King Zog of Albania

by Jason Tomes

"Shortly before 5 p.m., on Saturday, September 1, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: 32 year old Zog I of the Albanians. Few foreign journalists were present in the Parliament House in Tirana to hear him swear his oath on the Koran and the Bible, yet the birth of the Kingdom of Albania - a native monarchy, not an alien imposition - did not go unnoticed abroad. The strangeness of his name saw to that." "King Zog was a curiosity, and so he has remained: the most unusual European monarch of the twentieth century, a man entirely without royal connections who created his own kingdom. By contemporaries, he was variously labelled "the last ruler of romance," "an appalling gangster," "the modern Napoleon," "the finest patriot," and "frankly a cad." Even today his reputation is disputed, but Zog was undeniably one of the foremost figures in Albanian history. Though notorious for cutthroat political intrigue, he promised to bring order and progress to a land that had lon