Vandeleur Robinson Photo Collection Albania 1939 & 1944-1945

96 Pages·2012·5.08 MB·English

The Photo Collection of Vandeleur Robinson Albania in 1939 and 1944 - 1945.
(text by Robert Elsie)
British writer and military figure Vandeleur Robinson (1902-1990), born as Vivian Dering Vandeleur Robinson, was the
son of an army colonel. As a young man, he attended Cheltenham College, was briefly a military cadet at Woolwich
Military Academy, and studied history at Emmanuel College in Cambridge. He seems to have spent some time in
Czechoslovakia since he was initially married to a Czech woman. In the 1930s, Robinson was active for the League of
Nations as a regional organizer for southeastern Europe. It was there that he met his second wife, the British war
correspondent and journalist Clare Hollingworth (1911- ), to whom he was married from 1936 to 1951. The couple
spent their honeymoon in the Balkans and were also in the southeastern Europe for several months before the
Second World War, when they first visited Albania. It was this visit that gave rise to Robinson's book, Albania's Road
to Freedom (London 1941). Later during the Second World War, Robinson was an army captain and seems to have
been involved in intelligence activities. He arrived in Albania in October 1944 and met the new communist leadership.
In March 1945 he was press attaché at the British military mission in Tirana and had the rare opportunity, as a foreign
diplomatic observer, of attending the proceedings of the Treason Trial conducted by the Special Court (Gjyqi Special),
at which sixty members of the pre-communist establishment were sentenced to death and long prison sentences as
war criminals and enemies of the people. In May and June 1945, Robinson had occasion to go on an extensive tour of
southern Albania in an army jeep. It was during his stay in Albania that Robinson met Sara Blloshmi (1900-1974),
daughter of the Ottoman general Abdul Karim Pasha. As the granddaughter of Ismail Qemal bey Vlora who had
declared Albanian independence in 1912, Sara was born in Constantinople and studied in Cairo. Her first husband,
Selahedin Blloshmi had been Albanian ambassador to Romania under Zog. She was known as an emancipated
socialite in the Zogist period and was admired (and disapproved of) for her dancing. Sara realized what was going on
in Albania after the communist takeover and begged Robinson to marry her and get her and her daughter, the painter
Vera Blloshmi (1923-1998), out of the country. Robinson agreed, and arranged for a British military colleague, Jimmy
Mellet, to marry her daughter. In this manner, both women managed to leave communist Albania and got to England,
and both marriages lasted. Relations between the Western powers and the new communist regime in Albania
deteriorated rapidly and the British military mission - and Robinson - were soon withdrawn from Tirana. For decades
little news and few pictures got out of Albania. It is for this reason that the Robinson photo collection of 1944- 1945 is
particularly interesting. Vandeleur Robinson subsequently lived in northern Italy and was the author of some plays.
His archives are preserved at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. The photo collection of
Vandeleur Robinson consists of two parts: (1) the photos taken during his visit to Albania in 1939 and published in his
book Albania's Road to Freedom (London 1941), probably not all taken by Robinson himself, and (2) the photos from
late 1944 and mid 1945 - unknown to the public until now - that he took in Tirana and on his trip to southern Albania
before he was expelled from the country. The second part of the collection, given by the Mellet family to the Centre
for Albanian Studies, is now preserved in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Page 1
King Zog in uniform in the 1930s

Page 2
Kruja, 1939

Page 3
Mosque in Tirana, 1939

Page 4
Robinson on horseback, 1939

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Women at the market in Shkodra, 1939

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Waiting for a conveyance in Shkodra, 1939

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Man from Gjirokastra wearing a fustanella

Page 8
Gypsies in Albania, 1939

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Albanian peasants, once brigands, 1939

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