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Post by ILIRI I MADH on Jul 14, 2008 1:10:09 GMT -5
besa gia besa ore kapetan Gjoleka besa gia besa ore Koga Drako it looks like in ancient times when illyrian tribes used to fight amongst each other, in the video it is Albanian Lab mercenaries fighting for the turkish army aginst the Albanian Suliotes fighting for THEMSELVES not for the Greeks, it was a matter of whos going to control the lands!
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 14, 2008 5:01:59 GMT -5
^^^^ LOL !
pffft...arabs...
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Post by Kastorianos on Jul 14, 2008 18:28:25 GMT -5
Iliri posting his favourite clips...
besa gia besa...he is in love with this term.
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Post by Toskaliku on Jul 14, 2008 21:52:50 GMT -5
Expat, there is a diff between Youtube people and real people. These are real Albs caught in a home movie: uk.youtube.com/watch?v=m9cYatsmqMA&feature=relatedThis is Albania today, those people are stuck inside their homes making videos because they are not invited to these things.
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Kanaris
Amicus
This just in>>>> Nobody gives a crap!
Posts: 9,587
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Post by Kanaris on Jul 14, 2008 23:55:06 GMT -5
They are listening to Greek songs. Some niiiiiccee women there...
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Kanaris
Amicus
This just in>>>> Nobody gives a crap!
Posts: 9,587
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Post by Kanaris on Jul 14, 2008 23:56:51 GMT -5
Ilir..show me a pic of your Mercedes again.
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 15, 2008 5:47:49 GMT -5
Expat, there is a diff between Youtube people and real people. These are real Albs caught in a home movie: uk.youtube.com/watch?v=m9cYatsmqMA&feature=relatedThis is Albania today, those people are stuck inside their homes making videos because they are not invited to these things. yeah i know toskali, i just wanted to make a point that there are many that totally eat up this islam crap in albania and that is the only reason you side w/ the turks. The ironic thing of it all, is that you try to claim arvanites, suloits, ect as your own when they in fact acted completely opposite of those fools in the youtube link... Now you try to use albanism as a unifying factor which is pretty cool IMO. But the past shows otherwise...
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libofsha
Amicus
socially inept village idiot who is having a meltdown daily
Posts: 611
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Post by libofsha on Jul 15, 2008 6:18:10 GMT -5
i don't think we are claiming as such, i think we are simply trying to shed some light on the dark recesses of history, greeks on the other side also say that they were/are of hellenic stock, what they are now is smth else, but history needs to be addressed without bias, there's a lot of emotional change from both sides but the point is that albs helped secure greeks independence and albs needs to realise that they are now integral part of greece, what happened to get to this state is smth else, but at the time they were were much albs and regarded themselves as such
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 15, 2008 6:36:50 GMT -5
agreed....i personally dont have a problem w/ that perception of albos fighting for hellenic cause. But let me add that I am not that knowledgable about epirus and about arvanites, suliots as well. Other greeks here know more than me on those issues. Im just taking your word for it since you guys are so dead set on it. I give the benefit of the doubt....
Again, its like us greeks praising ottoman greeks for their accomplishments...thats never gonna happen. Thats our difference...and thats why there are greeks here that will swear up and down that they were greek and not albanian...whereas the ottoman greeks they were fighting against ( which im sure there were a few ) were considered nothing less than turks.
Thats the irony of it all...
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 15, 2008 6:40:26 GMT -5
albanism that you guys tout all the time is somthing im guessing is fairly new due to the collapse of communism. So you guys dont identify w/ religion very well, only when its to piss us off you guys play the muslim and when you want to piss of turks you play the christians..
Not really conistent but who really cares anyway.....w/ us its different. Orthodoxy is engrained in our modern identity whether we like it or not. So therefore an alb that is orthodox, speaks greek, and fights w/ us will be considered a hellene. You guys have to just digest it....its no big deal..
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Post by Arxileas on Jul 15, 2008 6:49:07 GMT -5
albs helped secure greeks independence and albs needs to realise that they are now integral part of greece, This statement is very wrong, you have to realise that blood and ethnicity are not related, that in it's self should be self evident. A resistance leader during the fight for Greece's independence called out for anyone to attack the Ottomans from the inside, the first and only ones to responde for Hellenism were the Suliots.... .
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 15, 2008 6:54:34 GMT -5
^^ he is right.....you cant give credit to all albs. The sulliots obviously looked upon themselves as one of us when fighting for our cause.
A minor detail...but nonetheless corrected..
