Chapter I - The road to power

Summary

The child born in Tirana on 8 November 1941 did not wait even a day among the nation, but lifting its iron hand, began to give ruthless blows to fascists and traitors.

The turning point of modern Albanian history is considered to be November 28, 1912, when a group of nationalist activists who had gathered in Vlore announced the independence of Albanian land, declaring the breakage of almost 500-year-oldties with the Ottoman Empire. The declaration of independence issued during the First Balkan War was a reply to the threat of the land inhabited by Albanians being divided among the Balkan states. The drive towards independence was supported in Rome and Vienna, where a plan to create an autonomic Albanian principality with limited sovereignty was formed. The formal ruler of the new state was Wilhelm von Wied, from the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family. After the outbreak of World War I, when Greeks and Serbs crossed the border into Albanian land, in September 1914 Wilhelm von Wied fled from Durrës – the capital of the country he ruled. For the next four years the territory of Albania was occupied by the Austrian, Montenegro, French, Greek, Serbian and Italian armies. The idea of constructing a fully-independent Albanian state was the guiding principle for a group of nationalist activists, who in 1920 gathered at the congress in Lushnje.