‘My name, their city’ Kosovars named after Albanian towns

TIRANA, March 27 – “My name their city” an exhibition by Kosovo contemporary artist Alban Muja is bringing to Albania pictures of Kosovars named after Albanian towns, a popular phenomenon in neighbouring Kosovo but almost inexistent in Albania. The exhibition shows the influence that nationalist identity politics’ of Kosovo Albanians have had in the birth of a particular phenomenon of naming children after Albania’s towns, mostly during the 70s and 80s. This is linked to a nationalist idea or dream of the unification of all Albanian territories around the border of modern day Albania into a greater ethnic Albania, originally conceived by the League of Prizren in the 19th century. In the second half of the 20th century it became the ideological driving force of a struggle culminating with the independence of Kosovo in the first decade of 21st century. Another factor was the impossibility of Kosovo Albanians to travel to what was felt by them to be the Motherland of their common ethnicity, which only helped foster stronger feelings of nostalgia about the neighboring Albania. For example, siblings that were caught on different sides of the border between the two countries at the time of the ‘closing’ just after World War II, had not been able to unite up until the fall of communist regime in the early 90s. As a legacy of that period, many people are called after Berat, Milot, Saranda, Gjirokastra, Shkodra, Butrint, Vlora, and so on; a self evident custom in Kosovo, but a rather strange one for the locals of these towns in Albania.
The photo exhibition by Kosovo contemporary artist Alban Muja will be open at the Miza Gallery near the Faculty of Law in Tirana until March 30.