James Pettifer, an expert on the Southern Balkans and professor at the University of Oxford, has written the book “The Greeks”. Unlike the usual political rhetoric that tends to be very hypocritical, Professor Pettifer is a realist.

He says that in fact history shows that the Greeks and Albanians are not two friendly peoples.

Pettifer is the author of a large number of books known to the Albanian reader such as “The Albanian Question – Reshaping the Balkans”, “Albania from Anarchy to a Balkan Identity” (together with Miranda Vickers), etc.

From the book “The Greeks” translated into Albanian by the newspaper DITA, we have excerpted the following excerpt:

“…In December 1990 a wave of poor Albanian refugees went to Greece. At first they were welcomed by the local Greeks, who provided food for the hungry and shoes for the barefoot. But, as the waves increased over the following months, generosity and tolerance began to wane. Greek police activity became determined, not to say brutal in some cases, with numerous deaths of Albanian refugees and human rights violations.

But the immigrants of the 1990s are not the only Albanians in Greece today.

You only have to travel 16 km outside Athens into rural Attica to find villages like Aspro-Pyrgosi ​​or Fili, where the majority of the inhabitants are of Albanian origin and where many of the older generation prefer to speak their language.

Some of these Albanians were refugees from religious persecution under Ottoman rule, Christian believers. Their extension of stay was not widely welcomed, but they remained.

The 1906 Encyclopædia Britannica says that the population of the island of Salamis, just off Athens, was about 6,000 people, all of whom were Albanian.

Only 90 of them were Greek.

They were not refugees, but part of the large Ottoman garrison and administrative apparatus based in Greece during the Ottoman Empire.

In this Empire, Albanians held many leadership positions throughout the nineteenth century in Greece.

This is why even today, most Greeks view Albanians in the same light as they view Turks.

A generation or two later, Albanian-Greek relations became very bad again – but for different reasons. The first signs of revolt movements by Greek nationalists against the Turks began. After these failed, groups of Albanians were sent by the Sublime Porte to suppress them, especially in the Peloponnese, which was the heart of the Greek independence movement.

But the later history, the one after the War, has been the most difficult. Albania became communist and tried to help the Greek communist army during the Civil War, both by providing supplies and by serving as a regrouping base for the Greeks.

The defeat of the left in the Greek civil war meant that Albania was kept in almost hermetic isolation from Greece. Incidents of gunfire on the border were a regular occurrence for many years.

As a result, the two countries were technically at war for many years, and diplomatic relations were not restored until the 1970s.

At the root of many of the problems is the fact that Greece has historically claimed large areas of Albanian territory, stretching as far as the Shkumbin Valley in central Albania.

What is now southern Albania is called Vorio Epirus (Northern Epirus) by many Greeks.

This territory was given to Greece in 1914, when the Great Powers were trying to restore order after the Second Balkan War.

But the 1914 decision was revoked by the Paris Conference of Ambassadors in 1921, when the Powers felt that the only way to end the anarchy in Albania was to establish a centralized state based in Tirana.

However, many Greeks, not all of them on the far right, are burning to reverse this decision and incorporate these territories into Greece.

But the question of the numbers and origins of the Greeks in Albania is highly controversial.

Albanians say that the Greeks were brought in as indentured laborers by Turkish beys during the Ottoman period.

Greeks say that there have been Greek colonies in the region since the initial movements of prehistoric tribes.

Professor Sederholm of Finland, who was in charge of the League of Nations investigation into the Albanian-Greek problem in 1921-23, estimated the total number of Greek speakers at only 35 to 40 thousand.

At the time of the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939, the Albanians recognized a Greek minority of only about 20 thousand people…”