Two Books on Northern Albania
From an SOE war diary to a general history, this rugged region comes to life
Today would have been the 85th birthday of Warwick University professor, author, and Balkan traveler Tom Winnifrith (1938-2020), whose new book is being reviewed today. One senses, even from reading, that Winnifrith must have been a great conversationalist; erudition, along with an argumentative yet fair spirit leap from the page.
The year 2023 also marks 80 years since young Englishman Reginald Hibbert, a member of the secret Special Operations Executive (SOE) was airdropped behind enemy lines into northern Albania. His unique diary of wartime adventures (which I first reviewed for the UK’s Royal United Services Institute’s RUSI Journal in 2021) will also be covered here.
Conveniently, both of these new works come from the same publisher (Oxford’s Signal Books) and contain prefaces by Oxford University history professor and noted expert on Albania, James Pettifer.
While both of these books are written by British authors, and while both were published within a short time of each other, they are actually wholly independent and indeed were written decades apart. Thus, the comparative similarities and differences tell much about what has stayed the same, what has differed and why it all matters for learning about and visiting, northern Albania today.
Isolated, mountainous northern Albania has achieved a somewhat legendary status, both now and throughout history, as a redoubt of outlaws, preservation of societal traditions (like blood vendettas), and generally operating on their own terms. Bereft of much archeological or written sources, the sub-region has been relatively less-covered than other Southeast European regions. Nevertheless, it has become more accessible in recent years, and even started to attract tourists drawn to its traditions and its natural beauty.
The Diary of a British Secret Operative
When signing up for mysterious ‘parachute duties’ in the summer of 1943, the young Reginald Hibbert of course ignored the first SOE rule (specifically, to not keep a diary, lest it fall into enemy hands), and history is all the better for it today. In fact, his work has special importance in being one of the very few kept and published from that brave and slightly crazy gang of lads sent out to fulfill Churchill’s vision, to “set Europe ablaze” while sabotaging the Nazis and organizing local resistance groups.
A truly extraordinary account of WWII covert operations as told by a former British operative is presented in Hibbert’s Somewhere Near to History: The Wartime Diaries of Reginald Hibbert, SOE Officer in Albania, 1943-1944, Jane Nicolov, ed. (Signal Books, 2020).
My detailed RUSI Journal article in March 2021 is here; it lives on the RUSI site as well, albeit behind a paywall. As I can’t re-print that review (and as there’s no space for that, anyway), I’ll just cite the chief takeaways about the book, and why you will want to read the book.
Reginald Hibbert was just 21 when he volunteered. He was trained to join the SOE- the tip-of-the-spear of British operations behind enemy lines, created to further sabotage of Nazi targets, perform intelligence-gathering, and coordinate local anti-German resistance movements.
Hibbert went from training in England to final training in North Africa (for much of the war, Egypt was the command post for Southeast Europe) before being airdropped into the Albanian wilds. His diary captures all of his private concerns and real-time reactions to enlisted life, training and service in the field.
As such, it is a remarkable time capsule, one only pried open and published after his death (though he had definitely given it a look-over in his later years, after his retirement from a long and successful diplomatic career).
Ground Realities
As we follow Hibbert learning-while-traveling through uncharted territory, we are struck by several unique qualities. Despite the hardships of life with poor rations and unpredictable safe houses that depended on winning the trust of wary locals in isolated mountain villages, he keeps upbeat and always prepared for problem-solving. This exuberance owes both to youth and to character. Several of his notes of engagements with the locals, his fellow soldiers and other odd characters (like their Italian POW/servant/chef) are actually quite amusing.
Hibbert shows a sagacity beyond his years in his ongoing attempts to puzzle out the various machinations going on in the minds of his hosts, who have their own local preferences and rivalries to consider. This inevitably divides the other British SOE teams active throughout Albania and the Balkans, as each develops ties with their own micro-regional clans and support networks. A major point of disagreement is whether to support, as one British faction did (and would, loudly, following the war) the right-wing nationalist Ballist militia, or the communist Partisans under Enver Hoxha.
Reginald Hibbert in Albania, 1944 (unknown photographer)
The problem was partly regional, as the nationalists (particularly strong in the north and in neighboring Kosovo) tended to be favorable to the Nazis, who were amenable to creating a ‘Greater Albania.’ On the other hand, the Albanian Partisans had been created by the Yugoslav Partisans of Josip Broz Tito, which in turn caused resentment and suspicion among the northerners. Hibbert and his colleagues were stuck in the middle of the confusion, with only a radio and occasional messages linking them to the outside world to support decision-making in the field.
Throughout his narrative, the reader observes as Hibbert learns something of the difference in regionality, dialects and sub-ethnic groupings of Ghegs (in the north) and Tosks (in the south). Yet even beyond this, the make-or-break decisions of alliance and support come down to very specific and obscure local leaders known today only to specialists. This is one of the great benefits of this book for military historians, and indeed anyone interested in knowing the reasons for shifts in English policy during the war.
