Albanian History and Identity #shorts

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]I'm from Albania / Kosovo, right? Which we consider North Albania, right? We lost it during the Ottoman Empire. And we were forced to live under, you know, not just did we lose Kosovo, our people were fragmented into five different countries. We lost about 80% of our territory at that time. So, at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, right?

[00:00:17]Similar time period your people went through hell. And then we were treated very poorly under all these other countries that we were divided into, right? So, some of our people ended up in Macedonia. We lost Northern Greece, which used to be Southern Albania. We lost Corfu. We were absorbed a piece into Montenegro. And then we were treated brutally under all these people.

[00:00:33]So, of course growing up, I would visit my family in Kosovo. It was under Yugoslavia. It was okay for a while under Tito. And then once Yugoslavia started collapsing, it became really bad. We all know what happened in the Bosnian War and Croatia and, you know, a lot of people died, bro. Yeah. So, of course I lost a lot of family in 1990. I lost 28 relatives, right? Cousins, uncles, like I and I knew them. It wasn't like, oh, I never went to visit them. I was with them every summer. So, to say I didn't have hatred in my heart for anyone that was Serbian, I'd be lying to you. I didn't want to have If you were Serbian, I didn't even want to I didn't even want to know you. I didn't want to [ __ ] talk to you. I didn't want to say even [ __ ] hi to you.

[00:01:08]Okay?

[00:01:09]My heart was swollen, right? And people outside of our territories don't understand this, right? Like these things can go on for centuries, right?

[00:01:17]But when you live in a place like New York and you're forced to meet people and kind of hear their side of the story and then you got to realize something called propaganda. So, of course Serbia was under Milosevic at that time. And of course their news would only show what benefited that regime. So, it took me meeting a Serbian in New York called Andreas, well, I haven't seen him in years, but kind of opened my eyes a little bit. How so?