The newly-renovated square in the village of Derviçan has been named after Konstantinos Mitsotakis, the first Greek Prime Minister to visit the Dropull region in the southern Albanian district of Gjirokaster.

Addressing a special ceremony, where a statue of the former Greek PM Mitsotakis was unveiled, Prime Minister Edi Rama told the participating local residents that “Mitsotakis comeback today is the return of the right man to the right place to embody through his eternal presence here the inseparable connection of the Greek minority with Greece, a relation he helped to re-establish through his visit to the area 33 years ago after a long and painful rupture.”

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Dear friends, 

Agapiti filoi, agapites files

Brothers and sisters, 

Adhelfes qe adhelfia, 

Today we are celebrating and commemorating a historic personality of the neighbouring Greece by erecting his statue here.

It sounds like the replica of a novel narration, with the past, the present and the future of a country being entwined and inseparable from the main character in a way that both creates it and almost unbelievably merges them with the journey, events, the rises and falls and his rising again.

Kostantinos Mitsotakis was in the midst of the turmoil of Greek politics from the end of World War II until the early 21st century. That political turmoil was indeed his cradle, not only because in the house where he was born 105 years ago the Convention of Alepa was signed, granting the Cretans the initial privileges before the Crete island’s union with Greece, but also because he was born as the second son of a Greek parliament member by the name of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and as the great-grandson of the then Greek Prime Minister at the Balkan wars era, the legendary Eleftherios Venizelos.

Under a personal fund specially designated by his great-grandfather, the Prime Minister, to cover the boy’s education expenses, Konstantinos, against his will, attended the Athens law school, but as time showed, the legal training would help him throughout his life through the epic battles to defend his steadfast convictions.

Meanwhile, during World War II the young Konstantinos would serve as a lieutenant in the trenches against the German occupation of Greece, then as a member of the national movement of Crete, and later as a Nazi prisoner awaiting execution after his death sentence. Such fateful imposition would endow the later leader with the courage of the man who, after having hit the bottom, fears nothing when he fights to force his non-negotiable beliefs. 

In the Crete national movement, which best suited the convictions of the young boy, who did not lean to the left and disagreed on everything with the communists other than the patriotic desire for the liberation of Greece, he played a first-hand role in reaching the agreement that prevented a civil conflict in Crete in 1943. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death twice by the Nazi, but he miraculously survived thanks to an exchange between 30 German prisoners and 10 Greek prisoners. For his contribution and outstanding acts of resistance, the young man, who would later rise to the top of Greek politics only in his early third age, would be awarded post-war medals twice by the governments of Greece and Great Britain.

In 1955, the 37-year-old lawyer sided with the legend of 20th-century Greece, the writer Nikos Kazantzakis, together presenting to the Greek parliament a study on confiscation of the latter’s books in various Greek provinces after a short-sighted investigation into his religious views.

In his remarks at the parliamentary debate he described Kazantzakis not only as a prominent author, but also a true patriot, an authentic Christian, proudly walking out of the conformist line of parliament members, a feature distinguishing his special political character on more than one occasion.

Citing Kazantzakis, a name dear to Albanian literature lovers too, naturally implies the parenthesis to the fact that Kostantinos Mitsotakis was a polyglot and ardent reader who, until he passed away at the age of 98, despite his vision impairment, making it impossible for him to read, he never stopped reading even for a single day.

Thanks to audio-books, he kept enjoying the magic of French, German and Greek literature, closely following various publications, remaining an avid follower of literature and poetry, the love for which he jealously defended from the suffocating addiction to politics. 

The literally stalwart Cretan always nurtured the passion of learning by heart the poems that attracted him the most. As a center union MP, Kostantinos Mitsotakis did not dither and joined forces in the famous anti-government front Anendotos. And with whom, one would wonder?  He was exactly the man who would later become another legend of the new Greece, but also his biggest political opponent, Andreas Papandreou.

The political affiliation far from the communist ideology did not prevent the liberal lawmaker Kostantinos Mitsotakis from defending the values ​​of freedom and democracy by supporting in 1962 the legalization of the communist party, breaking away from the orbit of the overall suffocating mentality of that era of Greek politics, when communists were savagely persecuted for their outlaw ideas, but his new mindset, the iron strength of his convictions and his rebellious character would be sorely tested in the long years following the April 1967 coup d’état and the establishment of the infamous junta of colonels.

