Albania

From Illyrian tribes and Skanderbeg's mountain resistance to a small Balkan state forged on the edge of empires.

Albania traces its identity to the ancient Illyrians, whose lands along the eastern Adriatic passed under Rome, Byzantium and finally the Ottomans. In the fifteenth century the warrior prince Gjergj Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg, held the Ottomans off from his stronghold at Kruje for a quarter-century, but after his death the country was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire for nearly five hundred years, during which most Albanians embraced Islam. A nineteenth-century cultural and political revival, the Rilindja, and the League of Prizren of 1878 prepared the ground for statehood, and on 28 November 1912 Ismail Qemali proclaimed independence at Vlore amid the Balkan Wars. The Great Powers recognised Albania at the Conference of London but drew its borders so as to leave roughly half of the Albanian-populated lands, above all Kosovo, outside the new state, creating the enduring Albanian national question. After the reign of King Zog, an Italian invasion in 1939 and the Second World War, the country fell under the long Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who ruled in extreme isolation until 1985. Communism collapsed in 1990-91; after a turbulent transition that included the near-anarchy of 1997, Albania joined NATO in 2009 and became a candidate for European Union membership in 2014.