Lord Byron

For Byron, "Greece" was not so much a territory as an idea. He would have considered Albania to be "Greece" at a time when the largest Albanian city was Ianinna (then an important Ottoman center of administration and now the regional capital of Epirus) and Albanian was spoken as far south as the then-small town of Athens. The Greece that achieved independence was only a fraction of the size that it is now, after a century of expansion and attempted land-grabbing (the two Macedonian Wars of 1912 and 1913), and the forced "assimilation" of Slavs and Albanians, whose languages are still suppressed in the "Hellenic Democracy" that is part of the European Union.

Lord Byron described the Albanian popular customs as the most beautiful that he had never seen. They introduce indeed a great variety of shapes, colours, ornaments that vary from region to region, from city to city, often from village to village. And it is in the villages, that the customs have mainly been conserved along with the archaic vestiges of this ancient civilization. The ages of the ferocious Ottoman occupation, the sufferings, the great migrations, characterize some popular dresses , as the " Xhokja e zezë ", a black waistcoat that symbolizes the mourning carried by the Albanian people after Skanderbeg’s death. The most original dresses are the " Xhubleta " (typical feminine waistcoat of the zones of the North), that goes back to the Creto- Mycenaean age, and the " Xhoka " , part of the feminine customs diffused in all Albania in its twenty variations , that gets its origins from the Thracian – Illyric culture. During the festivities, the men wear the " Fustanella " (male variation of the xhoka, moreover symbol of economic comfort) the " Tirqë " (adorned and adherent pantaloon) or the " Brekushë " (rudimentary slacks, that during the feudal period expressed a low social standing, a state of submission and vassalage). The feminine customs are particularly charming. The patterns of the ancient customs are usually geometric , probably originated from the Albanian native populations, even if floral patterns, influenced by the Byzantine culture, are equally diffused.