During this campaign, the Navy had awarded 69 BSMs, and the Army with 5, 000 troops in neighboring Albania ( considered part of the combat zone ) awarded none.

Communist parties had already come to power in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia.

Stalin had respected his agreement with Winston Churchill to not intervene, but Yugoslavia and Albania defied the USSR's advice and sent supplies during the Greek Civil War to the partisan forces of the Communist Party of Greece, the ELAS ( National Popular Liberation Army ).

By 1985, a case had not been heard of in the past twenty years whereas previously Albania had the greatest number of patients infected in Europe.

Hoxha alleged that Tito had made it his goal to get Albania into Yugoslavia, firstly by creating the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Aid in 1946.

Hoxha stated that this was yet another of many attempts to overthrow the leadership of Albania which had been organized by Yugoslavia.

Their rule in part of Albania was briefly interrupted in the 15th century, when George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, an Albanian who had served as an Ottoman military officer, renounced Ottoman service, allied with some Albanian chiefs and fought off Turkish rule from 1443-1478.

When the war ended on 11 November 1918, Italy's army had occupied most of Albania ; Serbia held much of the country's northern mountains ; Greece occupied a sliver of land within Albania's 1913 borders ; and French forces occupied Korçë and Shkodër as well as other regions with sizable Albanian populations such as Kosovo.

By June 1934, Albania had signed trade agreements with Yugoslavia and Greece, and Mussolini had suspended all payments to Tirana.

A government of young men led by Mehdi Frasheri, an enlightened Bektashi administrator, won a commitment from Italy to fulfill financial promises that Mussolini had made to Albania and to grant new loans for harbor improvements at Durrës and other projects that kept the Albanian government afloat.

At the outbreak of war, Italy had seized the chance to occupy the southern half of Albania, to avoid it being captured by the Austro-Hungarians.

After the fall of Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, the Italian Fascists added to the territory of the Kingdom of Albania most of the Albanian-inhabited areas that had been previously given to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

A provisional government the communists had formed at Berat in October administered Albania with Enver Hoxha as prime minister.

Before World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had supported transferring Kosovo to Albania, but Yugoslavia's postwar communist regime insisted on preserving the country's prewar borders.

Albanian-Chinese relations had stagnated by 1970, and when the Asian giant began to reemerge from isolation in the early 1970s, Mao and the other Communist Chinese leaders reassessed their commitment to tiny Albania.

In 1967, the authorities conducted a violent campaign to extinguish religious practice in Albania, claiming that religion had divided the Albanian nation and kept it mired in backwardness.

The constitution's preamble also boasted that the foundations of religious belief in Albania had been abolished.

In 1995, Albania had been accepted into the Council of Europe and requested membership in NATO.

Colonel David Smiley, an aristocratic Guards officer who had helped Enver Hoxha and his Communist guerillas to liberate Albania, now prepared to liberate it from Hoxha.

By that date, the following nations had deposited instruments of definitive adherence to the pact: Afghanistan, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Romania, the Soviet Union, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Siam, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.

The frontiers of Albania had not been set during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, as they were left for the League to decide ; however, they had not yet been determined by September 1921, creating an unstable situation.

The National Assembly, anxious to keep Albania intact, expressed willingness to accept Italian protection and even an Italian prince as a ruler so long as it would mean Albania did not lose territory.

For much of the 1920s and 1930s, between long stints living abroad ( including Albania ), Lane lived with the Wilders at Rocky Ridge Farm.

Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents ' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri.

* 1443-After being sent in a battle near Nis, Skanderbeg turns in Albania, starts the long war against the Ottoman Empire and reembraces Roman Catholicism.

In fact, beards and long hair in men were banned in Albania as signs of degenerate bourgeois manners.

* The 20 km long Osum Canyon, the largest in Albania located near Corovode in Skrapar District

Prominent viziers and pashas hailed from Albania, and were appointed to their posts long before the majority of Albanians professed Islam.

With its reorganization, and the breath, that brought the ten main shareholders, which had a long successful experience with their business, about the alteration of the work mentality and all these followed by business plans and by clear strategy of development, " Birra Tirana " has stated its goal to become the main beer in the Albania market.

Within Albania, the Tropoja district has had a long reputation as one of the wildest and most conservative regions in Albania, virtually out of control of every government in Tirana, whether royalist, communist, or republican.

In Albania, coffee is culturally important, but has long been thought of as kafe turke – Turkish coffee.

It has a long tradition of being produced in Albania.

It is 30. 4 km long by 14. 8 km wide at its maximum extent with a shoreline length of 87. 53 km, shared between Macedonia ( 56. 02 km ) and Albania ( 31. 51 km ).

The census of 2011 will include ethnicity for the first time, a long standing demand of the Greek minority in Albania and of international organizations, though the details remain to be approved by the Albanian Parliament.

The šargija ( Cyrillic: Шаргија, ) is a plucked, fretted long necked chordophone used in the folk music of various Balkan countries, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania, Kosovo and Serbia.

Although the Albanian territories were lost, the notion and rights of the Kingdom of Albania continued for the Angevins for a long time after Charles of Anjou's death.

Bolla ( also known as Bullar in South Albania ), is a type of serpentic dragon ( or a demonic dragon-like creature ) with a long, coiled, serpentine body, four legs and small wings in ancient Albanian folklore.

In the Balkans the Bektashi order had a considerable impact on the Islamization of many areas, primarily Albania and Bulgaria, as well as parts of Macedonia.

By the 18th century Bektashism began to gain a considerable hold over the population of southern Albania.

However, his work bore no considerable fruit since Marxism hadn't found any favourable soil in Albania and the clandestine work was very difficult because of the activity of the security police.

Cemetery of the PartisansAfter WWII, under communism, the port was leased to the Soviet Union as a submarine base, and played an important part in the conflict between Enver Hoxha and Nikita Khrushchev in 1960-1961, as the Soviet Union had made considerable investments in the naval facilities at nearby Pasha Liman and objected strongly to the loss of them as a consequence of Albania denouncing the USSR as ' revisionist ' and taking the Chinese side in the split in the world communist movement.

Furthermore, the Armenian rulers of Artsakh began to play a considerable role in the affairs of Caucasian Albania.

When Mehmed II returned from Albania after his actions against Skanderbeg in 1466 he dethroned Dorotheos, the Archbishop of Ohrid, and expatriated him together with his clerks and boyars and considerable number of citizens of Ohrid to Istanbul, probably because of their anti-Ottoman activities during Skanderbeg's rebellion when many citizens of Ohrid, including Dorotheos and his clergy, supported Skanderbeg and his fight.

The Sarajevska Pivara opened in 1864 as the first local industry and shortly became one of leading producers in Bosnia, with considerable amounts exported to Montenegro, Dalmatia and Albania.