One of the largest migrations between two neighbouring countries in modern European history began on foot. In the winter of 1990–91, as Albania’s regime collapsed, people walked out of the country across the mountain border — roughly 3,000 by the end of 1990, some 20,000 by mid-March 1991 — down the frozen passes above Kakavia and Kapshtica and into Greece. Thirty-five years later, more than 600,000 people from Albania live in Greece, and more than four in ten of them are Greek citizens.
No other diaspora in this series lives this close to home, and none has a stranger statistical story. Albanians are half of all foreigners in Greece — 49 percent of foreign citizens at the 2021 census — yet the official count keeps falling, because Greece has been naturalising Albanians at a pace with no equal in its own history: in every year since 2007, Albanians have taken between 59 and 88 percent of all Greek citizenships granted. And inside the numbers sits a category that exists nowhere else: some two hundred thousand who arrived carrying Albanian passports and a documented claim to Greek ethnicity — the omogeneis — whose special identity cards have almost all since been exchanged for citizenship.
This page holds the whole story to the same standard as its sister pages on Italy, Germany and Austria: the numbers with their sources, the walk of 1991 and the hard decade that followed, the six-century Arvanite heritage inside Greece itself, the history of Çamëria, the organisations, the people — and how the community connects today.
For more on this topic, read Albanians in Germany: A Million-Strong Community and Albanians in Austria: A 100,000-Strong Community.
Last evidence review: 6 August 2026. Official statistics, historical record and editorial interpretation are labelled separately throughout. On the identity questions this page touches — Arvanite, omogeneis, Cham — it reports what people and scholarship actually say, and labels what is contested.
How many Albanians live in Greece?
More than 600,000 people from Albania — of whom about 375,000 still hold Albanian citizenship and at least 267,000 have become Greek. Greek statistics count this community in five different universes, and most of what is written about it goes wrong by adding across them. This page keeps them apart.
Start with the census. In 2021, ELSTAT counted 374,926 Albanian citizens resident in Greece — 49.0 percent of the country’s 765,598 foreign citizens. No other community comes close to that dominance of Greece’s foreign population: the second-largest group, Bulgarians, are 4.6 percent. A decade earlier the census had found 480,851; a decade before that, 438,036.
The number that explains the fall
Between 2007 and 2024, 266,970 Albanians acquired Greek citizenship — and in every one of those years, Albanians were between 59 and 88 percent of all naturalisations Greece performed. In 2018 the share reached 86.9 percent: nearly nine of every ten new Greeks that year had been Albanian citizens. Every certificate moved a family out of the census row the headlines watch and into the one nobody counts as foreign.
| Measure | Value | Reference date | What it counts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Albanian citizens (census) | 374,926 | 2021 census | Residents holding Albanian citizenship — 49.0% of all foreigners |
| Valid residence permits | 273,200 | June 2026 | Third-country-national permit holders — 48.0% of all permits; excludes EDTO holders and the naturalised |
| Became Greek, 2007–2024 | 266,970 | cumulative | Eurostat annual acquisition figures — ethnic-Greek omogeneis and ethnic Albanians alike |
| Second-generation grants | 107,801 | 2015–2023 | Citizenship by birth or schooling in Greece under the 2015 law, all nationalities — ~79% Albanian (2023 share) |
| Co-ethnic cards (EDTO) still valid | 14,531 | June 2026 | Ethnic-Greek Albanian citizens holding the special identity card — counted outside the permit system |
| Visible total | ≈ 641,900 | 2021–2026 | Census citizens plus recorded naturalisations; the honest headline is “more than 600,000” |
These universes overlap imperfectly — the census and the acquisition series have different dates, some of the naturalised have died or moved on, and the permit registry excludes exactly the people the citizenship register now counts. The arithmetic is opened up fully in the ledger.
The walk: 1991 and the hard decade
Albania’s isolation broke at its southern border first. Roughly 3,000 people had crossed into Greece on foot by the end of 1990; by mid-March 1991 the count had passed 20,000, part of an exodus of more than 200,000 people who left Albania within the year. They came over the passes in winter — through Kakavia and Kapshtica, down the Pindus valleys, many walking for days — into a country whose language many of the first arrivals, the ethnic-Greek minority of southern Albania, already spoke.
