I am Mediterranean

By Ben Blushi

I happened to hear 500 students say in one voice: I am Mediterranean.

Although they were happy because they were receiving their diplomas from the university that bears this name, I thought they are very right.

We Albanians are Mediterranean, and this is the only status from which no army and no invasion has been able to move us, and which we have never denied.

Neither the Romans, nor the Serbs, nor the Bulgarians, nor the Turks, nor the Italians, nor the Germans and nor the communists have been able to take us out of the Mediterranean.

This is the only case in which our stubbornness has produced a useful result.

Wanting to throw us into the sea of history, they left us in the most beautiful sea in the world. In the Mediterranean.

To be Mediterranean means to live on the shores of a sea that washes 21 countries which together created modern civilisation — today’s world.

The Mediterranean is the only sea in the world that unites three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa.

The Mediterranean is the only basin where Christianity, Islam and Judaism live.

On the shores of the Mediterranean were born God, most of the prophets we know, the holy scriptures, the alphabet and philosophy.

Both theatre and satire — both artistic weeping and artistic laughter — were born in the Mediterranean.

Democracy itself was born in the Mediterranean.

To make life more beautiful, Mediterraneans anointed their souls with olive oil, drank grape wine in order to sing better, and threw the salt of the sea into their food.

Of course, salt, oil and wine are a monopoly of the Mediterranean, which with these three elements has built the richest and healthiest cuisine in the world.

No one eats better than a Mediterranean, and no people considers cooking an art as Mediterraneans do every day at home.

There is nothing beautiful that was not born in, or refined in, the Mediterranean, even when it came from somewhere else.

The Mediterranean has been the largest laboratory of cooking, of art and of cocktails of the highest tastes, where beauty joined with savagery, strength with elegance and power with fashion.

Even when they were cruel, Mediterranean kings and emperors shone with gold and with the sculpted laurel crowns they wore on their heads.

The luxury without which today’s world cannot be understood is a Mediterranean habit, which forced queens to sew the fabrics of the East with sea motifs.

In the Mediterranean lived the minds that created our world: from Homer, Odysseus, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Socrates, Plato, Alexander, the Pharaohs, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Abraham, Jesus Christ, Christopher Columbus, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Cervantes, Napoleon Bonaparte and the genius Mustafa Ataturk.

Even Muhammad took his first religious lessons travelling from the desert to the Mediterranean on the camels of his first wife, the businesswoman Khadija.

Without the Mediterranean, the world would be much uglier and much more barbaric.

If the Mediterranean has one contribution in history, it is the softening of other peoples through art, diplomacy and food.

If a list of unnecessary things that were not invented in the Mediterranean were ever drawn up, it would include gunpowder, the Kalashnikov, tanks, the plastics that are poisoning us, the cigarettes that are choking us and the atomic bomb.

Fortunately, social networks were not invented in the Mediterranean either — although the world’s first Hollywood was Olympus, where Zeus, Prometheus, Athena, Poseidon and dozens of spoiled gods entertained people with the serials of their endless intrigues, interrupted by advertisements for cheese, wine, oil and silver jewellery, as happens today with films.

But unfortunately, the peoples washed by this sea have not done much to strengthen their Mediterranean identity.

In turn and in a coordinated way, Arabia, Asia, Africa and Europe have covered the Mediterranean with their umbrellas, like a seasonal beach.

Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians and Palestinians behave as Arabs; Turks as Asians; Syrians, Lebanese and Israelis do not quite know what they are, which is why they quarrel all the time; Spaniards, French, Italians, Greeks and Slovenes act as Europeans; the Maltese live as Africans; while the rest of us — Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Croats and Albanians — have been convinced that we are Balkan.

In fact, we are not.

We are Mediterranean more than we are Balkan, and European less than we are Mediterranean.

Whoever wants to find a reason for how we differ from the Balkan peoples on our backs — Macedonians, Bulgarians and Serbs — need only look at the plates.

Their food has fat but no olive oil; their dishes have no fish; their wine does not have the sour salt of the sea.

We must strengthen our identity as Mediterraneans, where we coexist in harmony with Greeks and Turks, with Italians and Croats, with Israelis and Palestinians, with the French and the Spaniards, with Africans, with Asians and with Europeans.

Only in the Mediterranean can we coexist with everyone, without exception.

Here also sail the Chinese, who bring electric cars; the Americans, who keep warships to protect oil; and the Russians, who sell weapons.

Everyone passes through the Mediterranean, unable to avoid it.

It is no coincidence that the Mediterranean is the only sea that bears the name of land: a sea in the middle of the earth, that is, in the middle of all the lands of the world.

And in the middle of this earth, we Albanians shine with our black hair, our big curious eyes, our wheat-coloured skin, and with the oil, salt and wine without which we cannot sit down at the table.

So when I saw so many students shouting with joy, “I am Mediterranean”, I too was amazed — and wrote this piece.