M R D Foot
Albanian Operations
The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle
By Roderick Bailey
Jonathan Cape 406pp £25 order from our bookshop
Roderick Bailey takes his title from Byron, who called Albania in 1809 ‘the wildest province in Europe’, a claim it still contests. Long under Turkish rule, it briefly became independent in 1914, but was conquered by Italy in 1939; much of it then still ran on the feudal system. A little larger than Wales, it was miserably poor, mostly barren and mountainous, with goat tracks rather than roads linking sparse villages inhabited by a verminous, thieving, gossipy peasantry who resented strangers.
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