Robert Elsie Knihy

In some senses, Albania is a living museum of the past. Originally a small herding community in the most inaccessible reaches of the Balkans, the presence of Albanians in southeastern Europe has been documented for over a thousand years. Albanian traditional folk culture, which evolved over centuries of relative isolation, is surprisingly rich. Yet despite recent events this culture remains little known to the Western world. Due to the lasting effects of a half century of Stalinist dictatorship, very few individuals even in Albania know much about their own popular traditions. The Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture makes available for the first time a wealth of knowledge about Albanian popular belief and folk customs. Alphabetical entries shed light on blood feuding, figures of Albanian mythology, religious beliefs, communities, and sects, calendar feasts and rituals, and popular superstitions, as well as birth, marriage, and funeral customs, and sexual mores. This unique volume will stand as the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.

The Bektashi dervish order is a Sufi Alevite sect found in Anatolia and the Balkans with a strong presence in Albania. In this, his final book, Robert Elsie analyses the Albanian Bektashi and considers their role in the country's history and society. Although much has been written on the Bektashi in Turkey, little has appeared on the Albanian branch of the sect. Robert Elsie considers the history and culture of the Bektashi, analyses writings on the order by early travellers to the region such as Margaret Hasluck and Sir Arthur Evans and provides a comprehensive list of tekkes (convents) and tyrbes (shrines) in Albania and neighbouring countries. Finally he presents a catalogue of notable Albanian Bektashi figures in history and legend. This book provides a complete reference guide to the Bektashi in Albania which will be essential reading for scholars of the Balkans, Islamic sects and Albanian history and culture.

Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of the Communist experience, came to an end in most of Europe with the death of Stalin in 1953. However, in one country - Albania - Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from 1944 until his death in 1985 was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state and Albania became isolated from the rest of the world and utterly inward-looking. Three decades after his death, the spectre of Hoxha still lingers over the country, yet many people - inside and outside Albania - know little about the man who ruled the country with an iron fist for so many decades. This book provides the first biography of Hoxha available in English. Using unseen documents and first-hand interviews, journalist Blendi Fevziu pieces together the life of a tyrannical ruler in a biography which will be essential reading for anyone interested in Balkan history and communist studies.

The present volume endeavours to throw some light on the historical dimension of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It consists of a collection of texts, written from 1912 to 1944, which make it evident that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Macedonia was a cornerstone of Serbian Government policies from the moment Serbian forces seized Kosovo and much of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire in 1912-1913.

Die vorliegende Arbeit befat sich in erster Linie mit dem albanischen Volksglauben im weitesten Sinne. Es umfat u.a.: Figuren der albanischen Mythologie, religiose Vorstellungen und Aberglauben, Glaubensgemeinschaften, Orden und Sekten, die in Albanien tatig waren oder sind, Heilige, die fur den Volksglauben von wesentlicher Bedeutung sind, Kultstatten, Kalenderfeste und Rituale. Eng verwandt mit der Welt des Glaubens sind auch Volkssitten, Gebrauche und kulturelle Besonderheiten, die mit aufgenommen wurden, etwa: Brauche bei der Geburt, Eheschlieung und Tod, sexuelle Gebrauche, Blutrache und das albanische Gewohnheitsrecht.