On the night of the coup d’état, he was arrested by the colonels and was closely watched as a suspect for organizing an uprising against the dictatorship in Crete.

He escaped from Greece amid many vicissitudes and dangers in August 1968 through the help of his friend, Turkish Foreign Minister Çağlayangil, flying from Istanbul to Paris on a Pakistani plane to dive into the rough swells of political exile. 

A year later, he joins his wife and 4 children through adventures that would deserve a movie from his novel-like life. The turbulent Paris also became the heart of the Greek resistance against the junta in 1968. 

In the capital “liberty, equality, fraternity”, Kostantinos Mitsotakis collaborated with Greek political exiles of all political affiliations, convictions, and colors. 

In the meantime, he was involved in arranging various public events, which left a mark on the path of the difficult democratic opposition of those men and women who moved heaven and earth during all those years abroad to help overthrow Greece’s criminal junta that had taken their homeland hostage.

When he finally decided to come back to Greece in 1974, fully confident that political resistance now had to be organized from inside the country, he found himself in the courtroom again, this time for publications, without police permission, deemed inciting against public order.

Kostantinos Mitsotakis returned to Parliament in 1977, initially as the Neoliberal party leader and, after joining the New Democracy a year later, he served as a cabinet member in several administrations until in 1984, when he took over as the leader of the party to which he gave the physiognomy of his political self, transforming from a classical a party of right-wing ideology into a liberal reformist party, with the ambition to open new horizons, leading no longer to simply rule with eyes on the old horizon.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis took office almost half a century after taking to the trenches of the liberation war, perfectly embodying the truth that nothing for him was said to be easily achieved, he climbed the steps of the Maximos Mansion after a saga of three consecutive election victories in just 11 months.

The chapter of the novel of his life too, as a literary political character at the helm of power, is not calmer than the turbulent chapters of his path to the top, where the Greece’s new 72-year-old Prime Minister of Greece enticed and induced all possible political and social winds against his own self , launching several liberal reforms that stirred the stagnant waters of a Greece saturated and numbed by the populist dominance of Anendotos’ one-time rebel parliamentary front and his super-charismatic rival Andreas Papandreou. 

The great ambition and confrontational approach pursued by the New Democracy’s patriarch at the helm of the government to cut the public sector, liberate the economy from bureaucratic chains, withdraw the state from the management of strategic enterprises and regulate the labor market and the flow of capital provoked waves of mass protests and opposition from all sides.

With the power of that immeasurable self-confidence that characterized him, but which in the eyes of his opponents resembled irritating self-indulgence, Konstantinos Mitsotakis completely turned the compass of Greek foreign policy towards the West and anchored in Washington, lifting the relations with the United States to the level of a strategic alliance which, the anti-imperialist worldview and the defiant attitude of his predecessor to the American superpower, had sent Greece into the spiral of a permanent conflict.

The early elections in 1993 removed the 75-year-old Prime Minister from office after only three years, where as if to shake up this chapter of his life to the end, his predecessor Andreas Papandreou himself returned to that office, while Kostantinos Mitsotakis withdrew from the party leadership. He remained the honorary President of the New Democracy until the end of the epilogue of his remarkable life.

Dear Dropulli residents, I found it appropriate and reasonable to sketch here today the thread of the lived novel of this emblematic character of the politics in the neighboring country – one of your two homelands – the first Greek Prime Minister who travelled to Albania and visited Derviçan. His comeback to this very square today through this statue that my colleague and friend Adi Dule successfully sculpted – and was really happy to do that, for the sake of truth, partly because he has been working as emigrant in Greece for several years, but also because the portrait of Mitsotakis senior is enticing for a sculptor because of the character of the shape – is the return of the right man to the right place to embody through his eternal presence here the inseparable connection of the Greek minority with Greece, a relation he helped to re-establish through his visit to the area 33 years ago after a long and painful rupture. However, it would suffice for one to have watched a Greek TV archival newsreel, showing Mitsotakis he speaks with love of a life hardened amidst turmoil and with that aristocratic sense of humor about the stubbornness of his Arvanite wife for everyone of us to realize that this presence of his here also nurtures the stubborn kindness of the inseparable bond between the two peoples of ours, which the past has mixed so much that if it was not for the different language or the different angle of memory of political history, nothing would have distinguish them and make them inseparable like drops of water.

