On the Mother Teresa Award I received in Tirana on 23 July

“A YEAR AGO this week, we had Mother Teresa on the cover, and an article inside by Gëzim Alpion, who has done more than any other scholar to reveal the influence of his fellow Albanian’s family and cultural roots on her extraordinary life. Now Dr Alpion, a sociologist based at the University of Birmingham, has received the Mother Teresa Medallion from the President of Albania, Ilir Meta.

Under the fabulously repressive regime of Enver Hoxha – brutal even by Eastern European standards – religious believers of all confessions were persecuted. Previous winners of the award include Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, who was the first priest to enter Albania after the fall of communism in 1991. When Paglia arrived, he was able to visit the one bishop still alive. He had been in prison for 19 years.

Gëzim sent us a photograph of himself and his wife Dashi on the steps of the presidential palace in Tirana, built by Italian Fascists in the 1930s for King Zog, then appropriated by the communists in 1945. He is showing off his decoration, one of the most prestigious this unsettled and mysterious country bestows: a handsome golden relief of Mother Teresa with her hands joined in prayer.”