15/03/2021
We took a Sunday drive this weekend to Peza, a few kilometres from Tirana. Peza was a hotbed of partisan activity during WWII. In September and October 1943 it was home to several thousand marooned Italian soldiers following Italy’s surrender, and a motley crew of British Special Operations Executive officers, led by the legendary Peter Kemp.
The Brits were hosted by the bandit turned partisan, Myslim Peza, who was respected by both Albanian nationalists and communists alike. He was one of the few prominent partisans who didn’t get murdered by Enver Hoxha in the decades following the war, and went on to die of natural causes at the ripe old age of 87.
Today Myslim Peza’s family house is an excellent and atmospheric restaurant, Il Paese. The grounds have some wonderful Communist-era monuments, and a sadly very full partisan war cemetery.
The Brits loved Myslim Peza, though his hospitality could get in the way of the war effort, as Peter Kemp noted in the colourful report he submitted on his return to SOE headquarters in 1944.
Kemp wrote -
“During this time his hospitality became almost embarrassing to us, for at about 10.30 each morning, there would be a knock on the door of our room and a small procession would enter; first would come Myslim’s wife - a small slim dark and wiry woman who always wore breeches and had shared his life continuously - carrying a roast chicken or some other delicacy, followed by Myslim himself, his ADC and es**rt carrying bottles of raki and plates of “meze” (hors d’oeuvres). We would then be invited - and more or less obliged - to join the party, which seldom finished before two o’clock in the afternoon. At six o’clock the same performance would be repeated, and was unlikely to end before ten o’clock. It would have been a serious breach of the Albanian code of manners if we had refused to join in these parties, but we wished they could have been less frequent in view of the amount of work devolving on us from the military situation..."
