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A quirk of Albanian grammar: many masculine nouns switch gender in the plural. Qytet (“city,” masculine) becomes qytete in the plural—now feminine. Linguist Martin Camaj calls these “ambigeneric” nouns, likely a remnant of an older, more complex plural system that predates the modern Albanian noun class.

The Komani-Kruje Culture in its entirety mapped out. Spanning from Late antiquity to the Early medieval it represents the resurgence of Albanians from Byzantine administration evident from its functionality independent from the Imperium and a need for reinforcement against the incursions of Avar / Slavic migrations seen by highly elevated settlements and forts. Although most archeological research has gotten to a steady halt in the past few years it clearly paints a picture that the first Albanian principality 'Arbanon' did not form from nothing but rather an already established settlement landscape with its own sub-economies with interconnected trade routes.

Ali Pasha's court was one of the first to use Demotic Greek as a language of state, and that choice later aided the demoticist cause in Greece's language debate. Despite being portrayed by Greek polemicists as a cruel Muslim fanatic, Ali appears to have had little real religious faith: nothing beyond some minor dabbling in Sufism.

Brankovic also betrayed Skanderbeg four years earlier at Varna in 1444, blocking his route to the Christian coalition and warning Sultan Murad of their advance. Serbian rulers of the period repeatedly chose Ottoman vassalage over the Christian cause when it suited them.

The claim on Skanderbeg’s family origins as Greek or Serbian are without weight and at times misconceptions or errors in translating older text. As Hodgkinson puts it, “..the Bishop of Chester must be a Roman Catholic because ‘chester’ in a name is proof of Roman occupation”.

Radoslav Katicic, one of the leading authorities on the ancient languages of the Balkans, argued that key Albanian toponyms—Lesh, Drisht, Drin and Mat—can be derived from their ancient forms only through Albanian-specific sound changes. No other language’s sound laws produce them. And where Illyrian glosses survive at all, he found Albanian correspondences “remarkably easy to find.”

Dimitri Ypsilantis wrote the following letter to Muslim Arvanites and Tosks on their early victories against the Ottomans during the Revolution.

Genomic pigmentation prediction on 47 samples from the BA-IA Western Balkans: overwhelmingly light or intermediate eyes, dark reddish-brown hair, intermediate skin — the modal Balkan Iron Age face. (AADR v66 · HIrisPlex-S)

Arvanite historian Aristidh Kola describes Arvanite settlements and their forms of governance, comparing them to the ancient Greek city-state.

Every branch of Indo-European inherited the negative particle *ne from Proto-Indo-European. Anatolian and Tocharian still preserve it. Albanian and Greek share its loss. Their negation systems show the closest overlap.

Modern papers such as Heyd et al. 2013 have established that the Cetina-Dinarske horizon is to be categorized as a maritime group. However according to PJZ IV 1983, the horizon is also a semi-pastoralist transhumance group that never stayed in one spot for too long at a time.

In the sultan’s own elite, the Albanians ranked first. Godfrey Goodwin’s history of the Janissaries names them the fiercest of all the corps’ warriors, placed above the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats, their temper being their most renowned quality.

Mehmed Ali, an Albanian from Kavala, became governor of Egypt in 1805 and built a powerful, effectively autonomous state under nominal Ottoman sovereignty. After defeating Ottoman forces and threatening the empire itself, he secured hereditary rule over Egypt for his family. His dynasty ruled Egypt until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.

When Rome opened the gold mines of Dacia, it brought in the miners it trusted, and many came from Illyria. At Alburnus Maior (Roșia Montană), what is interesting however, is that despite having seemingly latinized these colonizers still carried local names from their respective regions of origin.

The ships that won Greek independence in 1821 were crewed and partly commanded — by Albanian-speakers. On Hydra and Spetses, the islands’ Arvanite elite even wrote to each other in Albanian to keep their letters secret from their own side. So much so that one of them served as wartime president.

clusIBD Run of Modern Gheg, Tosk and Tirana Albanians against a plethora of Ancient samples, mainly Paleobalkaners of the Iron Age. The method is mostly based on Li et al. 2025 (biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…) which makes computing IBD data easier without the need of imputation or having to scramble for the original BAMs. Unlike ancIBD it computes IBD in Megabases (Mb) which then have to be converted into cM manually, which can be done using each results chromosome #, start and end pair to yield the amount of total cM's. This is mainly inspired by the 2026 Nature article on the Ancient origin of Albanians, by @LeonidasDav. Results are very similar to the paper with the only difference being the inclusion of 2 outliers from Iron Age Etruria and Latium with clear Balkan origin.

The role of the placenta in Albanian folk belief and its symbolic link with fertilisation and plants.

On January 17, 1982, Jusuf Gërvalla, Bardhosh Gërvalla, and Kadri Zeka were gunned down outside a political meeting in Germany. The assassinations are widely attributed to the Yugoslav Secret Service. The regime hoped to silence the movement. Instead, their deaths helped galvanize the Albanian diaspora and strengthen the cause of Kosovo’s independence.

In 1879, while traveling through northern Albania, E. F. Knight also observed that Albanian Christians and Muslims were barely distinguishable from each other and that beneath both, the old pagan layer was still very much alive.

This particular passage of Milaj speaks on the pagan substratum in the Albanian people, enforcing the folklorist view that in spite of the fact that Albanians may identify as Christian or Muslim they are still at their core Pagan.