fell in 1991, a pyramid-scheme collapse in 1997 brought near anarchy, and the country joined NATO in 2009. Tirana is the capital. Emigration to Greece and Italy has been very large. Durres is the main port and Shkodra the northern centre. The country has about 2.8 million people. Its name for itself is Shqiperia. Butrint and Gjirokastra are World Heritage sites. The Kanun, a customary legal code, still influences parts of the northern highlands. Albania has both Muslim and Christian populations and unusually high rates of intermarriage between them.

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