The revolving door
What followed was the harshest reception any Albanian diaspora met. Greece’s 1991 immigration law was, in the judgement of the migration scholar Martin Baldwin-Edwards, “little more than a policy of exclusion and expulsion specifically aimed at Albanians”. Through the 1990s, police sweeps known as skoupa — the broom — produced summary expulsions on an extraordinary scale: around 200,000 expulsions a year through the decade, with reported peaks near 277,000 in 1992, and over two million expulsion events by 2001. That figure counts events, not people: the same men were deported, walked back over the mountains, and returned to the same building sites within weeks. Expulsion was even used as diplomatic signalling — tens of thousands deported in days after bilateral flashpoints in 1993 and 1994.
Legal status, when it finally came, arrived all at once. Greece’s first regularisation in 1998 drew 372,000 applicants — about 65 percent of them Albanian — and further rounds followed in 2001 and 2005. A workforce that had built Athens’ Olympic decade in legal shadow finally got papers; Greek social-insurance rolls and school registers filled with Albanian names.
The stigma years
The 1990s Greek press wrote “Albanian” and “criminal” as near-synonyms — the criminologist Vassilis Karydis documented the equation illegal immigrant = Albanian criminal as the media default of the decade. The stigma had real casualties. Its worst moment came on 4 September 2004, hours after Albania beat Greece in a World Cup qualifier, when 20-year-old Gramoz Palushi was stabbed to death on Zakynthos as post-match celebrations turned violent — a killing widely covered in both countries, in the very years attitudes had begun to turn. The years around it also carried the era’s defining argument: twice, in 2000 and 2003, the Albanian-born top student Odysseas Cenaj earned the right to carry the Greek flag at his school parade — and twice a national controversy followed over whether he could.
The crisis and the turn
The Greek debt crisis after 2010 hit Albanians hardest of anyone. Construction — the community’s economic backbone — collapsed by more than 80 percent; an estimated 130,000–140,000 migrants lost their residence permits because they could no longer buy the insurance stamps the permits required; Albanian unemployment in Greece reached about 40 percent by 2013. INSTAT and the IOM recorded 133,544 adult Albanians (aged 18 and over) returning home between 2009 and 2013 — 70.8 percent of them from Greece. It was the largest reverse migration in the community’s history, and it is why the 2021 census found 106,000 fewer Albanian citizens than 2011: part naturalised, part gone home.
Yet the same decade turned the legal story around. A 2010 law opened citizenship to the second generation, was struck down by the Council of State in 2013, and returned as Law 4332 of 2015 — citizenship through birth or schooling in Greece. The gates opened: 107,801 second-generation grants across all nationalities by 2023 — with Albanian children around four in five of the 2023 grantees. The community the skoupa had chased through the 1990s became, in the 2010s, the overwhelming majority of new Greeks.
Twenty-eight years after the skoupa, Greek EMAK crews were digging through rubble in Durrës after the earthquake of 26 November 2019 — and Albanian television showed them being applauded in the streets.
The Arvanites: a six-century heritage inside Greece
Long before 1991 — before the Greek state itself — Albanian-speaking communities were already settled deep in the land that became Greece. From roughly 1300 to 1600, Albanian-speaking settlers moved south into Byzantine and Frankish Greece, mostly invited: rulers of Attica, Boeotia, Euboea and the Peloponnese granted land to Arvanite clans in exchange for cultivation and military service. Their descendants — the Arvanites — settled the countryside of Attica and Boeotia, the Argolid, and the islands of Hydra, Spetses and Salamis. Five centuries on, the reach of the language still startled travellers: writing of the young capital in the 1850s, the French author Edmond About — a satirist, not a sympathetic witness — reported that “Athens, twenty-five years ago, was only an Albanian village”, that Albanians formed “almost the whole of the population of Attica”, and that within three leagues of the capital there were villages where “Greek is hardly understood”. Beneath the sneer sat a real linguistic landscape: Athens became the capital in 1834 as a small town ringed by Arvanitika-speaking villages, and Plaka, under the Acropolis, kept the community travellers called the town’s Albanian quarter into the late nineteenth century.
On identity, the evidence is unambiguous, and this page follows it: the Arvanites are Greeks. In the standard sociolinguistic survey, 97 percent of Arvanite respondents identified as Greek, and many find the label “Albanian” offensive. What they carried for six centuries is a language — Arvanitika, a Tosk-rooted variety of which the linguist Peter Trudgill wrote that “linguistically, there is no doubt” it is a variety of Albanian — today classified by UNESCO as severely endangered. Estimates of how many still speak it run from 30,000 to 200,000 depending on whether one counts fluent daily speakers, elderly semi-speakers or heritage identifiers — a range this page reports as a range. When Albanian migrants arrived in the 1990s speaking something close to the grandparents’ language, the encounter was documented by linguists as awkward on both sides: kinship in the ear, distance in identity.
