Albanian Street Quotes

It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come.

What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other -- a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easy-going French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York Prison -- in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving o9utcasts in an extraordinary way.

When Guido and I fled Sicily twenty five years ago, we had no paperwork to be in the US, so there was no means for me to get a legal job, especially as a minor. Pickpocketing on the streets, I’d barely been able to feed my brother. My only choice was to reach out to the local Albanian clan.

And it was big enough that organized crime was split two separate ways. The west of the city was run by Ukrainians. The east was run by Albanians. The demarcation line between them was gerrymandered as tight as a congressional district. Nominally it followed Center Street, which ran north to south and divided the city in half, but it zigged and zagged and ducked in and out to include or exclude specific blocks and parts of specific neighborhoods, wherever it was felt historic precedents justified special circumstances. Negotiations had been tense. There had been minor turf wars. There had been some unpleasantness. But eventually an agreement had been reached. The arrangement seemed to work. Each side kept out of the other’s way. For a long time there had been no significant contact between them

parked, dominated the rest of the street. There was an understated sign over the door that read ALBANIAN CENTER in English, below which were some words in another language, which Lydia brilliantly deduced to be Albanian. Next to the door was a bulletin board behind a glass case containing a picture of Valentina, the date and the time of the service, and a few paragraphs in Albanian. It seemed like a meager memorial for a life to Lydia, who thought, You live a hurricane of emotions, dreams, experiences, hardships; you raise children. Your life seems so important, your problems so consuming, your successes so thrilling. And in the end, your picture winds up on a bulletin board, your life reduced to a snapshot and some kind words on a piece of paper.