published in: Claudia Lichnofsky, Enriketa Pandelejmoni, Darko Stojanov (Hg.): Myths and Mythical Spaces. Conditions and Challenges for History Textbooks in Albania and South-Eastern Europe, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017, pp. 97-134.
This chapter aims to explain why the Vlora conflict of 1920, between Italy and Albania, is subject to different interpretations and representations in Italian and Albanian textbooks. The author forms an analysis of mythologies that have conditioned the development of historiographies on both sides of the Adriatic Sea. Myths generate collective identity, determine the establishment of the institutional orders, and legitimize the political system that governs them. By observing the representation of events in different sources such as monographs, encyclopedias, and newspapers, it is possible to pinpoint the relation between the representation of the conflict and incipient ideological myths that define the contexts in which historiographies are developed. History textbooks are mere products of a certain historiography, but seem even more sensitive to ideological constraints since they aim to provide future citizens with a narrow concept of collective identity. To understand how textbooks transpose mythicized narratives, we must examine how history and myth merge together in our modern historiographies.
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