The heritage that helped build Greece
The Arvanite contribution to the Greek state includes the revolutionary fleet and part of the founding pantheon. The shipowning families of Hydra and Spetses, Arvanite-settled islands both, financed and crewed the revolutionary navy of 1821. The Souliotes — the Orthodox warrior clans of Epirus whose resistance to Ali Pasha entered European legend — descended, per the standard scholarship, from Albanian-speaking pastoral clans settled in Thesprotia around the sixteenth century; from 1821 they fought and died as Greeks among Greeks. Their story runs through this page’s people section: Markos Botsaris, whose own hand wrote a Greek–Albanian dictionary; the admirals Miaoulis and Kountouriotis; three Prime Ministers of Greece from Hydra’s Arvanite families. Greece’s national heroes include men and women whose grandmothers sang in Arvanitika — a measure of how deep the weave runs, and no claim on anyone’s identity.
Çamëria: the history that stays open
For hundreds of thousands of Albanians — the expellees and their descendants — the coastal region Greeks call Thesprotia and Albanians call Çamëria is not geography: it is family memory. No honest page about Albanians and Greece can leave it out, and no responsible one can pretend it is simple. What follows is the documented record, with its disputes labelled.
Before the Second World War, roughly 17,000 to 23,000 Muslim Cham Albanians lived in Thesprotia — Albanian-speaking Muslims, in Greece since Ottoman times. Greek official counts ran from 17,000 to 22,000; an Albanian consular count of 1936 gave 23,048. During the Axis occupation, part of the community collaborated with the occupiers; how large a part is itself debated by historians, and Chams also fought on the other side, in the resistance’s mixed “Ali Demi” battalion of ELAS. The collaboration had Greek victims with names and dates of its own — most infamously the 49 Greek notables of Paramythia, executed by the occupiers on 29 September 1943 with local Cham militia helping select them, and the villages burned in the reprisal sweeps of 1943–44. What is not debated is what happened next. Between June 1944 and March 1945, EDES forces under Napoleon Zervas drove the Muslim Cham population over the border into Albania: the attack on Paramythia on 18 June 1944 and the killings that followed on 27 June; the mass flight of August 1944; the Filiates massacre of 13 March 1945 that completed the expulsion. Historians put those directly killed at more than 1,200; Albanian and Cham sources count between roughly 2,000 and 2,877 killed, and up to about 5,000 dead in all once hunger and epidemics in flight are counted. Of the prewar community, only a remnant stayed: 117 on the first postwar count, 127 Muslim Chams at the 1951 census, plus an unknown number who converted and intermarried.
The aftermath froze into the positions both states still hold. A Greek special court convicted 2,109 Chams of collaboration in absentia in 1945–46; citizenships were revoked and properties confiscated — of collaborators and non-collaborators alike — under measures entangled with the 1940 state-of-war decree — a state of war Greece lifted by government decision in 1987, though the decree itself has never been formally repealed, a distinction Albania still raises and Greece considers moot. Albania’s parliament declared 27 June a national day of remembrance in 1994. Greece’s official position is that the matter is closed; a 1992 compensation proposal limited to owners not convicted of crimes was rejected by Albania, and talks in 2016 stalled. Eighty years on, the wound is administered by two governments and carried by families — in the songs of Çamëria that are part of Albanian musical heritage, and in the property deeds families have kept, in Albania and across the diaspora, for eighty years.
Sources and figures: the scholarly literature on the expulsion (Mazower; Baltsiotis; Mojzes; Vickers), the trial records as summarised in that literature, and both governments’ stated positions. Death tolls are given as the sources give them; where activists’ and historians’ figures differ, both are shown. This page takes no position on the bilateral dispute.
Where the community lives
In Athens, above all. At the 2021 census, the Attica region held 140,146 Albanian citizens — more than a third of the national total — with Central Macedonia around Thessaloniki second at 63,069. The insured workforce maps the same way: 48.1 percent of Albanian-insured workers are employed in Attica. Where Italy’s Albanians scattered across a hundred provincial towns, Greece’s community concentrated in the capital’s neighbourhoods — Kypseli, Patisia, Kallithea — and in the agricultural belts and islands where the work was.
