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‘We are not Greek, but...’: Dealing

with the Greek–Albanian Border
among the Albanian-speaking
Christians of Southern Albania

GILLES DE RAPPER

This article looks at the way Albanian-speaking Orthodox

Christians from Lunxhëri, in southern Albania cross the border
with Greece. Based on narratives and family histories collected in
2001 and 2002, it relates the specific position of this community
in the border area (Albanian but not Muslim, Orthodox Christian
but not Greek) to the representations and symbolic perceptions of
the border. It shows how the current crossings of the border are
related to the maintaining and crossing of the ethnic boundary
between Greeks and Albanians, but also between Albanians and
Vlachs, and between Muslims and Christians.

Following the publication in 1989 of Peter Sahlins’ Boundaries: the Making

of France and Spain in the Pyrénées (Sahlins 1989), the 1990s have
witnessed the development of an anthropology of international borders,
specially thanks to the work of Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson
(1999). The anthropological approach, with its focus on everyday life of
border communities as well as on the symbolic dimension of boundaries,
contributed to the understanding of borders and border areas, at a time
when many international borders, particularly in Europe, were rapidly and
radically changing. In this context, it is striking that the Balkan borders
have been the centre of relatively limited attention.
The purpose of this article is to present the way Albanians from a
specific area in southwest Albania cross the border with Greece, and to
question to what extent the ethnic or ethno-national boundary between
Greeks and Albanians plays a role in those border crossings. The idea is
that the specific position of those people in the Albanian context –
regarding religious affiliation and alleged cultural characteristics – gives
a special significance to their crossing of the border and influence their
practice of the border and border area.

Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol.4, No.1 (January 2004) pp.162–174
PU B L I S H E D BY F RA N K C A S S , LO N D O N
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DEALING WITH THE GREEK–ALBANIAN BORDER 163

I am thus making a distinction between the state border on the one
hand, understood as a line delimitating two political territories, Greece
and Albania, and the ethnic boundary on the other hand, understood as
the more or less organised juxtaposition of attributes that makes one
being Albanian or Greek. The former is a political or legal boundary, the
latter a symbolic boundary.
Implicit is also the idea that crossing an international border (or state
border) means more than a move through space, but has to do with the
self and with the social existence of the person who is crossing the
border. As is shown by Henk Driessen (1998: 101), there is a similarity
between crossing an international border and what is known in social
anthropology as a rite de passage. This is specially true in the case of the
new migration as it occurs today between Albania and Greece: due to the
imposition of rules to cross the border and work in Greece (or just visit,
as more and more Albanians do), most of the people who cross the
border have to go through a change in their being. Border crossings have
to be understood here as state border crossings as well as ethnic
boundary crossings.
The area I am focusing on is a group of around 12 villages on the
slopes of the moutain facing the town of Gjirokastër, and called Lunxhëri.
In opposition to the surrounding areas, those 12 villages are presented by
their inhabitants as being at the same time Orthodox Christian (as
opposed to the Muslim area of Labëri), and Albanian (as opposed to the
Greek minority officially recognized by the Albanian state).
The first part of the article is dedicated to the specific position of the
Albanian-speaking Christians in the border area, which is a position
marked by ambiguity. The second part looks at the way people from
Lunxhëri cross the border – the international border between Greece
and Albania as well as the ethnic boundary between Greeks and
Albanians. In other words, the focus of this study is not the border per
se, nor its creation in 1913–19, but rather the way it is experienced today
by the local inhabitants of the border zone. It also means that the people
actually living in that area, rather than the migrants originating from it,
are the centre of my attention.

ALBANIAN-SPEAKING CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN ALBANIA: CONTEXT

AND SIGNIFICANCE
To illustrate the specificity of the Albanian-speaking Christians as a
border community and in relation to border crossing, it is worth looking
first at another Albanian border area, inhabited mostly by Muslims. In
the Devoll, in southeast Albania, things seem to be quite clear: the state
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164 S O U T H E A S T E U R O P E A N A N D B L AC K S E A S T U D I E S

