Albania

Albania, officially the republic, is the Balkan country on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, with Tirana as its capital and largest city, followed by Durres, Vlore and Shkoder. Illyrian tribes, the Ardiaei, Bylliones and Taulantians among them, held the land before Rome and Byzantium, and Greek colonies dotted the coast, Apollonia most of all, and the Illyrian Wars brought Rome in. Four centuries of Ottoman rule forged Albanian language and identity, crowned by the nineteenth-century Renaissance, and the mountains kept a tribal north apart from the mercantile south. Independence came in 1912, and the twentieth century was turbulent: the principality under Wilhelm of Wied, the republic and then the kingdom under Zog, occupation in both world wars, and the communist regime of Enver Hoxha that sealed the country for four decades. After the first multi-party elections of 1991 the communists lost parliament in 1992, and Albania became a sovereign parliamentary constitutional republic.