Pilgrimage to Albania and Macedonia

The Church of St George, Lushunje, Albania - Before

Fr John Salter, the chairman, writes:

In the first ten days of September I shall be on pilgrimage with the Anglican & Eastern Churches’ Association to Albania and Macedonia. I was last in Albania in the summer of 1967 when the then Dictator, Henver Hoxha, declared it the first truly atheist state. I arrived in the city of Schodra to find the Franciscan basilica smouldering with the Friars locked inside and burnt to death. The mosque, too, was in bad shape, and the fear among the people was palpable. Clergy and seminarians were being murdered or blinded and I was thankful that my passport described me as a “Clerk in Holy Orders”, which the fifteen-year old soldiers in charge of passports did not understand, and as they held the passport upside-down I wondered whether they could read at all!


The Christmas broadcast of Pope Paul VI on Vatican Radio that Christmas of 1967 announced that “The Church in Albania has peace…the peace of the grave!” Much has changed in the last forty-two years and the Church has risen again, particularly the Orthodox Church under Archbishop Anastasios (appropriately named!) Yannoulatos, a Greek, who was appointed from Kenya by His All Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomeos I, who had to act to save the Church as there were only three aged and broken priests left of the former Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Schiptar. The resurrection of the Church has been nothing short of miraculous and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are working together to educate the people isolated for sixty years from mainstream Christian Europe.

The Church of St George, Lushunje, Albania - After Restoration