History | Albania

Video 1 Transcript

So one of the people that you'll probably end up hearing about a lot in Albania, his name is Skanderbeg. And if you can look up any just basic history about Albania and especially the influence of the Ottoman Empire, that is super helpful and just really good to know. It's a really good introduction to the traditions that you're going to see that people still practice today. But Skanderbeg was a really famous Albanian military leader. He was born in the 1400s back when Albania was under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. And so as a child, he was taken from Albania to like an Ottoman training camp and trained as an Ottoman, trained to like think the way Ottoman Empire leaders wanted Albanians to think and to be under their control and influence. And then as he grew up, he realized that he was Albanian and had this Albanian heritage and traditions and he wanted to stay noble to that. So he actually broke away from that and led some really famous Albanian battles against the Ottoman Empire, kind of in revolt of that. And he was very key to helping Albania still keep its identity during the Ottoman Empire.

Video 2 Transcript

One of the most amazing things about Albania is they're so open about their culture and their history. One thing that's really interesting is they were communist for a long long time and so whenever we talked to the older generation, the men or the women, they would talk about how either really hard it was being communist or how much they liked it, kind of however they believed about it, and how when communism ended that's when a lot of missionaries from all different types of churches and congregations came into the country and they started learning a lot about other religions.