The dominance runs deepest where the numbers are smallest: in Western Macedonia, Albanians are 77.4 percent of all foreign citizens; across most of rural Greece, “the foreigners” and “the Albanians” have been the same people for thirty years. In Attica the share is 40.6 percent of a much more mixed foreign population — the capital is where Albanian Greece lives, but also where it blends.
The two doors: how Albanians became Greek
Greek citizenship reached this community through two different doors, and the difference matters to everything on this page.
The first door was ethnic. Albanian citizens of documented Greek descent — the omogeneis, largely from the recognised Greek-minority zones of southern Albania — received Special Identity Cards (EDTO) from the Greek police and, from the 2000s, an expedited citizenship track. Roughly 200,000 such cards were issued by the late 2000s, on ministerial estimates. By June 2026, only 14,531 remained valid — not because their holders left, but because they became Greek citizens: the co-ethnic naturalisation track alone fell from 15,791 grants in 2014 to 1,433 in 2023 as the reservoir emptied.
The second door was earned residence — and it opened late. Ordinary naturalisation in Greece requires seven years of legal residence, fees and examinations, and for two decades it barely functioned: Gazmend Kapllani, the community’s best-known writer, applied in 2008 and famously never received an answer. What changed was the second generation. Law 4332 of 2015 gave children born or schooled in Greece a route of their own, and it transformed the statistics: 107,801 second-generation grants across all nationalities by 2023 — with Albanians 78.9 percent of the 2023 grantees. In 2023, more than half of all Greek citizenship acquisitions came through this track.
The result is a community whose legal profile flipped within fifteen years: from Europe’s largest irregular population to its most naturalised migrant community. What has not yet followed is representation — as of 2026, no ethnic-Albanian migrant candidate is known to have won a seat in the Hellenic Parliament, a first this generation of new citizens is positioned to claim.
Work and money
Albanian Greece was built — literally — on construction. At the end of 2024, 131,771 Albanian citizens were insured employees with EFKA, Greece’s social-insurance fund: 5.1 percent of all insured workers, and 47.3 percent of all insured foreigners. In construction, Albanians are 40.6 percent of the insured workforce — in the sector that raised the 2004 Olympic city, fewer than half the insured workers are Greek.
The remittance arc compresses the community’s economic history into one line. Before 2010, Greece and Italy together supplied more than 60 percent of a flow that peaked near €1.2 billion, with Greece then among the top two sources. The crisis broke it: total inflows to Albania fell by a fifth, and the Bank of Albania attributed the fall explicitly to Greece’s labour-market collapse. Today Albanian media, citing a Eurostat-attributed breakdown, put Greece fourth at about €202 million a year — behind Italy, the UK and Germany — less because families send less than because the community itself is now largely Greek: savings stay where the children are citizens.
Language, faith and community life
Linguistic assimilation ran faster here than in any other Albanian diaspora; the organised effort to pull the language back came later, and came hard. The first generation learned Greek on building sites within months; researchers in Thessaloniki documented Albanian families — Muslim-origin ones included — baptising their children Greek Orthodox and adopting Greek names in the 1990s and 2000s, a survival strategy in the stigma years that the scholarship calls exactly that. The second generation grew up Greek-speaking; by 2002/03, seven in ten foreign pupils in Greek schools were Albanian — 69,880 children — and almost none of them wrote Albanian.
The response is one of the largest weekend-school networks in the diaspora. The League of Albanian Teachers in Greece coordinates supplementary Albanian classes — the mësimi plotësues — with Albania’s Diaspora Publications Centre listing around 60 courses across Greece and shipping thousands of free textbooks each year. In Thessaloniki, the “Nënë Tereza” association has run free Saturday classes for two decades; in Athens, volunteer courses run from Kypseli to Pallini. The teachers are volunteers or state-contracted; the classrooms are borrowed; the stakes are whether the grandchildren of the walk will be able to speak to their grandparents.
Faith in Albanian Greece is quiet and plural. Orthodox Albanians found the parish familiar; Muslim Albanians practised at home for a generation in a capital that — remarkably — had no official mosque until the state-built Votanikos Mosque opened in November 2020. A small Albanian Catholic community gathers with the Capuchins in central Athens. And on 28 November, Flag Day, the community is anything but quiet: Athens streets fill with red-and-black flags, and the embassy’s “Nëntori Shqiptar” programme runs concerts and receptions through the month.
The organisations that hold Albanian Greece together
The community organised late — the 1990s left no room for it — and is organising fast now. Three tiers do the work.
