Mimika Luca, the great granddaughter of the Albanian intellectual, Sami Frasheri

During one of his usual parties, the Albanian businessman Gjergj Luca “punished” me by telling me to sit next to his mother, Mimika, since we were both from Southern Albania, while he considered himself a northerner because of his father’s origin.

Like many other Albanians, in my mind I had Mimika Luca’s image tied to that of her husband and therefore, I thought she too was from Shkodra. It was during that party that she began to tell me her and her family’s story.

Mimika’s mother was the granddaughter of the Albanian intellectual, Sami Frasheri and her family used to live in Ioannina prior to WWII. She was married to an Albanian lawyer whose life and career was built between Ioannina and Gjirokastra. At the peak of the Italian-Greek war, Mimika’s father died at a young age because of a terminal illness. Finding herself suddenly all alone with her children, Mimika’s mother decided to travel back to her home in Gjirokastra, so that she could be near her kin.

At the Albanian border, the Greek guards warned her that she was about to move enter a hostile country, since the Italian occupied Albania had declared war against Greece. However, Mimika’s mother decided to continue her journey to Albania where things were about to take a dramatic turn.

The house in Gjirokastra had been bombed to the ground and nothing existed from it anymore. Mimika, her mother and her siblings saw themselves homeless, without prospects and unable to return to Greece. The next day they travelled towards Tirana in order to meet the influential Toptani family with whom they had family relations. However, they were unlucky because the properties of the Toptani family were filled with Albanian refugees who had just fled from the atrocities of the Greek andartes, but they were promised a meeting with the prefect of Tirana, Qazim Mulleti.

The next day, Qazim Mulleti met Mimika and her mother in his office and offered them to stay in a government shelter for children without parents. The mother could work there, while also being close to her daughter. This was like a miracle out of nowhere.

Since 1941 until the end of the war, Mimika and her mother stayed there, until they were able to find a house for themselves. Years later, Mimika married the actor Ndrek Luca and started her independent life.

During her son’s party, I asked Mimika what she as an artist regretted from her career during the Communist regime, considering that she was married to a wll-known actor at the time.

“My only regret is about my mother,” she said, “She could never accept that I and my husband were actors. Throughout my life I’ve always felt bad about our art transmitted to the public.”

Mimika went on to tell me how she had invited her mother to watch the comedy “The Prefect,” a propagandistic parody of Qazim Mulleti by the Communist regime.

“We went to see the show and in about ten minutes, I noticed my mother staring down at her knees. She did not raise her head until the end of the show. I realized that she was offended and angry.”

At the end of the show, she turned to me, saying that I should be embarrassed about how they were making fun of the man who had saved our lives. For many years, that event stayed with as the biggest regret of my life.

“Have you told this story to your son?”

“I have told this story several times, but he enjoys that comedy as much as every other Albanian. I am the only one who wants to cry every time, because it reminds me of mother.”

I turned to her son and said to him that his mother had just told me the story of “The Prefect.” But, in his typical way, he laughed out loud and apparently had nothing to say.