Albanians in Greece

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Charles Gleyre : Albanian peasant woman, Athens . (1834, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ).

The Albanians in Greece ( Albanian  Shqiptarët në Greqi , Greek Αλβανοί στην Ελλάδα Alvanoí stin Elláda ) are the largest minority in Greece with a population of around half a million to one million people . It is divided into three groups: the long-established Greek Orthodox Arvanites , the Muslim Camen and since the early 1990s, new, mainly from the Republic of Albania immigrant migrants . Neither the migrants nor the Albanians resident in Greece are officially recognized as an ethnic or national minority .

number

Since 1990 and the end of the communist dictatorship under Enver Hoxha in Albania, Greece has taken in around 700,000 Albanian immigrants, many of whom entered illegally. The 2011 Greek census speaks of 480,824 Albanian citizens in Greece, the largest group of foreigners in the country at 53%.

In addition there are around 20,000 Christian Çamen and up to 200,000 Arvanites who speak Albanian or have an Arvanite consciousness. Of them, however, only 25,000 officially profess. Albanian sources give significantly higher numbers, claiming that millions of Greeks have Albanian roots.

Settlement area

Ethnographic map of Greece from 1908, areas mostly inhabited by Albanian people in orange

Albanian immigrants in Greece today mainly live in large cities such as Thessaloniki and Athens . The Arvanites are represented on the Aegean Islands and some villages in southern and northern Greece. Until their expulsion in 1945, the Tschamans lived in what their representatives consider genocide in Epirus in north-west Greece , which they call Çamërija .

Greeks and Albanians are fighting over the ethnicity of the Souliots , which reflects the current dispute over minority rights in the Albanian Northern Epirus (Greek Vórios Ipiros Βόρειος Ήπειρος) and the Greek Southern Epirus (Albanian Çamëri / -a). Members of both peoples see the fight of the Soulioten against the Ottomans as a heroic national commitment that contributed to the establishment of their modern state.

History and Assimilation Process

Albanian emigration to Greece between the 14th and 16th centuries

The Arvanites settled in southern Greece and the Peloponnese in the 13th to 15th centuries .

For centuries the Greeks have tried to assimilate the Albanians. During the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the Çamen were the only Muslim minority besides the Western Thrace Turks who were excluded from resettlement. During the Second World War, however, they were collectively suspected of collaborating with the Italians, and hundreds of thousands were expelled to Albania and Turkey .

The Arvanitic or Albanian language has no legal status and is not taught in schools. Only in the 1930s was teaching in Albanian in a few villages. Today all Arvanites and Çamen in Greece are bilingual. Observers speak of official pressure as well as the suppression and loss of prestige of the minority language by state institutions and the Orthodox Church. As a result, fewer and fewer Arvanites speak their mother tongue and recognize a Greek identity parallel to the Arvanite one. There is hardly any Albanian usage in the media or in public. The services are also held in Greek almost without exception. In addition to a few book and CD publications, only the playing of a few Arvanitic songs on local radio stations and appearances at music festivals are proven - singers who performed songs in minority languages, however, have also been exposed to violence. Around 1980 four Arvanite cultural associations were founded.

Albanians have been the largest group of migrants in Greece since the 1990s, but they try not to attract attention. Immigrants change names and religion for fear of discrimination: It has also been observed that more and more people in southern Albania profess to be Greeks and even change their Muslim name for a Christian or Greek one. They mostly hope to get a visa for Greece. After immigrating to Greece, they are baptized and the Greek name entered in their passports.

In the north of Greece, militant Albanians are said to have prepared the armed struggle in 2003 in order to found Greater Albania .

Well-known Arvanites and Albanians in Greece

Çamen and Soulioten
Arvanite descent
Naturalized athletes of Albanian origin

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hellenic Statistical Authority (Ed.): Announcement of the demographic and social characteristics of the Resident Population of Greece according to the 201 Population - Housing Census . Press release. Piraeus 23 August 2013, p. 9 ( statistics.gr ( memento of October 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF; accessed on September 10, 2017]).
  2. ↑ a b Konrad Clewing: Albanian speakers and Albanians in Greece and Greeks in Albania . Ed .: Society for Threatened Peoples. Göttingen April 28, 2005 ( gfbv.de [accessed September 9, 2017]).
  3. ↑ a b c Greek Helsinki Committee: The Arvanites ( Memento of October 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Valeria Dedaj: 4 Milione Greke Kane origjinë të Paster shqiptare. In: Shekulli. August 4, 2013, accessed on September 10, 2017 (Albanian, interview with Arben Llalla).
  5. ↑ Armand Feka: Greece's Hidden Albanians. (No longer available online.) In: Wiener Zeitung. July 16, 2013, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; Retrieved on March 2, 2016 : "He smiles and answers in perfect Greek: 'I'm actually an Albanian too.'" Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wienerzeitung.at
  6. ↑ Lars Brügger: Controversial Identities. Crossing borders at home and abroad . In: Karl Kaser, Robert Pichler, Stephanie Schwander-Sievers (eds.): The wide world and the village. Albanian emigration at the end of the 20th century = To the customer of Southeast Europe: Albanological studies . tape 3 . Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99413-2 .
  7. ^ Renate Flottau: Balkans: Uprising of the Skipetars. In: Der Spiegel (46/2003). November 10, 2003, accessed March 2, 2016 .