The Telephone Invasion of Albania

By Faik Konitza
A week or so ago there was an Associated Press dispatch carried by ‘The Times’, to the effect that the telephone was being introduced in Albania and that up to now people have been shouting from hill to hill to spread news or carryon a conversation. There is a good deal of truth in this piece of news. The telephone has been in use in Albania for very many years, but only for military and police purposes. As a favor, and free of charge, people would be allowed now and then to send a supervised message, but that was all.
Albanians have relied for their communications on the telegraph, and sometimes two persons in different towns would sit by the side of the telegraph operators and conduct a conversation. The famous English correspondent Bourchier, known as ‘the Ambassador of the Times in the Balkans’, used to say that in Albania the one efficient service, and amazingly so, was the telegraph. He was delighted to find again and again that his long dispatches in 1913 and 1914 from Albania reached always promptly and faultlessly the London office of his paper.
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It is possible that the telephone may also become popular in Albania, though perhaps at the expense of public security. Seventeen months ago, an insurrection burst out in Albania and was crushed in less than twentyΦour hours, mainly because the police and armed forces had telephones at their disposal, while the would-be insurgents had no such means of communication. I imagine the police will have to perfect a wire-tapping technique in order not to be caught napping.
I, for one, though from a selfish point of view, regret the telephone invasion of Albania. The telephone is a useful but irritatingly intrusive instrument. To have a telephone in your room is equivalent to giving freedom to anybody to jump up loudly in front of you and box your ears at any time of day or night. And you do not have the possibility of escape by switching off, as you do with the radio and the electric light.
A few weeks ago, one evening I was busy working on a book on Albania, when a telephone call persistently interrupted me. I unhooked it at last and a tiny voice, with a babbling of similar voices around, asked me a question. Obviously it was a party of children. The little voice said: “Please will you tell us just where is Bilbao.” The children doubtless had looked up the embassies and legations in the telephone book and innocently had picked out the first name in the alphabetical list.
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Concerning the “shouting” from hill to hill, as the A.P. dispatch puts it, it is true that even now it is practiced in some out-of-the-way mountains of Albania. This curious habit is of great antiquity. The English scholar, William Martin Leake, who traveled extensively in Albania and Greece at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries and published the results of his studies in several volumes, mostly in diary form, writes under the date of August 4, 1804:
“On the southern side, by which we approached the town, the position terminates in a tremendous precipice, the summit of which is so near to the church of St. George, on the opposite ridge, that words may be heard fi’om one place to the other; and the first intelligence is constantly communicated in this manner, on the arrival of passengers or caravans, which in winter are sometimes arrested there by a sudden fall of snow for several days. It is curious to remark with how much ease this telolalia or distant conversation is carried on. It is an art, which, as well as that of teloscopia, or of distinguishing distant objects, is possessed by the Albanians and mountaineers of Greece in a degree which seems wonderful to those who have never been required to exercise their ears, eyes, and voices to the same extent. The same qualities were among the accomplishments of the heroic ages of Greece, the manners and peculiarities of which have never been extinct in the mountainous and more independent districts of this country. ”
This antique means of communication has been perfected enough for travellers to order their dinner two or three hours in advance and to find on their arrival at the inn chickens or a baby lamb on the spit, or whatever else they had commanded.
(New York Times, 1938 / reprinted by permission)