For most of the book, the author’s duties keep him among the northerners and while he very luckily avoids hostile encounters with the Germans, it is clear that the Germans are actively hunting his unit, and that he is relieved once situations evolve and he is gradually sent southwest, through Partisan-controlled territory, before being evacuated to Italy.
By then, the British government had taken the decision that the Partisans were the more dependable anti-German fighting force, and this decision would leave Albania in Hoxha’s control after the war- leading to decades of paranoid self-isolation which only started to end after the Cold War ended.
One of the really interesting parts of the diary is its concluding pages in Italy, where Hibbert and his fellow evacuated SOE men are re-introduced to the ‘outside world,’ and have a hard time fitting in. Like all such post-war experiences, he feels disoriented and lost, and that the civilians around him cannot understand the world as he has seen it. His musings about the future of Britain in a post-colonial and post-imperial world prove prescient, and his criticisms of diplomatic higher-ups ignorant of local realities is also entertaining.
Finally, when considering the extensive footnotes of the editor, the historic photos from private archives and informative preface by Oxford Professor Pettifer, it is clear that Somewhere Near to History is a valuable new primary source for the history of WWII, of Albania, and of special operations in general.
Book Two- Nobody's Kingdom: A History of Northern Albania
Unlike the SOE diarist’s very intense and temporally specific coverage, Winnifrith’s work zooms out to take in the whole history of northern Albania, from prehistoric to modern times.
The first survey of its kind, T.J. Winnifrith’s Nobody's Kingdom: A History of Northern Albania (Signal Books, 2020) presents the north of Albania as if it was its own country, complementing his earlier work on the country’s south and (even earlier) specialization in the Vlach minority of Greece.
While not himself a solider, Winnifrith Hibbert in that he too was keen to rough it in hard-to-access locales and appreciate local realities and local insights.
After initial travels in Greece, “his research interests expanded to include the Vlachs, a nomadic Balkan race who spoke a Latinate language,” daughter Tabitha Gilchrist wrote in an obituary in The Guardian. “On trips to remote villages, he befriended them, learned about their history and language and helped give them a national identity.”
While a professor at Warwick University, Winnifrith “became the driving force behind the development of a new department of classics which opened in 1976, and which thrives today.”
As with Somewhere Near to History, the Foreword to Nobody’s Kingdom is written by James Pettifer. He traces Winnifrith’s interest in the Vlachs ultimately to his Oxford student days, when he was captivated by “Christ Church classics tutor and University Lecturer in Ancient History, Eric Gray. Gray was a Philhellene who spoke good modern Greek.” During WWII, Gray had been inserted in the Greek leftist ELAS guerrilla group fighting in the Arcadia region, and his tales of war led the young Winnifrith to visit and learn about the place and its peoples.
Pettifer adds that Winnifrith taught Classics and English in the 1960s, enjoying regular holidays in Greece (except for during the military dictatorship from 1967-1974). He got a PhD on the Bronte sisters as novelists, and later went on to teach at Warwick, until retirement in 1998.
Pettifer concludes that the book depicts “Northern Albania seen through the eyes of a scholar very learned in the medieval and Byzantine worlds as well as the ancient classics.” And he reiterates that Winnifrith was “a resourceful and active traveller into old age, willing to rough it in order to speak to the people on the ground in often remote localities.” This description could be applied almost exactly to the research method of Prof. Pettifer himself as I have seen it over the past 15 years or so here in the region.
Book Structure and Composition
Nobody’s Kingdom is divided into nine chapters. After the first (which explores the differences between the south and north of the country) and the second (which focuses on geography), the rest of the chapters follow a chronological order.
Thus we learn of the relative influences that different civilizations, invaders and occupier had over time, ranging from the Illyrians (from 1200-230 BC), Romans (230BC-235 AD), Goths, Slavs and Byzantines (to 1018), to the five-centuries of so-called ‘anarchic’ Albanian presence, before the Ottomans (1501-1912), and various modern Albanian states after the creation of the Albanian state in 1912.
Some Interesting Points from Nobody’s Kingdom
Although the book is far too long to discuss in detail in this space, a few examples will suffice to show Winnifrith’s exacting brand of old-school scholarship, rooted in a Classical education and 20th-century worldview combined with regular fieldwork until relatively recently.
Winnifrith begins by recounting a now-closed former tourist agency that sold overpriced tours to Albania, which highlighted the combination of tourist sites and an exotic, unknown country. While even back then there were some large hotels in the main towns of the south, Winnifrith states that tourist accommodation, while fewer and further between, existed in northern towns like Shkodër, Kukës, Peshkopi and Bajram Curri. And, despite the historic (and still-noted) more wild nature of the north, Winnifred notes that the past two decades have led to “a large western military presence in the neighbourhood and a fund of goodwill to western travelers” among the locals.
