Radio Tirana

In April 1939, the self-proclaimed King Zog of Albania [L lifted from commons.wikimedia] fled the country with the country's gold-reserves in his carry-on luggage. The power vacuum was filled by the Provisional Administrative Committee of Albania until an "army of liberation" arrived from Italy. The PACA issued a bulletin to its diplomats abroad including the advice . . . stop Listen regularly to Radio Tirana stop . . . which was moderately amusing because I did just that when I was learning Portuguese in the mid-80s. In addition to formal lessons from a wonderful me-local officer from the Instituto Camões, and reading novels in parallel text editions, I had scanned the airwaves hunting for Portuguese language broadcasts. By far the strongest signal was from Radio Tirana blaring out Marxist propaganda, music & current affairs to former Portuguese colonies in Africa many of which were still in a state of unresolved armed struggle aka USA/USSR proxy-war. I listened into Tirana while doing the washing up: it certainly tuned my ear to the cadence of Portuguese.

I only know <TMI> about King Zog because I was urged to read Indignity, a Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi. Her great-grandfather Xhafer Bey Ypi was leader of PACA and had been briefly Prime Minister of Albania in 1922. Indignity follows Lea Ypi's journey through The Archives to discover what happened to her grandmother Leman who grew up in Salonika but emigrated to Albania as soon as she could. 100+ years ago, Lea Ypi's forebears lived in Salonique le Magnifique where French was, since Crusader times, the lingua franca for that cultural and religious melting pot. But in the family they might switch to Turkish, Albanian, Arabic or Ladino. It was impossibly romantique. One of them died of a surfeit of baklava!

Indignity built upon last Summer's book about the Near East Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. That looked at commerce, wars, parties, fires, punctilio & pogroms in Beirut, Smyrna and Alexandria - but it could have included similarly cosmopolitan Salonica. By happenstance I was simultaneously ear-booking Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk by Lara Marlowe; like Lea Ypi's family 100 years earlier, Lara and Robert are ducking in and out of Paris and Beirut in search of culture and pastries.