This section contains articles on Albania and related topics authored by Van Christo and others.

Revolution by the Book In Post-Communist Albania, a Tiny Library Speaks Volumes About Hope
Date posted: Tuesday, August 11, 1998
Author: Thomas Goltz

POGRADEC, Albania -- Mary Andre Hunter, age 70, is a librarian of the old school. She does not tolerate noise in her bulding and scolds when a member of the local soccer team drops a box of 50 books on his foot and disturbs tranquility with an instinctive yelp.

"Shhh!" stage-whispers Hunter, looking over bifocal glasses and scowling her stern, librarian-style, "This is a library! No noise!"

"Shhh!" say the other members of the team to the boy holding his foot in pain. "No noise! This is a library!"

Order restored, the team resumes hauling books to Hunter and her staff of three local girls as they go about their almost silent task of scratching out Dewey Decimal System cards for an open-stack, public library of 300,000 books in this town of 20,000 people.

Pogradec (pronounced Pogradetz) might seem to be a strange place to establish what will be the largest public library in the Balkans. Set on the shores of Lake Ohrid, on the Macedonian/Greek/Albanian frontier, it is a dumpy town of unfinished, cinder block buildings alternating with military bunkers that have been turned into public toilets.

But for Mary Hunter and the New England Relief Organization (NEARO), a private organization set up by Albanian-Americans to aid their distant kinsmen, Pogradec is a special town indeed, There are other government and non-government aid organizations who have brought in the usual range of blankets, baby food and Bibles to Albania to assist in difficult -- no mind-boggling -- transition from being an isolated communist encalve to being part of the worlds communtiy again. But NEARO is the only humanitarian group in the country that specializes in libraries. In fact. Pogradec has two libraries, bought whole and shipped to Albania by Peter C. Kole, a native of Pogradec who now lives in Cleveland, Ohio (See photo at right).

"Pogradec region used to be famous for two things, " explains Hunter, during a rare break from her task of cataloguing books. "It had the highest number of immigrants to foreign countries and it had the highest number of bankers of any part of Albania, per capita. Now it will have the highest percentage of books, and thus the highest percentage of free-thinking individuals in the new Albania of today."

Hunter bristles when the NEARO library project is compared with the activities of American missionary groups now sweeping through the country, or even with U.S. government aid.

"It is not charity, she says, "We are family, and we call it sharing."

Mary Hunter is a very self conscious Albanian-American. She is the daughter of an Orthodox Christian, Albanian couple who moved from the nearby village of Zerchisht to Jamestown, NY. She grew up speaking Albanian and rolling borek, a sort of multi-layered cheese or meat wafer that Albanians claim as one of their contributions to world kitchen culture. Her second cousins are the Belushis, as in the actor brothers John and Jim, whose family also came from Zerchisht.

As a group, the Albanians remained the most obscure of all European

migants to the United States for one very good reason: Unlike other "ethnic"

groups such as the Irish, Ukranians or even the Armenians, ties to the

"homeland" were severed for almost 50 years because of the "fundamentalist communism" imposed on the country by its Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha.

The symbol of Hoxha's paranoid state are the estimated 1 million bunkers that dot the landscape like so many cement and steel warts, built to defend the country from a long list of perceived enemies: the imperialist Americans and their NATO "lackeys," the Greeks and Italians, Yugoslavia (after Tito's break with Moscow) and the "revisionist" Soviet Union (after its break with Stalinism). A few years before Hoxha's death in 1985, the "backsliding" Chinese joined the Albanian enemies list.

Under Hoxha's regime, listening to foreign broadcasts on the radio was a political offense that landed many in jail. As for possessing books or magazines in foreign languages -- well, that was almost a capital crime.

"My father was a high official in the party and had access to books the common people were not allowed, " a long-haired young man names David told me in a bar in Pogradec. "When my mother was pregnant, my father happened to be reading a book that made a great impression on him and decided to name me after the hero. The authorities demanded to know why he was so infatuated with bourgeois culture. But because my father was a man with connections, he held his ground and won the right to name me the way he wanted."

