Albania Albanian ribbon bar from the 1950's

[Eric Schena]

Hello all:

As some of you may know from the WAF, I have a penchant for communist period Albanian decorations (well, I should say, I have a penchant for little explored areas of interest), so I thought for my first post on this forum I would share one of my favorite items, an Albanian six place plastic/metal ribbon bar from the 1950's.

The ribbon bars used in Albania in the 1950?s were painted plastic mounted onto a substantial metal frame. Some early newsreels of Enver Hoxha visiting with communist allies such as Stalin and Bulgaria?s Georgi Dimitrov show him in the uniform of a colonel-general wearing a ribbon bar setup like this one. However, I have to say, photos of Albanians wearing communist decorations are few and far between.

This ribbon bar belonged to a member of the 8th Offensive Brigade who fought primarily around Visegrad, Yugoslavia, until April 1945. Afterwards, he was sent to a Soviet military academy in Odessa until 1952. He achieved the rank of Major until the abolishment of ranks in 1966/1967. The medals are:

1. Order of Skanderbeg 3rd class

2. Medal "Remembrance 1942-1943"

3. Order of the Red Star

4. Medal for Bravery

5. Medal for the Liberation of the Country (essentially the WW II victory medal)

6. Medal for 10th Anniversary of the Army (which dates this bar to about 1955)

I hope you like this ribbon bar. I have been doing some research on Albanian decorations and I hope to share some of it here if it is of any interest.

Cheers,

Eric

[Guest Rick Research]

Obscure and arcane... just what I like!!!

[Gerd Becker]

Hello Eric and welcome to this gentlemens-forum

Its nice to see you here and i look forward to read your contributions. 90 % of what i know about Albanian Awards comes from your excellent article over at the WAF.

best,

Gerd

[Ed_Haynes]

Nice, Eric! Thanks for sharing the eye-candy. Ed

[Eric Schena]

Hi all - thanks for the kind welcome! I've actually gotten a lot more research done on communist Albanian decorations since I wrote that thread in WAF, so I hope to refine it and post some of it here.

I thought I'd actually show the gongs to which these ribbons represent. The first two medals I'm posting, the Medal for Bravery and the Medal for the Liberation of the Country, actually belonged to the wearer of this particular bar. I count myself very lucky in that while I don't have the complete group, I do have a couple of his medals plus a couple of photographs of their recipient when he was in Odessa in the 1940's. However, out of deference to the gentleman and his family (as well as my very good friend from whom I got this group), I'd like to keep him anonymous.

First up, the Medal for Bravery...

[Eric Schena]

...and here is his Medal for the Liberation of the Country. These early WW II awards carried a lot of prestige in Albania due to its fractioous and difficult history during their Italian and later German occupation. 20th century Albanian history is a very fascinating subject and well worth the effort to discover...

[Eric Schena]

Now for the representative decorations. Here's the Order of Skanderbeg 3rd class. This one was made in the DDR by Pr?wema in Markneukirchen. Pr?wema seems to have been one of the prinicple makers of these screwback decorations in the 1950's and 1960's as I have seen far more screwback decorations with this mark than any others. There is a book that was printed in Albania in the 1980's about these decorations that says 472 3rd class Skanderbegs were awarded. I do not have a copy of this book (apparently it is rarer than hen's teeth) so take that number with a grain of salt.

Edited September 16, 2005 by Eric Schena

[Eric Schena]

Here's the Medal "Remembrance 1942-1943". This was awarded to partisans who participated in the anti Italian resistance campaigns in 1942 and 1943. This one was made by IKOM in Zagreb when Hoxha and Tito were still on speaking terms. That changed in 1948 when Tito embarked on his "different path to socialism" as well as Hoxha's not entirely unfounded claim that Yugoslavia intended to add Albania as a province - this may have helped form the basis for Hoxha's policy of almost unrelenting xenophobia in the 1960's and beyond. According to that same book (the same caveat applies), 690 of these were awarded until 1982 when awards ceased.

Edited September 16, 2005 by Eric Schena

[Eric Schena]

Here's the last one I can show (I do not have a 10th anniversary medal sadly). This is the Order of the Red Star. This is a confusing oder. From what I can tell, this was awarded in one class originally but at some point (who knows when - I presume in the late 1970's when Albania seems to have restructured its award system after breaking with China in 1976) it was divided into three classes. This one is from the earlier period and I suspect it's from the 1940's - note that the ribbon is cloth.

I hope y'all liked these. I'll make a point of showing some more of these seldom seen and less understood but really historically interesting decorations (what's the point of knowledge if you can't share it?) .

