Undated painting of Zog the First, King of the Albanians by Spiro Xega. Photo courtesy of the Albanian State Archives, Tirana.
King Zog, Albania’s only homegrown king, picked up where others left off in continuing a cycle of political murder—one that almost caught up with him in Vienna in 1931. Luckily for him, but not his opponents, he survived. Afterward, Zog was more determined than ever to eliminate those who had opposed him, making murders and suicides a regular feature of Albania’s twentieth century.
Few remember that in February 1931 the relatively new King of the Albanians was almost assassinated in front of the Vienna Opera. By then, assassinations were almost mainstream in Albanian political life. This tendency worsened when the communists took power in 1944 and the cycle of revenge intensified.
In 1931, King Zog was making his first foreign trip since receiving the rubber stamp of approval from a parliament of landowners eager to preserve Albania’s feudal stability and declaring himself king in 1928. According to local propaganda, Albanians were natural monarchists and he was merely responding to the “will of the people.”
Barely three years into his reign, Zog’s best days were behind him. Before, he had been undoubtedly Albania’s most successful politician. He had fought in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) at the age of seventeen, and then on the side of Austria-Hungary in the First World War. When Albania regained independence after the war, he served as interior minister, prime minister, and president before becoming king just before he turned 33.
Being king seemed to suit Zog. He built a small royal court and a few palaces. He was devoted to his mother, who took the title of queen mother and was also the royal food taster. His six sisters left behind village life in central Albania to become princesses, buying the clothes to match their new status and to burnish Zog’s image as a committed Westernizer like Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His one nephew became the prince of Kosova. As the new kingdom was largely scorned by other countries, Zog was left to his own devices and received few foreign visitors. Despite the laziness that had set in, he likened himself to Napoleon for reasons known only to him.
As king, he needed a queen but there seemed to be few potential consorts that met his standards and Europe’s established dynasties shunned him. By then, agreements with Italy had reduced Albania to a mere satellite and Zog was lavishly bribed to ensure that Benito Mussolini got everything he wanted. Mussolini was determined to reverse the fact that Italy had won the First World War but lost the peace and Albania was destined to be his colony, or more precisely a holiday destination for Italians.
Zog’s kingdom was not that dissimilar from other states between the wars, with lots of talk about lofty ideals but ruled largely as a protection racket so as to avoid social revolution at all costs. Zog invested more in the survival of his monarchy and the trappings of the kingdom than in schools or the draining of swamps.
Zog’s decision to go to Vienna had three unofficial motives. First, he loved the Austrian capital. He had visited toward the end of the war in a kind of house arrest as the Austrians held him and several other Albanian notables to later use them for a new government, should Austria-Hungary win the war. This first visit may well have inspired his decision to make Albania a kingdom. Second, he was in poor health due to constant smoking and living a sedentary existence largely hiding out in a Tirana palace in fear of assassination. Third, he had a lover in Vienna.
Once in Vienna, Zog was determined to make an impression. He stayed more than a month. He bought things and showered gifts on his lover and her sister. Zog was desperate to be recognized. The local Mercedes dealership loaned him a car in the hope he would buy a fleet for his government. He wanted to hear the locals say: “There goes the Albanian king.”
Zog was not the only Albanian in town. Vienna had become the key place for refugees from his authoritarianism and his enemies could not have been happier that he had decided to visit. The fact that he spent so much money in the city really irked them. Zog was hardly one of the greatest criminals in power between the two world wars, but he certainly had earned the enmity of hundreds for his jailings and executions.
Zog’s meteoric rise had been possible because his uncle, Esad Pasha Toptani, was the victim of a daylight assassination on a Paris street in 1920. The assassin, Avni Rustemi, was fined only one symbolic franc by a Paris court that ended up putting Esad Pasha’s reputation as a disreputable Balkan warlord on trial. He went home, where he was treated like a hero. It was widely assumed that it was Zog who ordered his assassination in Tirana in 1924.
As prime minister and later president, Zog hired hitmen to kill some of his major opponents, particularly the members of the revolutionary government that had briefly ousted him in June 1924. He probably got Mussolini’s approval to have one former cabinet minister murdered in Bari in 1925, and then one of the key leaders of the Kosovars in the same year and his own brother-in-law in Prague in 1927.
But Zog still had a few notable enemies alive and well in Vienna. The Austrian police kept tabs on them and told them to lie low during the king’s visit or face deportation.
Zog took some suites at the Hotel Imperial on the Ringstrasse. He put the two sisters up at the Regina Hotel near the Votivkirche. On February 20, Zog was headed for the third night in a row to the opera, where he always got the best possible box. The women were to meet him later at a bar. Zog always parked his Mercedes in the most visible place for maximum attention. It was always easy to find out where he was.
The assassination attempt was planned principally by Hassan Prishtina, an extremely devoted Albanian nationalist from Kosovo who rejected Zog’s casual abandonment of its cause, among other things. Two enlisted men were to carry out the act while the planners watched from the café in the Hotel Bristol, across the street from the opera. Zog left early with three other men. As soon as he exited, the shooting started. His bodyguards fired back. His key bodyguard was killed but Zog was not even hit. A local mob descended on the assassins. Zog skipped his date and went back to his hotel.
The Vienna tabloid press was livid that Albanians had so brazenly abused Austrian hospitality. There was talk of reinstating the death penalty. The two assassins were seized as the police arrested every other Albanian they could find. Zog told the press that he was relieved that no Austrians had been harmed. He got some of the recognition he wanted when Foreign Minister Johannes Schober visited and Germany’s President Paul von Hindenburg sent a “get well soon” telegram. Disingenuously, Zog blamed Serbs for the whole thing. Given Zog’s love of cash bribes, Mussolini was likely relieved at not losing his client.
The trial that followed was taken out of “leftist” Vienna for fear that it might inspire a repeat of Rustemi’s Paris trial by putting Zog and even Austrian foreign policy on trial. It took place in Reid, west of the capital, under very tight security given the assumed Albanian propensity for violence. The defendants documented the plundering of the country and the extravagance of the Vienna visit. The sentences were light, ranging between two and three years. Zog organized further trials in absentia in Albania, where family members of the plotters faced a much worse outcome. The mastermind Prishtina escaped the police round-up and ended up in Thessaloniki hiding from Zog’s emissaries. In August 1933, he was murdered.
Ignoring his doctors’ advice that he should head to the Alps for recovery after the attack, Zog went home. He never voluntarily left Albania again. In April 1939, he was forced to flee when Italy invaded. That began twenty-two years of exile that ended when Zog died in France in 1961. His murdered and exiled opponents would become heroes for the communists, who blew up Zog’s hometown castle in Burgajet.
Robert C. Austin is associate director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He is a guest at the IWM in 2023.
