The term Albanian would probably pass unrecognized by the great majority
of the inhabitants, who speak of themselves as _Skipétars_ and of their
country as _Sccupnj_. They are, most ethnologists agree, probably the
most ancient race in Europe, there being every reason to believe that
they are the lineal descendants of those adventurous Aryans who, leaving
the ancestral home on the shores of the Caspian, crossed the Caucasus
and entered Europe in the earliest dawn of history. One of the tribes of
this migrating host, straying into these lonely valleys, settled there
with their flocks and herds, living the same life, speaking the same
tongue, following the same customs as their Aryan ancestors, quite
indifferent to the great changes which were taking place in the world
without their mountain wall. Certain it is that Albania was already an
ancient nation when Greek history began. Unlike the other primitive
populations of the Balkan peninsula, which became in time either
Hellenized, Latinized or Slavonicized, the Albanians have remained
almost unaffected by foreign influences. It strikes me as a strange
thing that the courage and determination with which this remarkable race
has maintained itself in its mountain stronghold all down the ages, and
the grim and unyielding front which it has shown to innumerable
invaders, have evoked so little appreciation and admiration in the
outside world. History contains no such epic as that of the Albanian
national hero, George Castriota, better known as Scanderbeg, who, with
his ill-armed mountaineers, overwhelmed twenty-three Ottoman armies, one
after another.[A]

Picture, if you please, a country remarkably similar in its physical
characteristics to the Blue Ridge Region of our own South, with the same
warm summers and the same brief, cold winters, peopled by the same
poverty-stricken, illiterate, quarrelsome, suspicious, arms-bearing,
feud-practising race of mountaineers, and you will have the best