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libofsha
Amicus
socially inept village idiot who is having a meltdown daily
Posts: 611
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Post by libofsha on Jul 15, 2008 8:02:10 GMT -5
albanism that you guys tout all the time is somthing im guessing is fairly new due to the collapse of communism. So you guys dont identify w/ religion very well, only when its to piss us off you guys play the muslim and when you want to piss of turks you play the christians.. Not really conistent but who really cares anyway.....w/ us its different. Orthodoxy is engrained in our modern identity whether we like it or not. So therefore an alb that is orthodox, speaks greek, and fights w/ us will be considered a hellene. You guys have to just digest it....its no big deal.. personally i don't have a problem with it as long as a few truths are spoken, they have now assimilated into the greek culture, they are by all accounts greeks provinient from alb stock but that has little bearing on the fact that they identify themselves as greek, i have a problem however with religion defining ones national identity, it should not be like that, in my opinion, i am an orthodox from southern albania and i find affinity in an albanian muslim from kosovo as much i would from an alb from albania, i am close to their cause and i consider it as my own without any distinction, for me albs wherever they are considered equal and of same stock, i do not separate them out in terms of religeous pertinence, i do not see muslim albs or catholic albs, that's a matter of choice, i am not so arrogant and ignorant to be disenchanted by a certain group of people simply because they choose to practice a certain religeon, its called free will....however i do not like and despise albs denying their roots, thinking they are turks or greeks or denying that we once were the defenders of christianity because that is the truth, but i do not attempt to change how the reality is, some are muslim some are christian, nowdays its of no consequence, who gives a sheet
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Post by chalkedon on Jul 15, 2008 8:15:46 GMT -5
yes but thats how it was w/ albanians in the beginning. They had no problem with the ottomans....you were converting to islam in droves. Of course !!! how can you hate your own since over half are identified as " muslims " Our circumstances our very different, I myself think its bullschit to identify w/ religion unlike my compatriots here. I think christianity threw us in a loophole back in time instead of forward. It helped against the turks no doubt, but it should of stayed in its place.
I guess what pisses us off the most is some sort of betrayel that we might of felt when you guys were converting like hotcakes and the closeness you had w/ the turks. Maybe if you guys had it as hard as we did, maybe just maybe it would be completely different today.
Not to mention the WW2 incident where ONCE AGAIN you picked the wrong side...Technically if you guys are Illyrians like you claim to be, then your side is supposed to be w/ us and not w/ them. You cant get any closer than the illyrian/hellene connection.
And maybe thats why ppl doubt when you claim that you are....cause your actions show otherwise
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libofsha
Amicus
socially inept village idiot who is having a meltdown daily
Posts: 611
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Post by libofsha on Jul 15, 2008 11:04:59 GMT -5
expat,
forget what you were taught in school, forget the general perception of alb history in greece, forget what they have told you or what your local priest preaches....
albanians suffered the most during ottoman empire, most of our cities were burned to the ground, our population was less than halved, many people fled abroad for fear of persecution, a lot of yound kids taken to fight for the ottoman army, even with all that being said we did not massively convert until the turn of the 18'th centuary, late 17'th, but most people had no choice, our folklore is riddled with tales and stories of tribesmen rebelling continously against the ottomans, we have never accepted the turks as our rulers....as you suggest, conversion didn't happen over night, people didn't exactly embrace islam willingly, but rather circumstantially.
in fact, if anyone had better than anyone else was the greeks, there was no significant rebellion to speak of in over 3 centuries, you guys were so integrated in the turkish state it was difficult to tell where turkey begun and greece ended, not to mention the fact that when we were spilling our blood keeping the turks from crossing into mainland europe, you guys had surrendered without virtually any stance.
let me ask you this, if you guys had not shipped off the millions of greek muslims, and if you had not mass re-converted to christianity and if you hadn't murdered the rest, how many muslim greeks there would be today? you would have had the exact same situation as us! also if half of our population had not left after the fall of "Kruja" then the numbers would be a lot different,
so its a little convenient for greeks to talk about how they preserved christianty intact....that is not true by a long shot for aforementioned reasons, you preserved at the expense of your countrymen being expulsed and many other dodhy deals cut by the greek patriarch at the time,
there's never been any closeness with the turks, we were the most backward province during the ottoman empire, and still to this day even, if we were so favoured then where are the benifits? but this is the card that greek politics has played over the years when albania was chopped up, to portray us collaborators, even though we were the most hard done, so they could annex our territories, turkey also f**ked us over as they could easily have preserved out territories if they had wished but they fed us to the dogs,
what WW2? are you insinuating we took the side of the nazis? this statement is next to insanity, do you know that we have been officially recognized as a country which helped the allied forces? check sources, true story, so i resent that last statement, because that is another farsity which the greeks have utilised to annex territories overwhelmingly populated by albs(chameria)
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Post by Toskaliku on Jul 15, 2008 11:36:50 GMT -5
For the nationalist Albanian it has nothing to do with Islam, for those who are religious its another matter. I for one do not side with Turks based on religion, I have never even been inside of a mosque.