At the top, the Federation of Albanian Associations in Greece (F.SH.SH.G), based by Omonia in central Athens, is the historic umbrella — its successor community organisation marked twenty years in November 2024 under president Rovena Xhori. A newer coordination body, Diaspora Shqiptare në Greqi, was founded in Thessaloniki in February 2024 to knit dozens of associations together. Beneath them, Albania’s National Diaspora Agency registry lists 32 organisations across Greece — hometown associations for Korça, Lushnja, Përmeti and Lunxhëria, the emigrants of Arta and Ioannina, women’s and cultural groups — the best single directory of who is active where.
Alongside them: the League of Albanian Teachers running the weekend schools; the Greek Forum of Migrants, where Albanians hold senior roles across the migrant-rights movement; Albanian polyphonic and folk ensembles registered from Athens to the islands; and the scholarly infrastructure — ELIAMEP’s migration research tradition, and Albanian taught at the University of Athens’ language centre and Macedonia University’s Balkan studies department. The community’s newspaper era — Egnatia from 1993, Gazeta e Athinës from 1998 — has largely passed to portals and to the state-supported Diaspora Shqiptare, whose Greece desk covers the schools and associations continuously.
The people: from Botsaris to Foureira
Two very different rolls of honour meet on this page. The first belongs to Greece’s own history: national heroes of documented Arvanite and Souliote heritage — Greeks, presented here exactly as they saw themselves, whose family languages happened to be rooted in Albanian. The second belongs to the last thirty-five years: the migrants and their children, with each person’s identity stated precisely — in this community, the precision matters.
The heritage roll: heroes of Greece
Markos Botsaris
Leader of the Souliotes, general of Western Central Greece, killed leading a night attack at Karpenisi in August 1823 and mourned across Europe — Delacroix painted his fall. A Greek national hero of the first rank; and in Corfu in 1809 his own hand wrote a Greek–Albanian dictionary, today in the Bibliothèque nationale de France — the language of Souli, recorded by its most famous son. The standard scholarship holds that the Souliotes were Orthodox clans of Albanian-speaking origin who fought and died for the Greek Revolution — a framing Greek and Albanian historiographies still contest at the edges.
Painting: Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1874 · public domain
Laskarina Bouboulina
The naval heroine of 1821: she financed and commanded warships, blockaded Nafplio, and was named honorary Rear Admiral by the Greek Navy — in 2018, 193 years after her death. Her heritage is reported as Arvanite on her father’s Hydriot side by the standard biographical references — a claim some scholars dispute: attributed lineage on one line of a thoroughly Greek life. Spetses keeps her museum; the Greek Navy keeps her rank.
Engraving: Adam Friedel, 1827 · public domain
Andreas Miaoulis — and Hydra’s fleet
Admiral of the revolutionary fleet from 1822, victor of Nauplia and a string of sea battles that kept the Revolution alive. Born on Hydra to an Arvanite family from Euboea, he stands for something larger: the fleets of Hydra and Spetses — the Arvanite-settled islands — were the navy of the Greek War of Independence. His son Athanasios was Prime Minister of Greece for four and a half years; the Kriezis and Voulgaris families of the same Hydriot world gave Greece two more Prime Ministers, and Pavlos Kountouriotis — victor of Elli and Lemnos, first President of the Second Hellenic Republic — descended from Hydra’s great Arvanite shipping house.
Portrait: Karl Krazeisen · public domain
A heritage in plain sight
Louis Dupré’s 1827 lithograph of an “Albanian butcher in Athens” — drawn when Arvanitika could be heard across Attica’s villages. The heritage never hid: it is in place names, in songs, in the fustanella the Greek court adopted as national dress in 1835 (a garment both nations claim — a dispute worth noting and leaving there). The politician Theodoros Pangalos, Greek Foreign Minister of the 1990s, liked to say it plainly: his ancestors were Arvanites — and he was, therefore, exactly as Greek as Greece itself.
Lithograph: Louis Dupré, 1827 · public domain
The modern roll: the migration and its children
Eleni Foureira
Born Entela Fureraj in Fier in 1987, in Athens from childhood, and for a decade one of Greece’s biggest pop stars. At Eurovision 2018 she sang “Fuego” — for Cyprus — and finished second, the island’s best result ever. For years she kept her birthplace out of the story; Greek media reported it in 2013, and the following year she confirmed it, in words many of her second-generation peers have echoed: she had stayed silent “in order to be accepted”. Her openness since marks how far the country she grew up in has moved.
