Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story of a modern factory to provide ample cigarettes for a newly communist, newly atheist country. and ended up a ramshackle refugee camp for Muslims.
The stamp here is communist, it could be nothing else. A tobacco factory, with no emblem, because it is state owned. It is large so the people will believe they will soon be inundated with ample low cost smokes. Communism will work, no more capitalist or religious distractions. The good life fellow Albanians, a popullore people’s republic.
The stamp today is issue A94, a 50 Quintar stamp issued by the people’s republic of Albania on August 1st, 1953. The stamp depicts the tobacco factory in Shkoder, Albania. It is part of an eight stamp issue in various denominations showing industrial sites around Albania. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 45 cents in its mint state.
After World War II, Albania freed itself of Italian, Greek, Ottoman, and Montenegrin domination. The new Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha envisioned a new country where everyone would be Albanian, and everyone would be the same religion, atheist. This way a peaceful prosperous country without all the Balkan rivalries could form. Religious practice, both among Christian and majority Muslim was banned and religious property seized and repurposed. Ethnic minorities were forcefully made to conform to Albanian nationhood. After all the ethnic and religious wars, I can see the appeal. Indeed Albania was the first nation to be officially atheist. According to the 1976 constitution,”the state carries out atheistic propaganda in order to impart a scientific, materialistic outlook in people.”
After communists fell from power the cigarette factory fell into disuse. The cigarettes were of low quality and now foreign tobacco was available. Religion and ethnic tribes were also reemerging. The northern Albanian city of Skoder was at one time half Catholic but found itself receiving thousands of Muslim ethnic Kosovars that were fleeing the Serbs in the late nineties wars in former Yugoslavia. They were housed in the now abandoned tobacco factory seen on todays stamp. The tobacco drying racks were repurposed into beds. It was generous to take in the Kosovars, but no more cigarettes and the return of tribe and religion seems such a failure compared to the optimistic future proposed on todays stamp.
Interestingly, in 2008 a new tobacco factory opened in Shkoder. Much smaller and only employing 20 people. Cigarette taxes had gone up making local sourcing more sensible. Better than nothing, but conforming to modern ideas of low expectations.
Well my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. In the full course of history, the Albanian and Yugoslav experiments with communism seem a peaceful oasis in a turbulent place. How much repression was required to pull it off for a while I am not sure. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.