Mother Teresa Day in Albania

Mother Teresa was born in 1910 to Albanian parents who lived in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia, but which then belonged to the Ottoman Empire.

The nun never lived in Albania, country of origin of Muslim majority, which she met in 1989, at the age of 79, when she visited the grave of her mother, Drane, and her sister Age in the cemetery of Tirana.

The Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha (1944-1985) who banned the practice of religion in 1967, to turn Albania into the first atheist state in the world, and persecuted the clergy, prevented Mother Teresa from seeing her mother during her lifetime.

The Catholic nun returned to Albania in April 1993 when she accompanied Pope John Paul II in a visit considered historic for a poor and small country, which until 1990 had lived under the fiercest communist dictatorship in Europe.