border between Albania and Greece is also an ethno-national boundary

between Albanians and Greeks, as it separates Muslims from Christians,
and appears in collective memory as a place of confrontation and
conflict. People recall stories of Greeks burning Muslim villages at the
time of the First World War, of Muslims being expelled from their
villages on the Greek side at the time of the Lausanne Treaty (1923), and
of the last battles of the Greek Civil War (1949), in the Grammoz
moutains, known on the Albanian side as ‘the Greek provocations’. In
the 1990s, however, people from the Devoll started to cross the border
and migrate to Greece. The result of this migration, as far as identity or
ethnicity are concerned, is the appearance of a double identity
phenomenon. People choose or are given a second, Christian name, that
they call their ‘Greek name’, they use false documents stating that they
are of Greek descent, present themselves as Northern Epirotes, and
sometimes go as far as converting to Christianity – that they practice in
Greece rather than in Albania. In consequence, one can hear in Muslim
villages people joking about their Northern Epirote identity, calling their
friends by their Greek names, and using more Greek words than
necessary in conversations.1 I am not pretending that things are easy for
those people; actually, it is not easy at all and generally comes along with
great suffering. But at least things are in a way quite clear: they are
Albanian Muslims and, in order to cross the border, pretend to be
Christians of Greek descent. At least until 1997, this double identity
process was facilitated by the seasonal character of their migration:
people would live one half of the year in Greece, among friends and male
relatives, and the other half in Albania, with their families. Such changes
of name and religion also appear in the Muslim area of Labëri, and it is
a source of amusement among the Christians of Lunxhëri and Dropull,
who laugh at ‘those people with a moustache who bear Christian names
and pretend to be Christian’.2
In the case of the Albanian-speaking Christians, on the other hand, no
such things are possible, as their position always appears, from the start,
ambiguous. In his book Nationalism, Elie Kedourie reports the story of a
villager from Southern Albania, asked by the international commission in
charge of delineating the border, if he was Greek or Albanian, and
answering – in Albanian – ‘I am Greek’ (Kedourie 1966: 124). One can
guess that what the man actually meant was that he was a Christian. As it
is well known, in that part of the Balkans, the ethnonym ‘Greek’ was
widely used with a religious meaning, and all the Orthodox Christians
were called ‘Greeks’. Even today, this ambiguity creates space for the
discussion over the size of the Greek minority in Albania: are all
Orthodox Christians of Greek descent, or only a part of them?
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DEALING WITH THE GREEK–ALBANIAN BORDER 165

If the ethnonym ‘Greek’ is not used today by the Lunxhotes, there is
evidence that they did use it in the past, at least in its religious
dimension. Moreover, from the Muslim point of view, all the Christians
are kaur (infidels), either Greek or Albanian, and this religious
community is sometimes seen as more important than the national
community that makes Albanian Muslims and Christians alike.
In fact, religion, or more accurately religious affiliation, is too
important in the construction of collective identity in Albania to
sidelined in favour of the sense of national belonging (de Rapper 2002a).
It can be shown that collective identity in Lunxhëri is to a large extent
constructed in opposition to the neighbouring area of Labëri, and one of
the main dimensions of this opposition is religion. Moreover, in the
social and political context of the 1990s, Christianity means Europe and
European integration, and in that respect, it cannot be given up. Being
Christian is thus one of the most important features of Lunxhote
identity.
At the same time, nationalism has had a strong impact on Lunxhëri
(as it usually has in border areas), and being Christian does not, in
Lunxhëri, mean being Greek. Albanian nationalism developed in
southern Albania in reaction to the territorial gains made by Greece since
its independence. One of the main tasks of the nationalists was to
convince the world, and the Albanians themselves, that there was such a
thing as an Albanian nation, and that either Christian or Muslim, the
population of Epirus was Albanian. As we will see later on, not all the
Lunxhotes agreed on that, and it took time to convinced the others, but
it can be said that the aim was reached during communism. Today, not
only are the Lunxhotes aware (and sometimes proud) of being Albanian,
they also know how to consider Greece as an enemy of the nation. The
image of Greece also depends on the new emigration and the feeling that
Albanians are not rewarded as they should for their work in Greece.
‘Greeks are not fair, says a man from the village of Stegopul, the
Albanians have rebuilt all their villages for a mouthful of bread, they
could treat them better’. Lunxhot identity can thus be summarized as
one Lunxhot from Gjirokastër does, by two negative statements: ‘neither
Islamized, nor Hellenized’ (as islamizuar, as greqizuar), one related to
religion, the other to national belonging. It can also be heard however
that the non-islamisation of Lunxhëri is a result of the strong influence
of Greece in the area, and that, without Greece, Lunxhëri would have
become Muslim.
Particularly illustrative of the ambiguity of the position of the
Lunxhotes is the case of the Greek language. Although Greek is
acknowledged as the only written language of former times, the question
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is: do the Lunxhotes speak Greek in addition to Albanian, or not? To