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Post by epiroti on Jul 15, 2008 11:54:06 GMT -5
expat, albanism that you guys tout all the time is somthing im guessing is fairly new due to the collapse of communism. So you guys dont identify w/ religion very well, only when its to piss us off you guys play the muslim and when you want to piss of turks you play the christians... It would be really interesting to see an actual study, if at all possible, regarding the reasons why albs converted to islam during the ottoman times. I'll give it a shot myself. It couldn't have been lack of courage, because this was proved by earlier periods. We fought fearlessly against them in Scanderbeg's times (ignoring, although I shouldn't, all the numeruous regional rebellions, many times successful to the extent that the mountanous parts of albania were pretty much autonomous at the least) And a whole generation of yearly battles against a numerically-superior enemy only harders one's culture, so we didn't exactly lose heart neither. (and allow me to ask your nation where you guys were when we were giving them hell, as you asked above with regard to your war of independence; the montenegrins(?) joined us, you didn't; but things are not that simple, more factors were involved than courage.) Well, let's say for the sake of the argument that maybe there was some fear, we are only humans and fear is hardwired into us, but it certainy wasn't a factor to the extent some of you might claim. Was it betrayal? After all, betrayal happens in every race, and we've had our share of it too. Are we a treacherous race/nation? If we were, we wouldn't have Besa (integrity/loyalty) as one of the cornerstones of our culture. And it isn't smth to just appear tough. That bloody virtue (literally) is responsible for honour killings. What else could it be? Perhaps a lack of commitment towards religion. Sermons were delivered in either greek or latin in middle-ages albania (if we were so keen about religion, we would have done something about it), and our culture was quite independent of religion. We had our own code of laws, which was very widely-speard amongst us before albs started converting. I'm not claiming we were a nation of atheists, but we certainly weren't as religious as our neighbours. Another sign of this is that there were no internal conflicts with religious motives after the conversion. So whatever the motives for conversion, it was easier to decide for it because religion didn't mean to us what it meant to you. I remember speaking to my grandparents who grew up and lived in villages (almost unaffected by communist/atheist propaganda), and there was no sign of what we know as proper islamic faith even though both sides (mother's and father's) were considered muslim. They believed that there was a god, and there probably is an afterlife, but that's about it. You must know that albania is mostly mountanous, and life was harsh for us back then (not excluding the losses we suffered from the wars led by scanderbeg, or the revenge taken by the ottomans after the invesion; during his reign, the main income was from the export of salt - what does that tell you about our economy back then?). And there certainly was profit to be gained from converting (lower taxes maybe, the right to carry arms - a big thing for our culture in that time). And conversion didn't happen straight away, or within the first generation of living under ottoman rule. It started happenning about a century after. You must understand that ottoman rule after a few generations must start feeling like it's not something you can get rid of that easily - so, keeping in mind the other factors mentioned above, many (well, most) adapted to the new way of life. Some might ask 'well, why did you join the turks (as mercenaries)?'. For profit, obviously. It wasn't a matter of betrayal - it was a matter of making money. It definetly looked so to you because many of them fought against greeks - but the greek cause wasn't their cause. (Probably just like the arvanites weren't really fighting for national pride, or for religious reasons, even though by the 19th century they were inevitably more religious than the albs; they were probably fighting to get rid of the ottomans dictating their way of life - but the arvanite example is slightly different, so ignore this for the moment). I certainly don't recall those mercenaries being a problem for our own war of independence (even though I am aware that the history I've red might have been a little biased). It certainly was nothing like it is depicted by the greeks. Hell, you call us turk-albanians, like we were in love with turkish culture, or like we intentionally positioned ourselves against your national interest (they were mercenaries fighting for an empire - if it wasn't you they were fighting againts, it would have been some other nation fighting for the same cause; life is a b!tch, it's sad it had to be like that, almost just as sad as it would have been for us killing turkish soldiers who were made to fight by the sultan, so the albs were more prone to become mercenaries than traders; they didn't have as much choice as you people believe). So don't call us turk-albanians, mercenary-albs would be more appropriate The turk-albanian notion is completely wrong! It wasn't that we were muslim-brothers in arms. It wasn't that we intentionally positioned ourselves against greeks because we had hostile views of you. The greek state with its version of history (with respect to us) has totally messed things up... so now, after communism, we find ourselves dealings with so many greeks because we were depected as 'turkey's little brother'.
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Post by mendor on Jul 15, 2008 15:00:14 GMT -5
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Post by ILIRI I MADH on Jul 15, 2008 23:20:32 GMT -5
i drive a hyndai now gas is too expensive for a v12
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Post by Arxileas on Jul 16, 2008 0:14:42 GMT -5
mendor we can show you 15 pages of info showing how the Soulis were being referred to as Greeks, but what's the point when we'll be still discussing this again next month as if we've never did before...Key thing here is ABSORB what goes in and what has been learned, then we move on. Do you agree ?
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