@Aardwolf:
Albania was pretty much North Korea without the nukes and pseudo-religious bullshit. The footage of Jong-il's funeral with people wailing and tearing out their hair? It's basically a carbon copy of what happened in Albania when Hoxha died.
It's surreal how similarly dictatorships develop even when the countries are across the world from each other.
Albania and North Korea have a key thing in common, geographic isolation.
Korea (like Japan) has always been isolated from the rest of the world for a large part. Invaders came and went, but Korea was always this embattled nation (or nations at some points) boxed into a peninsula. Paranoia follows.
Albania may seem like it's square in the middle of the whole European hubbub, but check out the topographic maps for half a second.
http://mapsof.net/map/balkans-topographic-map#.UTukBVdmyRM
That coastal strip there is very much skipped over historically, or at best slightly visited and colonized. Backwater at best. The Albanians weren't coastal merchants either, culturally they come from the mountains.
This is a people that are very probably the only one of those ancient "vanished" European peoples of the Balkans to still be around.
Thracians? Turned into Greeks, Romans and Bulgarian Slavs.
Dacians? Turned into Hungarians, Bulgarian Slavs, and largely Romanians via Rome.
Illyrians? It's damn likely that the Albanians ARE the Illyrians.
Survived up in the armpit of Greco-Rome down till today.
Isolation creates paranoid societies.