Religious Distribution in Albania

2008 – Albania
Is religion an important part of your daily life?

	No	N/A	Yes
Total	62%	5%	33%
Male	66%	6%	28%
Female	58%	5%	37%
age 15-24	76%	6%	18%
age 25-34	59%	6%	35%
age 35-49	58%	6%	36%
age 50+	57%	5%	38%

2008 – Albania
Have you attended a place of worship or religious service within the past 7 days?

	No	N/A	Yes
Total	76%	2%	22%
Male	77%	3%	20%
Female	74%	1%	25%
age 15-24	82%	2%	16%
age 25-34	77%	2%	21%
age 35-49	76%	3%	21%
age 50+	71%	1%	28%

poll conducted worldwide in 2008, by Gallup Inc.

Eric, Silvia and Áron visiting a vernissage at the Ministry of Tourism and Culture and meeting…

Minister of Tourism & Culture Aldo Bumçi and a French guy surrounded by press

Call for Scientologists to Project Albania

Below you can find the two pages of the 1992 letter by Scott Chaplin, Bookstore officer for the Church of Scientology’s Advanced Organization, Saint Hill United Kingdom, calling people to participate in Project Albania. This document is also one of the first steps towards Project BULGRAVIA.

BULGRAVIA – a Pan-Balkan state for Scientology

The BUL_GR_A_VIA project is a Scientology initiated effort to gain control over a Balkan region that included Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia, in order to establish a safe geographic territory (if not a Scientology state), from which to operate globally, with the minimum of disturbances. The documents show, the efforts started at the end of 1992 and around December were taking shape.

Albania, apparently, was the first country to be chosen, since its internal problems, destabilized it, making it an easy target, looking for any assistance to stand on its feet. The World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) was the infiltrating tool of Scientology and very understandably so, since for a covert operation in this scale, pure Scientology would not make good Public Relations, given its terrible reputation worldwide.

The Kanun in Present-Day Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro

Articles §600 and §601 of the Kanun, on a man's honor (nderi)

A 2004 report by Tanya Mangalakova on the kanun in northern Albania.

Missionary activity in Albania after 1992

Excerpt from the book “Albania: from Anarchy to a Balkan Identity” by Miranda Vickers, James Pettifer, pages 115-117.

Since 1991 missionaries and clerics from a variety of European and American Christian Churches have flooded into Albania. Because Albania had been officially proclaimed the world’s first and only atheist country, the need for Christian teaching was deemed by these highly-motivated zealots to be more necessary there than in any of the other former communist countries. The majority of Albanians have found the arrival of many of these groups a bewildering experience, especially as many of these visitors come from the wilder fringes of cultist movements.

Albanians were ignorant of the existence of so many different Christian religions, and as a result some members of Parliament proposed a law that would forbid any missionary activity unconnected with one of Albania’s established religions – Islam, Bektashism, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholicism. This, however, was such a sensitive issue, dealing as it did with the fundamental freedom to practise one’s religion, that the matter remained unsettled.

History of Jihad against the pre-Islamic Albanians (1332-1920)

A quite biased and anti-Islam, but somewhat useful overview on ‘How the Christian Albanians struggled against the Jihad to be overwhelmed by Islam and get submerged into the Dar-ul-Islam’.

(via historyofjihad.org)

The History of Jihad site is brought to you by a panel of contributors. This site is co-ordinated by Robin MacArthur with Mahomet Mostapha and Naim al Khoury, New Jersey.
Other contributors to this site include professors and members of the faculty from the Universities of Stanford and Michigan (Ann Arbor), Kansas State University, Ohio State University, and the London School of Economics. We strongly suggest that this site be recommended as additional reading for students of Islamic History.

Many of us think that Albania and Kosovo are Muslim nations. Not many know about how the Christian Albanians became Muslims.

The saga of the Jihadi onslaught on Albania begins when the expanding Ottoman Empire overpowered the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When the wild Ottoman armies burst upon Albania, the feuding Albanian clans proved no match for the armies of the sultan

Finngeir Hiorth – Albania: An Atheistic State?

Dr. Finngeir Hiorth is professor of philosophy at Oslo University, Norway. He has born in Indonesia where he lived until 1946 and since then has lived mostly in Norway. He received an M.A. from University of Oslo and a Ph.D. from University of Münster, West Germany. He visited Albania several years ago.

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In 1967, Albania officially proclaimed itself to be “the first atheistic state in the world.” All religious institutions were closed and religious officials were forbidden to exercise their function.

But is Albania really an atheistic state? What do experts on religion in Albania know about this? This paper intends to present a summary of and commentary on what is known about religion and atheism in Albania, particularly stressing the period since 1944 when the Albanian Party of Labor (the Communists) took power.

Vargmal – chthonic nationalism in Albania

During my investigation on Albanian national music, I ran into Vargmal.org, an extensive resource on local history, political and cultural conflicts, folklore and much much more. Tied closely to the martial/neofolk scene, chthonic black metal, Albanian traditionalism, paganism, and anti-Western political movements, Vargmal is a unique and uniquely well documented ideological library, especially compared to international sites dealing with the same kind of matters. They also support local music acts, and have their own YouTube channel.

view Vargmal.org’s English documentation
here (more history and culture)
and here (more current politics)

Vargmal on Facebook
Vargmal on YouTube