‘People here don’t know what crisis means’

This interview with A. was conducted in 2010 as part of an ethnographic study on the movement of migrants of Albanian origins returning to Albania from Greece. The extract is accompanied by notes from contemporaneous ethnographic research.

Α. was about 50 years old at the time of the interview. The first Memorandum of Understanding between Greece and the International Monetary Fund had just been signed and discussion of the ‘economic crisis’ dominated public discourse, not only on the national and international media, but also in everyday life. That is when the first ‘return migration flow’ began, with migrants of Albanian origins who had been living in Greece moving back to Albania. The deep wage cuts and the explosive rise in unemployment led many people of Albanian origins to invest their savings in building a business back in Albania.

However, according to A., the crisis was not limited to Greece. In 2010, wages in Albania were particularly low, especially for manual labour, as a construction worker would earn about 180 Euros per month. For A., the economic crisis in 2010 gave her the chance to talk about the circumstances under which she had left Albania with her family and the story of their resettlement in Thessaloniki. As she says, what constitutes ‘crisis’ for her was experiencing the events of 1996-1997 in Albania, when the country’s shadow-banking firms, which had been offering pyramid schemes promising a 50% return on capital investment within a few months, collapsed, and protests and riots spread across the country, shaking Albanian society to its core.