About

Gjergj Kastrioti, called Skanderbeg, was taken as a boy hostage to the Ottoman court, raised and trained there, and in 1443 turned around, went home to Krujë and spent the next twenty-five years holding northern Albania against the empire that made him. He held off three sieges of Krujë.

After his death in 1468 the resistance collapsed within a decade, and Albania stayed Ottoman for four more centuries, which is precisely why he became the figure every later movement reached for. Odhise Paskali's bronze went up in 1968, on the five hundredth anniversary of his death, at the height of the communist campaign to build a national mythology without religion in it.

He faces down the boulevard from the edge of the square, and the plinth is where people in Tirana say they will meet without needing to explain further.

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