House of Mother Teresa’s Family

In one of the streets near Kavaja Street in Tirana there is the house of Mother Teresa's family. Her mother, sister and brother lived here. Everyone knows this house as Mother Teresa's house, although she never really lived there. If you ask on the way, everyone will show you where the house is. An old radio 'Siemens'. An old oven. A clock and a table. These things are the remaining legacy of Mother Teresa's family in Tirana.

When the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1979, one of the priests sitting in the hall asked Mother Teresa where she was from. She said: "I was born in Skopje, I was educated in London, I live in Calcutta and I work for all the poor people in the world. My homeland is a small country called Albania. During the time of socialism Mother Teresa was little known in Albania because of his isolationism.

In the meantime, Mother Teresa had tried for a long time to come to Albania. Her first letter was sent to the Albanian Committee on Foreign Relations in accordance with the protocol. Bureaucrats of that time did not answer and she was forced to send another letter to the successor of the dictator Enver Hoxha, the communist leader Ramiz Alia, and another letter to Nexhmije Hoxha, the wife of the dictator Hoxha, where mother Teresa claims she was looking for her mother's grave. After several attempts, Mother Teresa was given permission to visit her home.

It was the end of the 80s. Communist oppression became less and less, and the state began to open up a little. Communist authorities of the time came into possession of the Zajmi family house and were told that there was someone who wanted to visit the house. The "little" woman, who the Albanians had seen in the news of the Italian television channels and who whispered that she was Albanian, wanted to go to the house where her family had lived.