“My parents have accomplished in my country what governments would not do, establishing a music and arts and cultural center,” Kapllani said of her parents’ DEA Center of the Arts. DEA stands for Dizdari Educational Academy, after Kapllani’s mother’s maiden name.
Kapllani, though, worried her music lessons weren’t being taken seriously enough. “Maybe the fact that we were in a living room was a factor,” she said. So she and her husband decided to lease a commercial space and establish a full-blown school.
Albania’s past as it is transmitted to us in popular songs is therefore more relevant than might be thought to present-day questions, and in any case it is always interesting to see the lower classes encountering the challenges of invasion and exile without losing anything of the qualities which give strength to a sense of national identity.
Mr. Hahn the Albanians are descendants of the famous Pelasgi. The Pelasgi would have formed the pre-historical population of Epirus, Macedonia, Illyria, Greece, the Peloponnese and large Italian territories. In Greece, the Pelasgi would have adopted the Hellenic language, when the Hellenic population came to dominate the Pelasgic one
