Dua Lipa, known for her songs “Don’t Start Now” and “New Rules,” has taken to social media to show her support for a “Greater Albania” that includes areas of Serbia like Kosovo and the Preševo Valley, areas of Montenegro, the Greek island of Corfu and southern Epirus.
On her social media she showed a map of Greater Albania and wrote:
“au•toch•tho•nous adjective (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.”
Dua Lipa was born London, however her parents are Albanian from the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Albanian nationalists like her claim that they are “indigenous” to these lands claim, but every objective academic study has found that Albanians have nothing to do with the Ancient Illyrians that lived in some of the areas claimed in “Greater Albania.”
Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger from Vienna University found that Albanian and Illyrian have little or nothing in common, judging from the handful of Illyrian words that archeologists have retrieved, the Albanian link has long been cherished by Albanian nationalists, reported Balkan Insight.
The theory is still taught to all Albanians, from primary school through to university. It is popular because it suggests that Albanians descend from ancient people who populated the Balkans long before the Slavs and whose territory was “unfairly” stolen by these later incomers.
“You’ll find the doctrine about the Illyrian origin of Albanians everywhere,” Matzinger muses, “from popular to scientific literature and schoolbooks. “There is no discussion about this, it’s a fact. They say, ‘We are Illyrians’ and that’s that,” he adds.
Pandeli Pani, a Tirana-born academic at Jena University in Germany, said that despite the communist regime of Enver Hoxha to indoctrinate the Albanians’ with their Illyrian origins into the nation’s consciousness, the theory has become increasingly anachronistic.
“The political pressure in which Albania’s scientific community worked after the communist took over, made it difficult to deal with flaws with the doctrine of the Illyrian origin,” he said.
But while the Illyrian theory no longer commands universal support, it hasn’t lost all its supporters in Albanian academia.
This blatant indoctrination in the post-communist era diminishes the education system in Albania, a major contribution as to why Albania’s national IQ is consistently ranked the lowest in Europe, according to the Ulster Institute for Social Research.
However, even if we entertain the idea that the Albanians are Illyrian, the Illyrian homeland is not in Epirus or in Corfu.
The claim to Epirus is because of the existence of an Albanian minority in Epirus from the Middle Ages onwards, ignoring the thousands years previous Hellenic life in the region.
The region had an Albanian minority until they escaped from the region for Albania towards the end of World War II when they withdrew with the evacuating Nazi occupiers, afraid of repercussions from their ethnic cleansing of the Greek population and collaboration with the Axis Powers.
Dua Lipa’s claim for Corfu is even more disturbing considering Albanians in their entire history controlled the island for just a few decades in the late 1200’s/early 1300’s, retaining its Hellenic character established nearly 2000 years before the Albanian invasion and right up until this day.
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