See Albania
I Tedeschini spouses, Joseph and Alma, manage the only bed & breakfast in Durres. The city is the port of Albania for those who come by sea from the west and the pair plays a similar role: it introduces travelers to the knowledge of their country.
I was met by a friend in Albania, Elena, and the house where we were greeted is a building of 1840, one of the few that survive the housing boom. With democracy has returned to private ownership and most of those who have seen the return property nationalized by the communist regime to transfer it to builders in exchange for a couple of floors of the skyscraper that will replace their old property.
This is not any house: it was the residence of the Consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a position he has held the Tedeschini and handed down from father to son, after having been for centuries and always inherited by Consuls of the Republic of Venice. The First World War has wiped out the empire, and with it, the family business, Joseph is now an agronomist in charge of biological and integrated, but the attachment to the history of the ancestors is big: the portrait of the princess Sissi which dominates the dining room has been hidden under the mattress for decades at a time when we ended up in jail if caught listening to Celentano or the Beatles.
Ben out in the same room, there is a photographic catalog of the Hapsburg possessions, printed in 1896 during the fifty years of the reign of Francis Joseph I am passionate to leaf through it because the town meeting, before arriving in Albania, I visited the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. The volume bears the stamp on the front page of the console Tedeschini.
the evening, Alma brings us together around a map of Albania and discussing the places to visit the next day. After choosing a destination, plunder the family library for historical information, archaeological, ethnographic.
In Berat, for example, a city founded by the Byzantines and then belonged to the Turks, the development of twentieth century did not affect the architectural coherence of the oldest neighborhoods: Gorica, Mangalemi and the Citadel. The dense texture of their buildings whitewashed and inlaid with Byzantine churches, mosques and mansions of Pasha, one of which is housed a renowned Museum of Ethnography. Photographs of tourist publications portray them from below, highlighting the many windows, but from the ramparts of the castle, searching the rooftops and the plant, it can also appreciate the consistency.
The Citadel, the Byzantine church of San Nicola is in an advanced stage of restoration, we pause to observe the painting of an interior wall, a saint whose left eye was removed. At that point, the painting presents a groove an inch deep. This is a frequent occurrence in countries that were subject to the Ottoman Empire, often reported in the accounts of Western travelers since the nineteenth century. In any case, the culprit was identified among the Turks or Albanians Muslims as proof of their barbarity. In the eighties of last century the phenomenon was exploited by the propaganda of the Serbian offensive against Kosovo Albanians, which was attributed, among other things, the blindness of the Byzantine princess Simonida fresco in the monastery of Gracanica, near Pristina.
the issue has recently occupied Božidar Jezernik, anthropologist at the University Ljubljana, in his book Wild Europe, The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers . Jezernik shows that were the same as Orthodox believers to affect the frescoes to remove the dust that is believed to have miraculous power to cure vision problems. All with the blessing of the clergy, who tolerate this practice pocketed substantial offers. Because Western had no passengers questioned the suspected version unfavorable to the Muslims and personally? Jezernik suggests that they were prepared to see only what they had already decided that they would see in those remote and unknown regions of Europe. A little 'as it happens today, the Western tourists they see the rest of the world only to be pitied poor or picturesque places in front of which sigh, so that he can feel simultaneously good and above.
The denigration of a country always prepares his "civilization" or its colonization. Bismarck, tells Joseph, said that in Albania there were men with tails, he was not alone, so much so that Jezernik devoted to the subject one of the tastiest chapters of his book.
not only sight but also hearing can be misleading: it is perhaps because the name sounds Italian Tedeschini that a young Londoner, Having stayed in B & B among the relics of the Hapsburgs, it has been convinced that the building was the former Italian consulate.
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