what extent can they admit that they speak Greek without being Greek?
Here is for instance what a retired school teacher from the village of
Dhoksat says about the links between Lunxhëri and Ioannina before the
Second World War:
The relations with Ioannina were intense, people were trading,
were going to the market there. Songs confirm that people from
Lunxhëri could go there without any problem ... Very few
Lunxhotes had settled in Ioannina, because Lunxhëri is
autochtonous (autokton) and does not speak Greek. Ioannina is
Greece, and we, we are Albania. Relations with Ioannina are
somehow superficial. The Albanian is Albanian, the Greek is
Greek. In 1913, someone from Qestorat [in Lunxhëri] was leading
the government of Northern Epirus ... they wanted Korçë and
Gjirokastër to be part of Greece. But Korçë and Gjirokastër
remained Albanian. That man was not representative of all
Lunxhëri ... Greeks came during the First World War, in 1920, in
1941, but there was no problem: we call them dajko [mother’s
brother], because they were protecting us against the Turks. But no
villager knows Greek. Even if until 1915 there was a Greek school
in every village, there was no transmission. Old people know
Greek.
Thus the use of Greek is acknowledged, in trade and education, but at
the same time, the knowledge of Greek has to remain superficial, because
Lunxhëri is ‘autochtonous’, as he says, that is Albanian, and the
Albanians do not speak Greek, because they are Albanian. Though
definitely Albanian, the language spoken by the Lunxhotes is nonetheless
rich with numerous Greek borrowings, much more than, for instance,
the language spoken by the Devoll Orthodox Christians.

CROSSING THE ETHNIC BOUNDARY AND THE STATE BORDER

Obviously, the ambiguity of their position does not prevent the
Lunxhotes from crossing the border. Although there are no figures on
migration from Lunxhëri, personal observations reveal that the villages
have lost a large part of their population, who moved to town or abroad,
Greece being the main country of destination. The demographic
changes, however, are not limited to the 1990s, and the new emigration
is only a moment among others in the history of population movements
and border crossings in the area. To keep things short, I will consider
briefly the main three periods of this history.
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DEALING WITH THE GREEK–ALBANIAN BORDER 167

The first period goes up to the time between the creation of the
border in 1913 and its closing in 1944. Up to that point, even though the
ethnic boundary between Greek and Albanian Christians existed (as it
appears in the relations of nineteenth-century travellers, for instance),
national consciousness was generally too weak to prevent people from
moving from one side of this boundary to the other. Moreover, this was
the period of the kurbet, of the migration of both Greek- and Albanian-
speaking Christians from Epirus towards Istanbul, Egypt and America.
The second period goes approximately from the creation of the
border up to its opening in 1991. It is a time of cristallisation of national
feelings (people have to choose their side) and of ‘national
enculturation’, as Anastasia Karakasidou calls it for the Macedonian
border area (Karakasidou 1997: 91), meaning the process through which
people come to identify with a national culture, rather than with their
ethnic or local culture. This period culminated with the communist rule
in Albania, when the border was closed and, at least from the Albanian
point of view, separated two enemies, but already at the turn of the
twentieth century, people started to split into filogrek (pro-Greek) and
filoshqiptar (pro-Albanian). Both groups were in power at various times,
but the former seem to have been powerful until the Second World War,
as in this story, from the village of Selckë:
Among the men of the village, there were filogrek [pro-Greek], and
M.P. made a speech to the men and said that this village would be
part of Albania. One of his cousins, M.N., told him to leave the
village, the lineage T. was filogrek, and they would kill him. He
took his wife along and went away, through the village of Sopik,
for America. The T. later on went to Greece, abandoning their
house, which is today inhabited by Vlachs.
The third and last period started with the re-opening of the border in
1991. People started again to cross the border, but the national or
nationalist context is still dominant, people do not perceive themselves
outside national categories such as ‘Albanian’ and ‘Greek’, and tend to
apply those same national categories to past events or periods, when they
were not as relevant as they later became. If it is a period of ‘soft’ borders
compared to the earlier periods, crossing is not as easy, and one must
either be on the ‘right’ side (i.e. a member of the Greek minority, or at
least Orthodox Christian) or cheat and cross illegally.
It is no surprise, then, that observation reveals that the Lunxhotes
rely on existing networks to cross the border in the most legal way,
rather than doing it clandestinely, as recent research has shown (Sintès
2003). Most of those networks date back from the period of the kurbet,
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and people try to reactivate them whenever possible to facilitate their

