Hello and welcome to Longreads, a Jacquin podcast where we look in depth at political topics

and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacquin, and I'll

be presenting the show.

From much of the last century Albania seemed like Europe's odd one out. It was the last

country in the Balkans to gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire. It was the only Muslim

majority state west of Turkey, and it followed a unique path during the Cold War under the

long rule of Enver Hodja. Our guest today for a conversation about Albanian history is

Leia Ippi. She's a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and

the author several books. Her most recent work is free, coming of age at the end of history.

It's an account of her experience growing up in the last years of Albanian communism

and the first phase of the country's new order.

You refer in the book to your grandmother's experience of growing up in Salonika when it

was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and that brings up the wider point that Albania

itself was the last country in the Balkans to break away from Ottoman rule in the early

20th century. How did Albania emerge and survive as an independent state, at least formally

independent, going into the interwar period?

Yeah, well, looking and reading the history of the period, it seems sometimes to be an accident

of history or rather an accident of the will of the great powers being in competition with each

other for hergemony in the Balkans. Albania's history and its effort to be its own independent

union were very much entwined with those of the Ottoman Empire for a very long time. In part

because it was in the region, one of the countries with the majority Muslim population, it also had

an orthodox Greek orthodox and Catholic minorities, but throughout its history it had been this

...