“Five photographers – 50 Monuments – 1 Balkan Tale.” This is motto of the Balkan Tale exhibition in Athens featuring the Ottoman presence in the Balkans from the 14th to the 20th centuries
TIRANA, Oct. 3 – After its first display in Athens, and later in Skopje, Prizren, Berlin and Belgrade, the “A Balkan Tale” photo exhibition featuring the Ottoman presence in the Balkans from the 14th to the 20th centuries has finally arrived in Tirana where it will be displayed for 20 days. The exhibition was initially inaugurated at the Ministry of Culture premises on Oct. 1 where it remained open for five days before moving to its new venue along the busy pedestrian street of Murat Toptani in central Tirana where it will remain open until Oct. 19.
In a neighbourhood with many fine buildings from the Ottoman period, the organisers will also be offering historical walks of the area. The documentary film a ‘Silent Balkans’ will be playing at the Cinema Millennium nearby.
“Five photographers – 50 Monuments – 1 Balkan Tale.” This is motto of the Balkan Tale exhibition in Athens featuring the Ottoman presence in the Balkans from the 14th to the 20th centuries documenting some of the last remaining traces of the fast-disappearing cultural heritage of the Ottoman era still evident in the Balkans.
“The message this exhibition seeks to convey is the fact that the Balkans has not only had conflicts and divisions but also points of unity. There has also been a culture under the umbrella of the Ottoman Empire which has united these peoples and made them see their contact with nature, architecture and customs in a similar way. Today the whole heritage is endangered of rapid extinction. The pace of extinction as a result of development has been accelerated in many countries which came out of poverty only lately as is the case of Albania,” says Albanian architect and researcher Artan Shkreli.
The exhibition comprises 50 specially-commissioned photographs of Muslim, Christian and Jewish monuments in the Balkans, shot by five award-winning photographers from Athens, Belgrade, Pristina, Skopje and Tirana.
Albania is being represented in the event by Jutta Benzenberg, a German-born, Tirana-based photographer famous for her pictures of Albania since 1991, just before the collapse of the country’s almost 45-year hard-line communist regime.
Benzerberg features Albania, which was under the Ottoman rule for five centuries until declaring independence in 1912, with some religious monuments including the Catholic Cathedral in the northern town of Shkodra, erected in 1858-67 with permission granted by the Ottoman administration in a decree issued by Sultan Abd
