King Zog’s ex-property to be renovated

TIRANA, March. 23 – Muttontown may restore Gates to kingdom that never was, writes Northender newspaper. The Village of Muttontown is waiting to hear if Nassau County is interested in assisting in the renovation of King Zog’s Gates, which stand as a last tangible reminder of Long Island’s link to one of twentieth-century Europe’s more bizarre figures.
According to Village Clerk Vivian Van Wagner, the idea of restoring the gates was put forward by the village’s beautification chair at a recent trustee meeting. The village has tapped the county about a feasibility study. “I have called in to the County Dept of Parks and we’re waiting for their response at the moment,” Ms. Van Wagner said.
The gates stand on Muttontown Road and once marked the entrance to the sprawling Knollwood estate, site of an ornate mansion built in the early 1900’s by tycoon Charles Hudson.
Knollwood’s most famous owner, however, was King Zog I of Albania (1895-1961), who owned it for a few years in the 1950’s, albeit without ever taking up residence. Zog’s claim to royal standing was tenuous at best. By birth, he was Ahmet Zogolli, chieftain of a powerful Albanian landowning clan. He distinguished himself during World War I (serving Austria-Hungary) and during Albania’s subsequent break with the Ottoman Empire. In the 1920’s, he became Albania’s prime minister and then president, and in 1928 installed himself as constitutional monarch.
Historians’ verdicts on Zog’s rule are varied. He brought his “kingdom” a measure of stability, and was committed to making it a voice among western powers. Himself a Muslim, he sought to solidify an atmosphere of religious tolerance in a Balkan country that is roughly two-thirds Muslim and one-third Christian. Some of his measures for doing this were no doubt controversial, such as prohibiting Albanian women from wearing veils and nationalizing many religious educational institutions. Historians rarely fail to mention, on the other hand, several factors that cast Zog in a less flattering light. He personally controlled much of Albania’s wealth and had no scruples about using it to live like, well, a king. And in a violent political climate where assassinations were a matter of course for eliminating one’s political rivals, it is likely that Zog had some disturbing skeletons in his closet. At a time when royalty preferred to keep the blood blue when it came to marriage, this Muslim upstart stood little chance of prevailing on a European princess to share his rocky throne. He did, however, find himself a winsome young queen in the person of Countess Geraldine Apponyi de Nagy-Apponyi (1915-2002), a Catholic Hungarian whose mother was an American heiress and distant cousin of Richard Nixon.
Zog and Geraldine fled Albania when Mussolini’s forces invaded in 1939. All through the war and the subsequent decades of communist rule in Albania that prevented their return, they moved from country to country, living lavishly on what historians contend was a large portion of the former Albanian treasury. They were attended wherever they went by an entourage that would make a modern pop diva jealous, and the popular version has it that it was with a view toward presiding over a sort of loyalist micro-kingdom that Zog purchased Knollwood. This version says that US customs officials spoiled everything by capping the number of Albanian ex-pats Zog could bring into the country with him, and that it was this that led him to settle in France instead. Most of the Knollwood house has been torn down and the property now makes up a large part of the Muttontown Preserve.