Traveling northward

The planned trip to Montenegro requires quite a bit of preparation. We are planning to bring with us a bulky and heavy load of large panels to be exhibited at an event organized in the town of Tuz (in Albanian, Tuzi for Slavs), where there is a large Albanian community.

These panels display a large collection of archival material from my family that includes documents and photographs, which were seized by the communist government in 1946 when my uncle was arrested in Tirana, tortured and sentenced to 7 years in prison as a political dissident. Everything that was found in our house at the time was saved and catalogued by the state archives and even preserved on fiche since 1988. At the conference that we organized in Tirana in September 2003, on the 50th anniversary of his death, these panels were prepared and mounted for an exhibit that was also video taped for a documentary shown on national Albanian television.

The weather forecast is not good, rain is expected and is suppose to stick around for a few days, but we continue our planning in cooperation with another Montenegrin humanitarian association, named after my father’s and uncle’s first cousin, Nikoll. He was a well known patriot and activist of the Albanian cause since the early years of the 1900, well before Albania became a nation, and traveled extensively in Europe and the US to advocate and promote help toward this end.

The phone connection from Tirana to Tuz, and Podgoriça, capital of Montenegro, is not great, but, also thanks to email exchanges, we conclude our planning and decide that we should yield to the request of extending our stay an additional day to allow all the distant relatives to spend more time with me.

The main event will take place on Sunday in a large hall of the local gymnasium, and I am expected to speak. Thus, I get busy preparing some remarks in English, which are also being translated into Italian and Albanian. At the end of the speeches, the exhibit will be open for a few hours while a reception will be ongoing.