Albanian PM Rama says Athens was “Albanian”

The remonstration by the Greek Foreign Ministry regarding the seizure of Greek properties in Albania, lead to Albanian PM Edi Rama uploading an outrageous and unhistorical post on his Facebook page concerning Athens and its inhabitants. In his provocative post, Rama claimed that Athens was more or less an Albanian city in the middle ages, while the Parthenon had been saved thanks to the intervention of an Albanian named Gjergi Dushmani, who convinced the Venetian general Francesco Morosini to not bomb the city of Athens and the port of Piraeus in 1686. The Albanian PM attached a photo to his post of an old engraving showing Athens in the 1670s, commenting that most of the people living in Athens during the 17th century were Albanian-speaking. “Even though these facts do not make Athens a completely Albanian city, the same could be said about the city of Chimara, which experienced the Greek archipelagos and the Greek language, as a ‘common dialect’ of the East, via sea exchanges, in a close and a fruitful coexistence, this does not render it a completely Greek province”, he wrote. As a matter of historical accuracy, the Parthenon and Athens were in fact bombed by the Venetians, while the “Albanian” “saviour” of Athens, according to Rama, was in fact a person from the Greek island of Corfu and had served as Bishop of Athens during the period, as the city did not have an Archbishop.