It is an acknowledgment of some tacit kind of the growing population of illegal alien Albanians, who surge over the border in the hundreds every day, and whom the Greek police round up and return by the busload. And another Balkan knot—the Greeks and the Albanians would like to be differentiated from each other absolutely, but there are parts of Greece, for example, the island of Hydra, that were populated largely by Albanians. There are villages in what is now Albania that are largely Greek. Albanians served as Turkish henchmen during the Ottoman years, but a number of Greek revolutionary war heroes were of Albanian descent. And the foustanella, the famous Greek kilt, is said by many to be a version of the Albanian warrior’s costume, and is sometimes called the Albanian kilt. The Balkans did not and still do not seem to have the Western notion of national borders; villages dominated by different ethnic groups intricately veined the region, and the Balkan notion of borders seems based on the notion of the ethnic enclave of the village—which, if this is true, explains why nationhood here has been wrought through three predominant patterns: federation, colonization, or genocidal slaughter.
What do You think about Dinner With Persephone (2011)?
