Süreyya Bey Vlora

Abstract

Avlonyalı Süreyya Bey (Syrja, Syreja, or Sureya Vlora, 1860–1940) was fifty-two when Albania declared independence in 1912. Before that, he was a citizen, bureaucrat, and politician of the Ottoman Empire, which he eventually served as a Member of the State Council and a Member of Parliament. Although he supported the independence of Albania and became its first ambassador to Vienna the following year for a couple of months, his career ended after that, and Süreyya lost all his achievements amidst the chaos of the post-empire world. Although he is an ideal exemplary character for a narrative on biographies in the transition from empire to nation-state, Süreyya remained a minor figure in Albanian historiography because of the many shadows blurring his silhouette. His complex positionings and interrelationships, various multinational family and friendship connections, the many locations he moved to and resided in, historical and cultural overlaps, and coincidences have blurred the so-far anecdotal accounts of Süreyya’s life. Under the influence of (post-)imperial tensions, strategic alliances, and battles for mechanisms of political and financial control, many states considered him a spy of others. Interconnections and interlocutions, ambivalences and ambiguities around past and future identities, loyalties, and belongings led him to be suspected of spying for various countries. In his memoirs and correspondence, Süreyya reflects on the imperial-to-national change from his perspective and thus creates a self-designed narrative for the topography of Albanian identity. He was Muslim, Ottoman, and Albanian, usually compatible identities. However, his turbulent life led him along a path where they could become estranged from each other. This article focuses on the complex question of self-design and the design of others, how plurality and interdependence, heterogeneity, demarcation, and asymmetry are experienced, managed, and negotiated in a less-known Albanian life at the turning point between empire and nations.