entry in Greece and to rapidly find better job opportunities. Those
networks are not, however, the only thing to be called back from the past
and used in the present. The crossing of the ethnic boundary, and
sometimes the crossing of the state border as well, are embedded in a
wide range of memories and images of the past.
First of all comes the feeling of close contact and shared attributes
between Lunxhotes and Greeks. By Greek are meant here both the
Greeks from Greece and those of Albania, mainly inhabiting the Dropull
and Pogon areas. All those areas are said to share the same high level of
culture and development, as opposed to the Muslim areas.
Intermarriage, even if it only occurs to a limited extent, is felt to be
possible between those communities. It is also interesting to hear people
telling stories about the Second World War, and especially of its first
phase in Epirus, the Greek–Italian war of the winter of 1940–41.
The Greeks were not afraid here, says an old man from the village
of Selckë, it is a Christian area, with a lot of minoritarë [members
of the Greek minority]. They were much welcome. When they
reached Gjirokastër, that was different; in Kardhiq and Golem,
they had to fight against the Muslims.
Greek soldiers and officers were hosted in Lunxhëri (just as Italians had
been a little earlier), where they found no difficulty to communicate in
Greek and sometimes happened to meet people they already knew from
Greece. There are cases of people originating from Lunxhëri, who had
left Albania for Greece before the war, and came back at that time as
Greek soldiers. It also happened that, after 1991, Albanians met the
families of those soldiers and officers their parents or grand-parents had
hosted in Lunxhëri.
School and church also seem responsible for this feeling of
community, or at least of close ties, between Albanians and Greeks. As
already mentioned, in most villages, the only school had been Greek up
to the end of the First World War, and even later in some villages. Some
people also say that when the Greeks occupied the area during the
Italian–Greek war, men had to go to school and learn Greek. Greek was
also the language of the church until 1966. Education and religion have
therefore been the target of Albanian ‘nationalisation’ or ‘national
enculturation’ programmes. By the end of the nineteenth century there
was a dispute between the supporters of Greek education and those of
Albanian education. Two villagers from Qestorat, one of Greek national
consciousness, the other of Albanian national consciousness, fought over
the school opened in 1874 by the former, Kristaq Zografi (or Christakis
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DEALING WITH THE GREEK–ALBANIAN BORDER 169

Zographos). The school was eventually closed in 1891, but the Albanian
Koto Hoxhi was beaten to death by his opponents in 1895. His statue
has since been erected in front of the former Greek school.
The spread of Greek schools and religion also means that many
school teachers and priests were of Greek background, coming either
from Dropull and Pogon or from Greece. Several families of Lunxhëri
thus trace back their origin to a Greek priest or school teacher who had
arrived to work in the village and married there. Today, they nonetheless
perceive themselves as Albanians. Crossings also happened in the other
direction: quite a few people from Lunxhëri went to Greece to study (in
Athens, Corfou and Voshtinë-Pogoniani) and did not come back to the
village, where employment was not easy to find. It also happened,
however, that in some periods and for some people, this contact with
Greece was the cause of anti-Greek feelings and pro-Albanian
commitment, as was the case for instance for Spiro Konda, born in 1862,
who later wrote studies on the ancient history and origins of the
Albanians. Although not originating from Lunxhëri, his example is
worth mentioning as particularly illustrative of the role of language in
both creating and crossing boundaries:
My work on this issue [i.e. the origin of Albanians] started when I
was a pupil in the high school of Messolonghi (Greece). During the
lessons on Iliad and Odyssey, my teacher was impressed by the fact
that I was able to understand many words through the help of
Albanian, words that sounded and had a meaning in Albanian.
Later on, as I was a student at the University of Athens, I started to
study this issue more seriously. I thus became aware that the
Albanian language was the key to many questions raised by ancient
history and ancient languages. (Konda 1962: 182)
For others, marriage of relatives was a source of interest in Greece and
the Greek language. A villager from Saraqinishtë, born in the 1920s,
explains:
I went to the Albanian school for five years. I wanted to learn
Greek. I talked to my teacher, but he was filoshqiptar [pro-
Albanian], and said I should not learn it. I wanted to learn Greek
because my sister was married in Poliçan [in Pogon, Greek
minority], and I was going there quite often.
As can be seen, kinship and marriage also played a great role in
maintaining a feeling of community and in facilitating the crossing of the
ethnic boundary. Genealogies and familiy histories reveal a great number
of marriages in which, at least in today’s recollections, husband and wife
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are said to be of different ethnic backgrounds. What is more important

