Albania

Butrint and Apollonia are among the best-preserved Greco-Roman sites in the Balkans; Cicero stayed at the latter. Albanian alone forms a branch of the Indo-European family. Skanderbeg, who resisted the Ottomans for twenty-five years, was proclaimed “athlete of Christ” by the pope.

An Illyrian land and then the Roman province of Epirus, Albania is crossed by the Via Egnatia, the great road linking the Adriatic to Constantinople. It lies exactly on the dividing line between Latin and Greek Christianity.

Skanderbeg's fifteenth-century resistance delayed the Ottoman conquest, which then held for four centuries and converted the majority of the population to Islam. Independence was proclaimed in 1912.

From 1944 to 1985 Enver Hoxha's regime imposed Europe's most complete isolation, breaking successively with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, and declaring in 1967 the world's first officially atheist state. Democratic transition began in 1991. A NATO member since 2009, Albania opened its Union accession negotiations in 2022.