Eric

[Ed_Haynes]

Thanks again, Eric. I love learning about the exotic and you can hardly beat Albania! Nice eye-candy with a tangy coating of history.

[David Gregory]

Eric,

I was always under the impression that Albania had closer links to PR China than any of the Eastern Block countries.

Did the DDR manufacture many Albanian awards and did PR China do anything more than provide political clout?

Thanks in advance,

David

[Eric Schena]

Hi David:

Albania has quite the laundry list of alliances in the Eastern Bloc:

Yugoslavia helped to establish and to a certain extent rebuild the country in the 1940's after the Italian and German occupations. In 1948, however, Tito?s increasingly reformist policies combined with Yugoslavia?s aim to absorb Albania came to a head and Hoxha permanently cut off all relations with Yugoslavia and banned contact with the nation (as well as precipitating a massive purge of ?Titoists? from all aspects of the Albanian government).

After the split with Yugoslavia, Albania turned to COMECON, joining in February 1949. Albania pretty much remained in the Eastern European sphere while Stalin was alive. This changed once Khrushchev took over the controls. Khrushchev showed greater acceptance of Tito?s ?separate road to socialism? as well as his policies of de-Stalinization, thus Hoxha became more concerned over resumed Yugoslav domination of the region.

Beginning around 1958, Albania thus began to court China as an ally. By mid 1960, relations between the USSR and China became fractious at best and increasingly hostile. Throughout this period of Sino-Soviet discord, Albania allied itself with China, to which the Soviet Union retaliated by cutting off much of its economic support to Albania and eventually, in December 1961, Moscow broke all relations with Tirana. After the cutoff, Albania did not participate in the Warsaw Pact or COMECON. Despite the separation from COMECON, Albania did continue foreign trade with Eastern Bloc nations, however, I am not sure when that ceased.

In 1966/1967, Albania followed its Chinese brethren in reorganizing the entire military structure by eliminating all forms of rank & insignia - the PRC proclaimed that such signs were "bourgeois displays of elitism incompatible with socialism". Warming relations between the West and China caused the Albania to once again break with a communist ally around 1976, after which Albania sought no further alliances in the communist world and remained essentially a "fortress of solitude" and a bastion of some truly hard core Stalinism.

After Hoxha?s death in 1985, Albania sought limited international alliances under his successor Ramiz Alia. While Alia tried to reverse some of the economic decay with a series of limited reforms, Albania remained insular until the communist regime?s eventual downfall in 1992.

The makers I have been able to identify for Albanian decorations are:

1. IKOM in Zagreb

2. Pr?wema in Markneukirchen

3. Mennica-Panstwowa (the Polish State Mint) in Warsaw

4. Zavod "Pobeda" in Moscow (seen on a 15th anniversary of the army badge)

5. Local Albanian manufacturer

From what I have been able to tell given the sheer lack of any solid information at my disposal, the DDR made most of the decorations in the 1950's and 1960's.

Edited September 16, 2005 by Eric Schena

[David Gregory]

Eric,

Thanks for that excellent history of the country in a nutshell.

The only things I have seen of Albania in recent years have been some rather good photo essays in quality magazines such as the Sunday Times colour supplement. Apart from that, the only Albanian influence here in Germany seems to be a disproportionately high share of expatriate Albanian participation in low-level organised crime.

In younger years I spent a few months working on ships in the Mediterranean and passed along the Albanian coast several times. Time and permission by the Albanian government permitting, I would like to visit the country for a holiday in the future and see for myself what has been hidden from us for so many years.

Is Albanian militaria easy to find?

Thanks in advance,

David

[Eric Schena]

Hi David:

I would love to go to Europe and tour around, and Albania would be high on my list. What little I know has been gleaned from a few books as well as conversations with folks whose relatives were in the Albanian military. It is SUCH a fascinating country: a "dapper dan"/playboy of a king who actually got involved in a gunfight outside of an opera house, the Italian occupation, the German occupation and decades of atrophy, xenophobia and repression under a bizarre and xenophobic dictator who ruled over the nation for 41 years. Too bad so little of this history is accessible.

Albanian militaria shows up every so often. I have a great friend who picks up stuff for me and we do some horse trading. According to him, the labor decorations show up much more often than the military decorations. If those award numbers I quote above are vaguely accurate, that would explain why so little of this material shows up as well as a marked lack of photos of Albanians wearing them in old communist era newsreels. I am actually trying to write a sort of guide to these decorations, but it's a hit or miss project at this point.

Cheers,

Eric

[Kallarati Heroik]

FROM MY COLLECTION

 

Edited October 19, 2015 by Kallarati Heroik

[Kallarati Heroik]

[Kallarati Heroik]