Coming to Greece

The death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 ushered in a period of great social changes, popular demands and widespread subversion within Albanian society. Despite the state’s reform efforts, the citizens’ discontent and need for change were so intense that by 1990, a mass exodus from the country had already begun.

Up until 1990, an attempt to cross the Albanian border was seen by the state as an attempt to flee the country and was therefore severely punished. Indeed, Kapllani mentions that ‘touching the border of a country like Albania before 1991, a country under a totalitarian regime, was either a miracle or a mortal sin. Very few were granted permission to cross the border. They were the lucky ones.’

However, at the beginning of the 1990s, state control of the border relaxed and a large proportion of the Albanian society left the country for different destinations, usually without the paperwork necessary to legitimise their movement. Some of the interlocutors in the research mention that many Albanian citizens simply wanted to know ‘what was out there’. Their migration plans were vague and their expectations from the experience did not follow common patterns of optimism, like ‘raising money’ or ‘starting a better life’. According to Pratsinakis (2005, 192-212), the first migrants from Albania often mentioned as a reason for their exodus their belief that it was the only way out of the poverty they were experiencing.

The most popular destinations for these first Albanian migrants were Greece and Italy. Some migrants with North Albanian origins managed to resettle in Northern and Central European countries, such as Germany and Great Britain. Migration overseas to countries like the USA was quite limited.

This was a time of mass movement mainly for men, as women and children delayed their migration and followed men only after the latter had settled permanently and found work. Since it was difficult to settle in Greece legally, movement from Albania to Greece became associated with hard manual labour and low wages.

Despite the fact that deportations back to Albania were common, attempts by Albanian citizens to move to and resettle in other countries did not abate. In fact, one of the interlocutors who moved from Albania to Greece mentioned that, from 1991, when he first came to Greece, until 1998, when he finally got a residence permit, he was deported from Greece nineteen times.