I would have very much wished that Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the son of Konstantinos, today’s Prime Minister of Greece and my dear friend, was here today, but surely he too will return to this square, all the more so as he has promised to do so precisely at this square that from today will bear his father’s name. 

However, I am very glad that an already gray-haired lawmaker of the New Democracy is with me and you here. When he accompanied Prime Minister Kostantinos Mitsotakis to this square 33 years ago, he was just a young man without a single grey hair on his head, who would later become the Mayor who returned the flag of the Olympic Games to Athens and, among many others, also one of my inspiring examples when I took over the office of the Mayor of Tirana.

My dear friend Dimitris Avramopoulos!

I don’t forget the time when as a member of a government delegation – I used to serve as Minister of Culture back then – I attended our delegation’s meeting with Mr. Avramopoulos in the Athens City Hall and heard him speak and show respect for the Albanian workers in Greece, their significant and contribution to Greece and to stronger relations between our two countries. 

After half a century of severed centuries-old close relationship between our two countries, everyone now says such kind words, but in that difficult time, when Albanians in the eyes of the entire public opinion of the neighboring country were just a very small minority of criminals, who made the TV and newspaper headlines, whereas indeed the vast majority humbly and silently did back-breaking work, the comments made by the Mayor of Athens were soothing ointment for our pride severely wounded by the mistreatment of the Albanian figure in Greece in the 90s.

I would like to wholeheartedly thank our old friend for coming today, just like I would also like to thank the Ambassador of the Republic of Greece, the ever-smiling ambassador, Kostandina, who honors us with her presence.

My friends, my Dropulli sisters and brothers, better than anyone else you know that Albania is your homeland, the place where you live, just like the Albanians, by your blood and your passports, the place where you have the graves of your ancestors, the memories and lands of those who no longer live, the houses where you were born and your children are born.

You also know that you are a precious asset for Albania, an irreplaceable bridge of good neighborliness with Greece, an inseparable connection of minds and hearts between peoples, a bond that not only never breaks, but also doesn’t weaken, when politics comes in between them with its whims and for no reasons at all.

I am proud of our common homeland, Albania, where minorities by law and by custom enjoy equal rights with ethnic Albanians and where no woes, no problems, no worries differ from the woes, problems and worries facing all the citizens of our Republic. The same goes for the level of attention, care and our efforts to tackle all these woes, issues, problems and worries with the very same passion in Tirana and Tropoja, in Dropull and Durrës, Maliq and Finiq, in the whole country where the painful wounds of a past of common hardship are increasingly being healed, with the Greek minority being the big jewel in the golden crown of civic coexistence between Albanians and various ethnic minorities.

Unfortunately, from time to time, electoral interests of the politics, with its insignificant needs for the destiny of our countries and peoples, disturb the natural flow of fraternity that has existed since the dawn of time between neighbors such as Albania and Greece, but these are things that we can overcome, albeit it would have been best if they didn’t happen, but the disputes and misunderstandings among brothers, who live in different house, can sometimes be overcome easier and sometimes more difficult.

It is certain that in the course of today’s democratic lives, disturbances and misunderstandings not only pass, but also make stronger the understanding of the inseparable bond between our two peoples and countries for which even the two indomitable opponents, Kostandinos Mitsotakis and Adreas Papandreu not only had the same conviction, but also did everything they could in the short time they had power at their disposal when Albania just came out of isolation.

Surely that in the course of today’s democratic lives, worries and misunderstandings not only transcend, but also the understanding of the inseparable bond between our two peoples and countries much stronger, a bond for which even the two indomitable rivals, Kostantinos Mitsotakis and Adreas Papandreou not only shared the same conviction, but also did everything they could when Albania just came out of isolation.

I don’t know whether Prime Minister Kostantinos Mitsotakis is seeing and listening to us from up there in heaven. I would like to think that even the sunlight is his smile, but by also apologizing for this long speech, through which I tried to summarize the meaning of the life of a statesman loyal to his convictions, who lived almost 100 years with the willingness to pay any price not to betray his convictions, I am concluding by wishing that Albania and Greece have more similar men and women with the man in this statue and very much hoping that this statue will serve the future generations to never forget that what sometimes divides us is never worth what eternally unites us Albanians and Greeks as two peoples that are like two drops of water.

Allow me to invite here my friend, your friend, a European Greek just like Kostantinos Mitsotakis, his former companion who had all black hair and today he has gone all grey for the troubles and problems of politics, but whose heart is always in the right place, Dimitris.