page_title: Piana degli Albanesi
section_title: Ethnic groups
hierarchical_section_title: Piana degli Albanesi / Demography / Ethnic groups
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Insegna in lingua albanese del Bar Shqjpëria (Bar Albania)
context_page_description: Piana degli Albanesi is a comune with 6,128 inhabitants in the Metropolitan City of Palermo, Sicily. The official name of the town was Piana dei Greci until 1941. The comune is situated on a mountainous plateau and encircled by high mountains, on the eastern side of the imposing Mount Pizzuta, the city, which is mirrored on a large lake, is 24 km from the provincial capital.
  The town is the most important center of the Albanians of Sicily, as well as the largest and most populous colony of Arbëreshë and it is the episcopal see of the Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi, constituency of the Italo-Albanian Church whose jurisdiction covers all Albanians of Sicily who practice the Byzantine rite.
  The community, after five centuries from its foundation, has maintained many ethnic elements of Albanian culture like language, religious ritual, traditional costumes, music and folklore. The inhabitants are the descendants of Albanian families, including nobles and relatives of Skanderbeg, that settled in Southern Italy during the Ottoman Empire conquest of the Balkans.
context_section_description: The ethnic composition of Piana degli Albanesi is significantly different from that of the surrounding Sicilian environment, whose population is and still feels Albanian. The community is configured as a historically consolidated system with an independent profile in the territory. The different origins, with the strong historical, cultural and value connotations, constitute specific points of the community, on the other hand perfectly integrated.
  The Arbëreshe identity, tempered in a foreign land (te dheu i huaj), seals its strong indigenous character. The cornerstones of the community are: the Albanian language, the Byzantine rite, traditional customs and customs, history. The social component was the endogenous force of Piana degli Albanesi: the intelligentsia Arbëreshe, the priests in the first place and exponents of political and cultural life, through institutions and the work of many illustrious men, worked with zeal to defend the peculiarities identity. The maintenance of the Albanian status, as in every identity reality, is confronted daily with the socio-cultural transformism and if once ignoring each other between Albanians and Sicilians was the way to preserve each one's own specificities, the current territorial dynamics not they allow it to the extent that the world-system is expressed through relations from the local to the supra-local.
  Identity aspects, such as ritual, language and customs, are still kept alive by the whole community, thanks to a strong and deep-rooted popular tradition in which this people is linked and is recognized, and religious and cultural institutions also contribute validly to the safeguard and to the enhancement of ancestral heritage.
  A flourishing Albanian community of Albania of very recent immigration, post-fall of the communist regime of 1990, coexists and is well integrated in the social of Piana degli Albanesi, with the creation of a community of arbëreshë which gathers within it a rooted core of shqiptarë. There is no lack of marriages between Italo-Albanians and Albanians from the Balkans.
  Between 1997 and 2002 the municipality and the Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi welcomed and helped the Albanians from Kosovo affected by the war.
caption: A historic "Bar Shqjpëria"
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