perhaps is not the intermarriages themselves (one could expect them in
that context) but the fact that they are still perceived as the sign or
evidence of both the existence and permeability of the ethnic boundary.
In fact, the social and ethnic origin of women was (and still is) under
heavy consideration before marriage, as it was assumed that women,
while not going away in kurbet, were the guardians of local tradition and
excellency.
Another way of crossing the boundary that is still remembered today
is emigration. At the time of the kurbet, emigration did not mean
automatically crossing of a state border: until 1912, Lunxhëri and
Istanbul, for instance, were part of the same political unit, the Ottoman
empire. But kurbet seems to have played a role in the construction and
crossing of the ethnic boundary that was to become a national boundary
and state border after 1912. In Istanbul, as well as in Egypt and in the
United-States, and furthermore in Athens, the Lunxhotes would live
together with the ‘Greeks’, that is with other Orthodox Christians, but
most of the time of Greek ethnic and/or national consciousness. They
would therefore learn Greek (rather than Turkish, if we can rely on what
is said today of the kurbet in Istanbul), work with Greeks, and, after the
First World War and collapse of the Ottoman empire, go to Greece or
follow the Greeks in their migration patterns (towards America and
Australia). The crossing of the boundary was facilitated in the case of the
migrants who, due to the closing of the border at the time of the Second
World War, remained away from Albania and identified with the Greek
migrants among whom they were living (and then, eventually, with the
country they lived in).
Finally, crossings of the ethnic boundary are said to have occurred
during the period of crystallization of the national boundary and when
the state border was closed. These have to do with kinship and
intermarriage, as the number of the latter seems to have grown after
1944 (as members of the Greek minority could not marry in Greece any
longer and had to turn to the Albanian-speaking Christians). They also
had to do with the social and political environment in Albania at that
time. It could thus be of interest for a member of the Greek minority to
become Albanian, but crossings also happened the other way round. This
was for instance the case of one village in Lunxhëri, as it was
incorporated in one cooperative and one administrative unit with Greek-
speaking villages in Pogon. As a local analyst states:
Until 1945, people would rather declare themselves Greek, later
Albanian, specially after 1967. In some families, cousins gone away
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DEALING WITH THE GREEK–ALBANIAN BORDER 171

