Religious life in Albania is a story of rebirth

In this holy season of the Great 50 Days of Easter, we are sharing the wonderful story of the resurrection of religious life in Albania.

In our sabbatical through African and European countries rimming the Mediterranean Sea, a surprising shining jewel was Albania.

In Albania, we witnessed the resurrection, restoration and rebirth of religious life. We experienced harmonious coexistence, intentional intersection and purposeful partnership of Christians and Muslims.

Albania was a small but bright light during the terror-ridden Nazi era. Practicing a core value of besa (protection), Muslims and Christians protected Jews and refused cooperation with Nazis. Albania was the only country where the Jewish population increased during World War II, as these feisty people made trouble for Nazis and held safe space for Jews.

Today there are few Jews in Albania. Most emigrated to the newly independent Israel and fled the terror of the communist dictatorship after WWII.

Many remember the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, when Communist regimes gripped nations and enacted purges on their own people. Under Enver Hoxha, Albania was one of the most repressive, isolative Communist dictatorships.

Albania has a long, tense history of subjection to foreign powers—Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Sicily, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, Italy and other countries through the early 20th century. Across centuries, there have been uprisings for independence, including efforts in WWII to repulse Italian fascists and German Nazis. 

Religiously, Albania has embraced the diversity of Abrahamic faiths for centuries. Christianity has been there since the first decades after Christ. Judaism arrived about 70 C.E. Islam came in the 1300s with the Ottoman Empire. Christianity is primarily Orthodox and Roman Catholic with some Protestants. Islam is also diverse—Sunni and Bektashi Sufi. There is also a high percentage of undeclared or unaffiliated "believers" and some atheists.

The post-WWII takeover by Hoxha and the Communist party led to purges of political opposition. Soon came purges of religion. All religions and religious speech were banned. All houses of worship were destroyed or turned into warehouses, bars or military facilities. All forms of Christianity, Islam and Judaism were annihilated by the State. Albania was declared an atheist nation.

Even cemeteries were destroyed to obliterate sacred memory. Many priests, imams, babas and rabbis were martyred, exiled or forced to adopt non-religious life. Most Jews emigrated to the new nation of Israel. Brutal repression continued for nearly 50 years, as the regime sought to enforce faith in itself as the almighty state and in its almighty dictator.

When we arrived last summer, there were beautiful new churches and mosques in cities and villages across the country. In the 1990s, the repressive regime toppled and was overthrown. Albania slowly but steadily and peacefully emerged into a democratic nation. Religious freedom was reinstated. Then came many years of restoration and resurrection of faiths.

Religious leaders who went into hiding 50 years earlier were quite old and not able to lead, but new life came forth. It came from other nations with leaders who came to help and also from people who had held the faith privately and in secret with their children and grandchildren.

From the ashes and ruins, faith was restored, resurrected and reborn. The first gatherings for public worship were in ruins of old churches and mosques. Thousands came out for worship. Over 25 years, hundreds of new houses of worship were built and hundreds more were restored. Thousands of new leaders were trained and deployed across the country. Hundreds of new social care agencies, schools, universities and hospitals were launched.

We saw many churches, mosques, tekkes and shrines. We were thrilled to join worshippers in the capital, Tirana, at the Orthodox Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ—so powerfully named to honor and celebrate Jesus' resurrection and the resurrection of Christian faith in Albania. There, we met Sonila Dedja, who leads the women's ministry and co-leads interfaith collaboration in this small nation. 

Sonila lived her childhood under the repressive autocratic state. Her grandfather was an Orthodox priest before the regime outlawed all religion and faith. He was unable to practice his faith in any open way, but he found ways to share and pass on his faith in hidden ways.

He told people bits of the teachings and healing ministries of Jesus without mentioning his name or other names. For example, he would say, "There was once this philosopher (or teacher) who told a story about a foreigner who helped someone really beat up and abandoned on the side of a road, when no one else stopped to help—and this showed what a real neighbor was like." 

Sonila grew up with her grandparents. Every night her grandfather blessed her with four kisses, on her forehead, then her chin, then each cheek. Without saying so, he made the sign of the cross on her. As the regime crumbled, and educational and religious freedom were restored, Sonila learned what was behind what her grandfather said and did, and she embraced Christian faith wholeheartedly as her true home. She now helps lead the Orthodox Church of Albania as a lay theologian and minister in its time of arising to new life.

Sonila's story is one among so many, across faiths. This is what we Christians would say resurrection looks like. Faith restored and renewed in Christian and Muslim forms, and a welcoming return opened for Jewish forms—and all the individual stories of faith reawakened or found again in a new generation. All are signs of new life. 

New Life arises as the great, steady, unrelenting power of Love that bursts with light from the tomb, that reawakens life in what we thought was dead and lost, that calls us by name. 

We pray all will hear the ever-merciful, all-embracing call of God, to follow Love and rise with the power of Life that cannot be annihilated.

The Rev. Dr. David Gortner and The Very Rev. Heather VanDeventer are Episcopal priests in Coeur d'Alene and Spokane.