university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

of the Balkan Peninsula” (2001: 1); whilst Winnifrith notes, “It is not uncommon in the
Balkans to find people fluent in two or three languages, especially in Southern Albania…”
(2002: 47). Todorova (1997) as well as other authors (Norris 1999, Bjelić and Savić 2002,
Green 2005) illustrate how the term Balkans, which was until the 19 th century used as a sociogeographical
term for the mountain range linking the Black Sea and the Adriatic (Todorova
1997: 25), became gradually filled with political, historical and cultural meanings. In the
contemporary literature Balkan is often used as a synonym for mixed, fragmented, multiple,
hybrid, ambiguous and contested. In the same manner, Vickers and Winnifrith use the word
Balkans, to which they ascribe multiplicity and mixture because of which they cannot find a
clear or single answer about belonging of Illyrian and Epirote or “Greek” tribes. Green
suggests that “the idea that you can never get to the bottom of it, that it will always be either
too complicated or too meaningless to ever be understood […]constitutes the essence of the
current hegemonic concept of the Balkans: that in political, intellectual, historical, cultural,
and even topographical terms, the Balkans are fractal” (Green 2005: 140). Green notes that
this fractality is hegemonic construction where things are not too complex or fragmented but
too much related.
2.4.2. Trading Overseas
According to the American Evangelical missionary Jacques (1995: 94-95) and the British
historian Winnifrith (2002: 42) the first trading relations in this area took place at the end of
7 th and beginning of 6 th century B.C., when Greek merchants established trading posts and
colonies such as Epidamnus (Durrës) and Apollonia (Pojan), Butrint, Finiq and Lissus
(Lezha) along the Albanian coast. Later, around the 3 rd century B.C., the area of today’s
Himarë/Himara together with a large part of today’s southern Albania fell under the reign of
Molossian kings that were historically a part of the Epirote realm which existed as a federal
republic until the Roman times (Jacques 1995: 78-79, Winnifrith 2002: 47). According to
accounts of the ancient historians, such as Strabo and Thucydides in particular, Epirote is
referred to as an ethnical term and a name for the tribe and not the territory (Winnifrith 2002:
47).
In his description of trading relations, local archaeologist Koçi (2006: 25) refers to the
findings of ceramics that date back in the period of late Neolithic. Together with Rusha (2001:
32-33) they both list names of ports or sites with trading relations, such as Panormë
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