to Greece declare themselves Greek, while others who moved to
Gjirokastër or Tiranë declare themselves Albanian. Today, people
rather tend to declare themselves Greek.
All this has an impact on the way people cross the state border today.
First of all, as already mentioned, the Lunxhotes use their direct or
indirect knowledge of the other side in their migration. But the past
should not be seen only as a tool in the present migration. Some
Lunxhotes crossed the border at the very beginning of the 1990s with no
‘migration strategy’ in mind, but rather to meet relatives gone at the time
of the war or to search information on properties their families used to
own on the Greek side (this is specially true in Corfou). Even today,
some people are aware of the existence of possible remote relatives in
Greece, but do not try to take advantage of it to migrate, if they consider
their situation to be good enough in Albania. For others, relatives or
members of former filogrek families who had moved earlier to Greece
are considered as potential support in educational rather than migration
strategy: many Lunxhotes want their children to go and study in Greece
rather than in Albania, and this seems safer with somebody to look on
them in Greece.
Others crossed the border to attend religious festivals on the Greek
side, or to get married at the church (what was forbidden in communist
Albania), or have their children baptized. Plans for work migration seem
to have come only later on, either as a consequence of these renewed
relationships with the Greek side, either because there came a time when
everybody was leaving. The example of the Vlachs or Aromanians
inhabiting Lunxhëri seem to have been of importance here: just as the
Lunxhotes, the Vlachs were able to find relatives on the Greek side, as
most of them have their origin in the village of Mexhide-Kephalovrisso,
in Greek Pogoni. But contrary to the Lunxhotes, they had suffered from
persecution in Albania during communism, and were eager to move
away from Albania. Actually, they were also the first ones to come back
to Albania, built new houses and start private business (often transborder
business), when Albanians were still expecting everything from the state.
When communism collapsed, many Lunxhotes looked towards the
towns and cities of central Albania, where some of their relatives or
neighbours had already moved in the 1950s and 1960s, and started to
leave the villages for the urban centres. Emigration, in a way, was for the
poor, for the Muslims and Vlachs, not for them. Even today there is a
kind of pride in saying that you can go to Greece whenever you want, to
go shopping, to visit friends, or go to doctors and hospitals. This sense
of distinction, or of ‘aristocracy’, as they say, might also explain that,
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generally speaking, the Lunxhotes tend to cross legally and work legally
in Greece. As one of them says, ‘we, the Albanians from the borderland,
we are considered close to them by the Greeks, because we are
Orthodox. We don’t need to cheat’. On the contrary, ‘the Labes are using
false documents, as if they were kaur (Christians), they are getting
baptized’.
On the other hand, assistance from people on the Greek side is not
looked for only by those who migrate. People who remain in the villages
are willing to apply to the ‘retirement of the Greek’ (pensioni i grekut),
i.e. financial assistance offered by Greece to members of its minority in
Albania, and to that aim they have to declare themselves Greek.
All this in turn has two main aspects: the first one is that while
making efforts to obtain visas and documents, people tend to take
advantage of relatives and kinship relations which might not be
considered relevant in the local kinship system, such as relations on the
mother’s side, for instance. A villager from Saraqinishtë, who did not
know Greek before the 1990s, has nonetheless got a certificate stating he
is a member of the Greek minority, because his mother was from the
village of Selckë, and though Albanian speaking, Selckë is included in a
single administrative unit with the Greek-speaking villages of Pogon.
After telling how he became friends with an old man living in Athens,
while he was looking for his mother’s brother’s wife, a villager from
Selckë explains:
We Albanians, even the Northern Epirotes [i.e. Orthodox
Christians], are not considered very well by the Greeks. This is why
I hold on to this friendship with the old Greek man. Who knows?
It can be of some help.
It also stimulates a growing interest in genealogies and onomastics.
The second aspect is that formalities and difficulties to which
migrants are confronted are felt as something extremely unfair for
people who consider themselves close to Greece and to the Greeks, who
have or had relatives or properties in Greece, and whose collective
identity lays to a large extent on another migratory experience, that of
the kurbet, perceived today as a golden age, and as the origin and
justification of the feeling of aristocracy that characterizes the relations
between the Lunxhotes and the others, Muslims and Vlachs.
It can thus be said that from the Lunxhotes’ point of view (as
probably for other border communities), the state border is more than a
political line separating two countries, more than an obstacle to
migration. It is part of local history and local construction of collective
identity. Due to the ambiguity of the Albanian Christians in the national
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landscape of the border area, and to the fluidity of the ethnic boundary
that comes along with this ambiguity, crossing the state border since the
1990s has had an impact on both the self-perception of the Lunxhotes
and their relations with the other communities inhabiting the area.
Crossing the border does not happen in the same way for the different
groups, and it does not have the same meaning.

CONCLUSION
I have considered here the impact of the state border on the definition
of local communities and on their relations. I have also considered how
this impact determines, in turn, the way the different communities
perceive and cross the border. I believe that the dynamic, or diachronic,
aspect of borders and border crossing is extremely important. We may
say that the creation of the international border between Greece and
Albania, and its changing status through different periods of time, has
brought as a consequence the reorganizing or renegotiation of ethnic
relations and boundaries in the border area. This process is connected to
various aspects of social relations, of which migration may be the most
well known, or at least the most studied, but we would have much to
learn by looking at kinship relations and family organization, for
instance, as these fields can also be crossed by ethnic boundaries.
Particularly interesting would be to study the articulation between the
rhetorics of blood descent and the perception of ethnic boundaries, just
as when the Lunxhotes say ‘we are not Greek, but...’, meaning that they
are not of Greek descent, or do not belong to the Greek nation as long
as it is based on common descent, but that apart from that, they have too
many things in common not to form a kind of transborder community.
In this respect, although it is obviously beyond the scope of this
article, it would be necessary to have a closer look at the other side of
the border in terms of narratives and representations from the Greek
border zone, but also with regard to the role of shared institutions and
ways of life on both sides, as they seem to have been important at least
until the Second World War, and are, again involved in the relations and
mutual representations of Greeks and Orthodox Christians from south
Albania.
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174 S O U T H E A S T E U R O P E A N A N D B L AC K S E A S T U D I E S

NOTES

1. For an example of this behaviour, see de Rapper 2002b: 105.

2. It is interesting to note that this is not the only forced change of names mentioned in
the area. As a villager from Selckë says: ‘The [communist] regime imposed Muslim
names on Christians, such as Agron, Ilir, etc.’ (which in fact are not Muslim at all, but
have been common among the Muslims, specially after 1976 and the ban on religion-
based names).

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