Beyond simply the linguistic and social differences of the northern Ghegs and southern Tosks, the author traces the modern-day divisions in Albania to the ascendancy (and later, heavy-handedness) of Enver Hoxha’s communist government. “The wartime division does reflect a fundamental difference between the North and the South which I have followed in dividing my work on Albania into two volumes,” he explains.
Winnifrith further notes that the isolated north was historically less associated with Greek culture and rule (whether ancient, Byzantine or modern), and more open to influences from Italy, the Catholic Church and (later) Austria.
Well before the ancient Illyrian civilization that spanned the Adriatic coast to Croatia (as I discuss in my own 2020 textbook, The History of Croatia and Slovenia), northern Albania hosted Neolithic populations of hunters, farmers and fishermen, “notably Blaz in the Mat valley.” In the Bronze Age (1900-1200 BC), remnants of civilization and war have been discovered- most, in the more fertile south, but also in a northern cave at Nezir, in Mat, the author adds. Similar remains have been found from the Iron Age, as numerous tumuli containing weapons in north-central Albania attest. But Winnifrith dismisses as “rather crude” certain Albanian historians’ theories of a proto-Illyrian civilization covering the Western Balkans.
Tom Winnifrith, 1994 (photograph by Lala Meredith-Vula)
Winnifrith’s tendency is to discuss the history of today’s northern Albania within the contours of the major civilizations of the time leads to frequent statements of sparse or missing archeological or literary evidence. For example, he writes of Roman times that “apart from Scodra and Lissus there are few Roman cities in the North, the fortresses of Gajtan and Sarcia belonging principally to late antiquity.”
The author also discusses the artifacts of Komani-Kruja, cited as proof by Albanian historians of a missing medieval link between the ancient Illyrians and post-1500 Albanians, while noting that some Western historians are skeptical.
Further Insights and Methodology
It is clear that the author is a stickler for the facts in a way that is sadly not always upheld by historians today. Even tangential episode are not exempt from this treatment. While Winnifrith says modern research has cast doubt over the long-related ‘Dorian invasion’ of Greece, “in Albania without any literary evidence we cannot be sure of any kind of invasion, or know how the Bronze Age Illyrians related to their Iron Age successors or how both groups can be linked to the parallel groups further south.”
Discussing the larger sweep of Albanian history, and eminent medieval clans like the Dukagjin and of course national hero Scanderbeg, Winnifrith points out several problematic areas or, at least, points out that some claims need further clarification. In doing so he makes an interesting point about how modern outcomes have affected historiographical trends:
“Albanian historians tend to ignore these cracks in the facade of Albanian unity, achieved for the first and almost last time in the fifteenth century,” he writes, “since the period after Albanian independence in 1912 has been marked by a series of internal division.”
This sort of insight distinguishes the book as objective and a work crafted by a scholar capable of approaching the subject from many informed angles.
Due to all the inconsistencies and lack of historical data, Winnifrith admits that it might seem “almost impossible to write” the bulk of the book: “primary sources are infrequent and unreliable, secondary sources partial in more senses than one.” This is all true, though certainly not his fault. One criticism might be the author’s decision to do without footnotes in the interest of ‘accessibility’ (I always prefer footnotes, whenever possible, to find exact sourcing and further reading). But Winnifrith does make a very interesting point here in defense of his decision, which illustrates the very interesting way in which his mind worked. He laments the unreliability of oft-repeated sources in general in his micro-polemic against footnotes:
“Writers repeat statements from other writers, sometimes quoting those other writers as a source in their footnotes. But we then discover that these other writers have no authority for their original statement. Thus it is not true that St Paul visited Durrës. He only tells us that he got as far as Illyricum (Romans 15:19) and this could just mean the frontier. It is not true that Gibbon said that Albania was more remote and unknown than the centre of America. There is no trace of this remark in any of his recorded writings.”
However, despite the lack of footnotes, the author does include appendices, maps and bibliographical notes.
Conclusion: A Very Worthwhile Book for the Serious Student or Traveler
Nevertheless, as this is a book that sets out to tell the history of a sub-region as if it were a country over thousands of years (though that country did not exist until 1912), the willing suspension of disbelief is somewhat required. Yet this does not mean that Nobody’s Kingdom can be ignored, for it is really the only book of its kind in English to devote such detail, and from such a scholarly mind, to this particularly gnomic and mysterious part of Albania.
Certainly one of the last writers of his age and world-view, Winnifrith admirably sorts through a tremendous amount of information, sifting out what is known and proven from what is still debated or even wrong about both the history and the people who inhabited the territory of today’s northern Albania. For this effort, both travelers and specialist scholars are the richer today. With the decline of Classical studies in the world today, it is very unlikely that there will ever be another scholar of Winnifrith’s caliber and intrepid manner to repeat this particular investigation into a remote and still inscrutable region.