When the world first started hearing the term "ethnic cleansing" coming out of the Balkan countries that made up the former Yugoslavia, once they recovered from the shock of understanding what that reality meant their next reaction was probably surprise. Where had such a large community of European Muslims come from and what was the basis for the amount of hatred being directed towards them? To properly understand that you would have to travel back close to five hundred years to when the Ottoman Empire was carving its way through the Balkan states in an attempt to follow the Danube River all the way into Europe.
Like all wars where religion is a factor, the ones between the Christian defenders of the various Balkan countries and the Muslim Turkish invaders were pursued with a certain amount of fanaticism on both sides. While some countries were able to mount a fair resistance and even repulse their would-be conquerors, others weren't so lucky. While the Ottoman Empire would have tolerated other religions under its rule, there would have also been advantages to converting to Islam in terms of standards of living and comfort. However those who did would have been considered traitors and betrayers by their neighbors, and history isn't forgotten easily in some parts of the world. Five hundred years after the fact people were forced to pay with their lives for the so-called sins of their ancestors.
I'm sure most people have heard the tale of Vlad the Impaler, who supposedly executed hundreds of Turks by impaling them on stakes and is the purported model for a certain bloodsucking fiend from Transylvania. While Vlad may not have actually drank his victim's blood, there is no denying that the war between the Ottoman Empire and the various Balkan states they invaded were bloody and protracted affairs. Instead of engagements in the field, where the superior numbers of the Empire would prevail, key castles and strongholds were defended with the result that long and bloody sieges were common. In his recently translated book The Siege, published by Random House Canada, Albanian author Ismail Kadare takes us back to the 15th century to witness a Turkish army's attempts to break through the walls of an Albanian castle.
For many years Albania had been completely cut off from the West, and even when the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries were following Russia's lead and throwing off their communist leadership, Albania remained closed off. Only since the upheaval in the Balkans have we had the opportunity to see what was hidden for all of those years, including the work of writers like Ismail Kadre. The Siege was first published in Albania in 1970, and this edition is actually a translation of a French edition released in 1994 that is now considered the definitive version of the text.
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