|
Select Your Country |
|
(Beta version!) These links will be active soon :)>> Recommend wdbase.com >> About Us >> Privacy
|
HOME >> WORLD PROFILES >>
Albania
NATIONAL AWAKENING AND THE BIRTH OF ALBANIA, 1876-1918
Albania
NATIONAL AWAKENING AND THE BIRTH OF ALBANIA, 1876-1918
By the 1870s, the Sublime Porte's reforms aimed at
checking
the Ottoman Empire's disintegration had clearly failed.
The image
of the "Turkish yoke" had become fixed in the nationalist
mythologies and psyches of the empire's Balkan peoples,
and their
march toward independence quickened. The Albanians,
because of
the preponderance of Muslims link with Islam and their
internal
social divisions, were the last of the Balkan peoples to
develop
a national consciousness, which was triggered by fears
that the
Ottoman Empire would lose its Albanian-populated lands to
the
emerging Balkan states--Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and
Greece.
Albanian leaders formed the Prizren League in 1878, which
pressed
for territorial autonomy, and after decades of unrest a
major
uprising exploded in the Albanian-populated Ottoman
territories
in 1912, on the eve of the First Balkan War. When Serbia,
Montenegro, and Greece laid claim to Albanian lands during
the
war, the Albanians declared independence, and the European
Great
Powers endorsed an independent Albania in 1913, after the
Second
Balkan War. The young state, however, collapsed within
weeks of
the outbreak of World War I.
Data as of April 1992
