Word: tirana
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...island of Malta; from Libya they threaten Egypt. Off the coast of Asia Minor they have a naval base at Leros in that happy hunting ground of submarines-the Aegean. The master stroke of recent Italian history was the seizure of Albania. For between Albania's capital of Tirana and the Greek port of Salonika there is a trough, along which Italian troops could move to intercept a Franco-British thrust into the Balkans...
Born. To Zog I, 43, Mohammedan King of the Albanians; and his wife, Catholic Queen Geraldine, 23; a son; their first child and Albania's Crown Prince; in Tirana...
...morning last week, two hours before dawn, the boom of a gun broke the almost rural silence of Tirana, the small capital perched in the mountains of the tiny Kingdom of Albania. Boom followed boom until 101 had shaken the sleeping town. A son and heir had just been born to King Zog I and his Hungarian-American consort, Queen Geraldine. The man-child was named Skander after the great Albanian patriot who in the 15th Century stood off the Turks during some 30 years of hard fighting...
Forty-eight hours later the bed-ridden Queen lying in Tirana's temporary Royal Palace could hear the roar of whole flights of planes overhead-planes that could not possibly be Albania's, since the country had only two. They dropped no bombs but leaflets fluttered down in the spring breeze announcing that "friendly" Italian troops were arriving that day to take over the country and "reestablish order, peace and justice." At four Albanian seaports, the nearest one (Durazzo) only 25 miles from Tirana, warships soon hove into sight, began bombarding. Troops were landed. A skirmish...
Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was best man at Zog's wedding last year, arrived to form a "provisional Albanian Government" and II Duce, as quickly as he could spare the time from his Palazzo Venezia desk, was scheduled to announce in Tirana just what he intended to do with his new possession. Best guess was that it would become a protectorate under the sovereignty of His Imperial Majesty King Vittorio Emmanuele III of Italy...