by Abdulla Mehmeti
Why and by whom were the crimes of the Greek state against Albanians in Chameria and throughout Greece concealed? Through political and church propaganda, the Greeks plant fake graves in Albania, while Albanians seek the return of the living Chams to their homes, to the homeland of their ancestors.
Europe and the world also have their own evidence regarding the Albanian ethnic character of Chameria and other regions in Greece, as well as the crimes against Albanians in Chameria and other areas after 1913, 1923, 1945–49…
From the collection of photographs researched and published by the great scholar Robert Elsie, also published by the Tetova News portal.
Frédéric or Fred Boissonnas (1858–1946) was a Swiss photographer born into a well-known family of photographers in Geneva. He is remembered mainly for his early artistic photographs of Greece. He learned the art of photography from his father, Henri-Antoine Boissonnas (1833–1889), and studied in Stuttgart and Budapest.
Boissonnas was fascinated by Greece, and during the period 1907–1913 he traveled through the Hellenic lands almost every year, taking thousands of photographs. His trip to the region in 1913 with the Swiss art historian Daniel Baud-Bovy (1870–1958) was especially fruitful.
In 1919 he founded the publishing house Editions Boissonnas and published around 50 books in total. Boissonnas’s photographs from Greece and the southern Illyrian Peninsula (the Balkans) were published, among others, in the volumes:
L’image de la Grèce: l’Epire – berceau des Grecs* (“The Image of Greece: Epirus – Cradle of the Greeks”), Geneva 1915
L’image de la Serbie: le berceau des serbes* (“The Image of Serbia: Cradle of the Serbs”), Geneva 1919
The photographs of Greece, and especially those of Chameria at the time of its incorporation into the Greek state, have not only documentary importance but also high artistic value.
This collection of Fred Boissonnas’s photographs is only a small part of the photographs he took in Greece and in the southern Illyrian Peninsula
