The Greek minority in Albania is better known through Greek-Albanian disputes, as they appear in the media every time. Essentially, however, it is an unknown community, historically surrounded by conflicting nationalist beliefs and the discrepancies between two different historical processes of national formation: the Greek religious and the Albanian linguistic. Equally unknown are the policies pursued by the Greek state since the 1990s. The volume describes the changes that have occurred in the community since the fall of the Hoxha regime and the policies of the Greek side, which have affected the profile of the small minority that still lives in Albania.
The policy of explicit or latent redemptive content exercised in the first half of the 1990s by Greece is examined, as well as the effort to include in the minority some communities of Orthodox Albanians and many Vlachs. The significance and course of the party that was considered to represent the minority are also explored, as well as the Greek-Albanian dispute in Himara.
The granting of special residence permits and ultimately citizenship to a much larger number than those living in Greek-speaking settlements or originating from them constituted a crucial point of the policies that were exercised and functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy in Greek perceptions of a large minority from Himara to Korçë. They also demonstrated the importance of religious affiliation as a criterion for inclusion in the national community. Today, the large Greek minority, as perceived by the Greek side, is no longer in Albania, as the policies pursued aimed for, but in Greece.
The minority that still resides in Albania seems to be in the process of emancipation from a set of characteristics reserved for it by Greek perceptions of national minorities.