Tirana

Before the second world war, the Croydon-born cricketer C.B. Fry was offered the throne of Albania. It’s not certain why. Possibly because his splendid party piece involved leaping from a stationary position backwards on to a mantelpiece. Or because, historically, the Balkan nation has been so inexplicably Anglophile as to appreciate the pratfalling funnyman Norman Wisdom. Sadly Fry declined the role and it was later taken by the fabulously named if catastrophic ruler King Zog (real name Ahmed Muhtar Zogolli). Had Fry accepted, history, that capricious monster mixed of chance and fate, would have been very different. In reality, Zog was toppled in 1939 by Mussolini’s invading fascists, who turned

For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The country came into existence only in 1912, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, King Zog, was ousted by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Hitler used Albania as a springboard for the Nazi invasion of Greece. The national resistance against Italy and Germany was led by the Albanian partisan supremo Enver Hoxha (pronounced ‘Hodger’). After expelling the hated occupiers, in 1946 the artful Hoxha proclaimed himself head of a newborn socialist republic. With his dangerous wife Nexhmije (the ‘Lady Macbeth of the Balkans’) he turned Albania