Albanian history

You know what really grinds my gears??? Albanian history! The lies that have been told about Albanian history! Here I stand, an educated 27 year old with the power of internet and unlimited sources of information on my side; yet, I still don’t know the truth about my history. Therefore, as a native Albanian, I am going to use outside attribution to explain this handicap. There is a famous quote: “Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” As lions, kings of the wild, we have been hunted by coward hunters wanting nothing but our extinction; nonetheless we survived, carrying our customs and values from the wound to the grave, passing it from mother to child like breast milk vital to our survival. With an Illyrian soul, I stand in my land for centuries, deeper rooted than the Balkan peaks themselves, yet the world ignores me and treats me like a stranger, stripped of my identity, denied of my history. An autochthone, a fossil that lies where once heroes marched the land, is now an unwanted face in its home. While at this point you are thinking: “there you go again, another radical Albanian blaming everyone else but themselves” I want to assure you that this is not a blame game, nor is it a call for sectarian violence. It is simply a byproduct of Westernized education blended with 3500 years of oppression, slander, and history manipulation.

Our neighbors to the south are a big part of this tragedy. A nation that we helped build throughout the centuries has done nothing but deny our history and tell it as their own. I don’t want to change their history, I want to change ours; the lion finally got a historian. In a world where Greeks do everything in their power to eliminate anything that was or is Albanian, including Alexander the Great, we should do the exact opposite. Teach our children the history written from the eyes of a lion and not from an agenda carrying hunter. For example: apart from a few inscriptions and fragments, texts written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander were all lost; yet, it is widely accepted that the name Alexander is derived from the Greek "Αλέξανδρος" (Aléxandros), meaning "defending men."  Or so says the hunter.  The Lion, on the other hand, says that the name is derived from the Albanian word of "A LE KI SI ANDERR." Born like a dream. After all, his mother was an Illyrian princess so it is totally plausible that this is the truth. One would be a fool to think that the Greek authorities at the time destroyed books depicting Alexander as Illyrian just to come up with a fictional character that supported their ethnocentric views (Wink wink). I’m not saying this is true, nor do I care.  No one from that time still lives to tell the story, and no one spoke to Olympia about the origin of the name in order to document this, therefore everyone is hypothesizing. Greeks just lied before we did. So now should be our time for propaganda and tell it like we see it.

Albanian was a spoken language, didn’t have an alphabet and written quality until later in its history; therefore, they used Greek letters. Greek historians claim this to be the fact that proves the whole Illyrian territory (ethnic Albanian) was once Greek territory. They claim that cities, cradle to modern civilization like Butrinti and Byllis, were once Greek cities because of the architecture and writing in the walls. With that thought, the whole world was once Arab since we are using Arab numbers. Now it all makes sense; have you been to Dearborn lately? People there are not immigrants, they are Arabs that remain from when US was Arabia. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? Like those individuals that tell lies for so long that after a while they start to believe them; the Greeks truthfully believe their history, and so they should. I actually don’t care about what they believe in, that is not what this is all about. I care about what we believe in. I care what the rest of the world believes in; and, I care about what our children believe in.  Let’s teach the world another version of history, our history, before Skanderbeg becomes half Greek half Serbian. (I shit you not, that is what they believe.) What’s next Greeks, are you going to claim Mother Theresa?