The name of the author was Charles Dickens; the book was "David Copperfield."

But as elsewhere in the former East, Albania is suffering from what might be called post-communist distress syndrome: the yearning, after the intitial euphoria of freedom from state control, for a return of a little law and order, even if it means restrictions on personal freedom. A mass, illegal immigration (mainly towards Greece) has deposited professors and engineers in jobs as day laborers at salaries far above the norm in Albania. When they return, they bring money with them and find resentment waiting. Many are increasingly afraid of a naive and dangerous ultra-nationalism bred of despair.

Pogradec's answer is books -- all 300,000 of them. In Hunter's library they are everywhere, but mainly on the floor: Chemistry and biology texts are hidden by hundreds of dime romances; fiction by Steinbeck and thrillers by Tom Clancy are intermixed with a ton or two of Readers' Digest condensed novels. Five full sets of encyclopedias and god-knows how many English-to-what language dictionaries lie tumbled and jumbled on the stairs, betwixt and between the shattered cardboard boxes that brought them here. When the books finally get to the shelves, they will be available to a community that used to fear giving their children anything other than a handful odf state-approved names.

"Our agreement with the government -- no, our demand -- is that the library be public and have open shelves," Hunter explains. "It is to be a place for anyone who wants to come and browse around ideas -- and then take home the book or books that he or she wants."

There have been hitches. NEARO first wanted the library set up in the larger regional city of Korcha, but the authorities there did not like the idea of open shelves. So NEARO packed up the boxes and shipped them down the road to Pogradec. One Albanian nespaper likened the idea of putting 300,000 books in the town of 20,000 to building an Olympic stadium in a village. Rumors were afoot that Mary Hunter is part of a dark scheme to sell the books on the sly and get rich.

"You have to get used to this sort of thing," Hunter says. "In a society

where access to books was a privilege of the elite, what else can you expect? The end of restricted access to ideas is the quickest way to end the problem of the "bunker of the mind" that has crippled Albania for more than 40 years."

NEARO -- which has several other library projects in the works -- is not going to allow itself to be intimidated. It has reserved the right to pull the library project from Pogradec if local authorities try to take control of what it insists must be a public project. The prospect that the town might lose its new trove of books is viewed as a disaster by ordinary citizens. A solidarity committee that calls itself the library's board of directors has formed to knock some sense into the heads of the municipal government.

Lorence Nolini is a member. At age 28, Nolini is arguably the most successful businessman in Pogradec -- and he likes to think that his success is a good omen for others. Nolini turned his grandmother's one-room house (which she shared with a cow) into a classy restaurant and bar; grandma is now the unofficial maitre d'. The house specialty is koran, a delicious freshwater salmon unique to Lake Ohrid, which people come from as far away as the capital city of Tirana to eat. Along with other business ventures, Noli expects to gross $100,000 this year -- and is thus a man to contend with when it comes to local politics. And Nolini wants the library.

"The library project is incredibly important for us," he says. "It is not like the other sort of aid that everyone is trying to pump into Albania. It is substantial and it is symbolic. It is exactly what we did not have in the recent past."

Meanwhile, the pile of books on Mary Hunter's upstairs floor grows and shrinks five or 10 times on a given day. The librarians work their way toward the bottom of the batch, only to have the soccer team dump a new load of books on top of the remnants of the last. After five months of labor, Hunter and her team have managed to work their way through more than 20,000 volumes, which now grace the shelves of the only room in the building with any sense of order.

"When I volunteered to lead the library project, I thought it would take maybe a year," Hunter says slipping a few more cards in her card catalogue. "Now it is looking more like five years. But that is all right. I am perfectly willing to spend the rest of my days in Albania. I feel like I have come home.

The scratching of Hunter's pencil is the only noise in the room until the first foreign "client" of the Pogradec library (me) reaches toward a shelf holding a book entitled "Totalitarianism" and stumbles on a small mountain of pulp fiction that happens to be in the way.

Shhh!" Hunter hisses, unable to hide an impish grin behind her professional scowl. "Can't you see this is a library?"