About John Watkins
Valbona, 2017
The Balkans have been part of my life for more than fifty years. The first Balkan country I went to was Greece in 1972. I had my nineteenth birthday on Paros and loved the island so much I wished I had been born Greek. The following year I went with friends to Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. Then in 1975, I went back to Paros with my girlfriend Kirstie. It was still wonderful. We went again in 1978, but by then, the magic was evaporating and we were chased off the beach by police.
The memory of those first visits still lingers. For a young man just out of school, Greece represented a freedom that was not available in England. Greek islands were hedonistic places and young people from all over the world gathered on their beaches. My chosen island was Paros, but the same thing was happening on islands across the Aegean. You could guarantee that by the time you had to come home, you had dozens of names and addresses scribbled on bits of paper. The fact that in 1972 Greece was governed by a military junta barely registered.
Antiparos, 1978
As time passed, I began to realise that while these countries provided spaces for young people to enjoy themselves, they were all troubled. During the 1970s, there was growing political violence in Turkey; economic problems threatened Yugoslavia’s system of “socialist self-management”. Although the Greek junta was toppled in July 1974, inflation in Greece rocketed to 25% and stayed in double figures for the rest of the decade.
Even so, Greece remained our destination of choice. When we had children, its beaches and easy-going lifestyle made it perfect for family holidays. In 1990, we bought an old campervan and the four of us spent six months touring the Balkans, crossing and recrossing the borders between Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey.
The one Balkan country we couldn’t visit was Albania. I remember seeing the Albanian coastline for the first time in May 1972. I had just crossed from Brindisi to Corfu and was camping at Kassiopi. A waiter told me that Albania was communist, forbidden, “nicht gut”. That it was closed to visitors only added to its allure. After the death of its dictator, Enver Hoxha, in 1985, restrictions were eased and it became possible to go on trips arranged by Albturist, the state tourist authority. I went to the north of Albania in 1987 and to the south in 1988. I went again in 1990 when Albania began allowing day trips from Corfu to Sarandë.
By now, we had moved from the Midlands to London. In 1981, after a spell at Birmingham’s independent radio station, BRMB, I began working as a radio producer at the BBC. I worked first on Woman’s Hour and You and Yours. Then I moved to a features department and was able to make some programmes about the Balkans: about Kosovo, Bulgaria and Bosnia. Later, I joined the BBC’s Science Unit and made programmes about Romania, Russia and Albania.
When I retired in 2011, unsurprisingly the Balkans - or more specifically Albania - once again became my focus of attention. I started visiting Albania two or three times a year. Sometimes I went with family members; other times I went on my own. In 2012, I became a member of the Anglo-Albanian Association. I was elected to its Board in 2017 and in 2020 I began editing the AAA’s online Anglo-Albanian Gazette. I started to learn Albanian, and as I got more and more absorbed in the country’s extraordinary history and politics, I started to think seriously about writing a book about it.