Voices from a Vanished Wetland Landscape

Immediately following World War II, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha hailed the drainage of the vast Maliq wetland in southern Albania as one of his great political triumphs over the landscape. This mythologization of the drainage effectively silenced less powerful narratives of loss. Fragments of these narratives persist in the villages surrounding the wetland. Ethnohistorical research and ethnoecological interviews revive memories of this deliberately forgotten landscape, and reveal considerable multivalency in people’s perception and use of the wetland.