Photo: Dewayne Barkley, EuroVisionary / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Pyrros Dimas
Three Olympic golds for Greece — Barcelona 1992, one year after crossing the border; Atlanta 1996; Sydney 2000 — and a bronze at Athens 2004 lifted on a wrecked knee to a stadium chanting his name. Born in Himarë in 1971, Dimas is not an ethnic Albanian: he is of the Greek community of Himarë in southern Albania, and says so plainly — “I am not of Albanian origin. I am a Greek, born in Albania, a child of the minority.” He belongs on this page because his road was this community’s road: the same 1991 crossing, with the weightlifting cohort who crossed in the same wave — Leonidas Kokas of Dropull’s minority villages, Leonidas Sabanis of Korçë, Viktor Mitrou of Vlorë — who between them lifted four more Olympic silvers for Greece (a fifth medal, a Sabanis bronze from Athens 2004, was stripped for doping) and were, for many Greeks, the first famous faces of the people walking in from the north.
Photo: DiviFilius / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Gazmend Kapllani
The migration’s essential writer. By his own account, Kapllani crossed the border on foot in January 1991 and worked as a builder, cook and kiosk attendant; he took a doctorate at Panteion University in Athens — on how the Greek press wrote about Albanians — and became a Ta Nea columnist and the author of A Short Border Handbook, the book of this migration, a Greek bestseller translated across Europe. His ending is part of the record too: he applied for Greek citizenship in 2008, never received an answer, and left in 2015 for an American professorship. The country that made him its chronicler never made him its citizen.
Photo: ErnestoSaffo / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Thomas Strakosha
Born in Athens in 1995 to Foto Strakosha, Albania’s goalkeeper of the 1990s who kept goal for Greek clubs — a true second-generation story, and the living bridge between two pages of this series. Formed at Panionios, a decade at Lazio with two Coppa Italia wins, and since 2024 back in his birth city with AEK Athens, where he became a champion of Greece. Albania’s No. 1 at Euro 2024: born in Athens, starring in Athens, defending Albania’s goal.
Photo: Kulac / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Laert Vasili
Born to an Albanian father and a Greek mother, Vasili came second among 750 applicants to the National Theatre of Greece’s drama school — and then put the immigrant experience itself on the Greek stage. He is photographed here in the fustanella: the garment both nations claim, worn without an argument.
Photo: Laertis Vasiliou / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Neritan Zinxhiria
Carried across the border as an infant in 1990, Zinxhiria grew up to collect Greek cinema’s young-director laurels from Drama to Rotterdam — where he presented his short “Light of Light” at the 2023 International Film Festival. The migration’s second generation is no longer only in front of the story; it is directing it.
Photo: Vera de Kok / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
The football story runs in both directions, and the direction chosen is the clearest marker of identity this community offers. Sotiris Ninis — born in Himarë to an ethnic-Greek family, raised in Athens from infancy — became Panathinaikos’ golden boy and chose Greece, playing at Euro 2012. Panagiotis Kone, Tirana-born and Athens-raised, chose Greece too, reaching the 2014 World Cup squad — while saying, with disarming honesty, that in Greece he is Greek and in Albania he presents as “Kone the Albanian”. And Ergys Kaçe, brought to Thessaloniki at three and formed at PAOK, made the reverse choice: 25 caps for Albania and a place in the historic Euro 2016 squad — the emblem of a generation raised in Greece that chose the eagle. Around them: Enea Mihaj (Berat-born, Greek academies, Albania international, now in MLS) and the PAOK academy’s Albanian generation.
In music, the second generation now owns the Greek charts it grew up on. Sin Boy, born in Athens to Albanian parents, took Greek trap to No. 1 with “Gigi” and made “Mama” one of its most-watched hits — and has spoken openly about the racism that came with his surname. Toquel, born Klaudjo Dhespo in Tepelenë and in Crete from his first year, grew into one of the biggest names Greek trap has produced. Claydee (Klejdi Lupa, Tirana-born, Athens-raised) writes dance-pop hits across half of Europe — his “Mamacita Buena” was the first Greece-produced song past twenty million YouTube views. And the pop mainstream carries the migration’s other identity too: Christos Mastoras, frontman of MELISSES and a coach on The Voice of Greece, was born in the Greek-minority village of Vodino in Albania and calls himself “a proud Greek Northern Epirote” — recorded here, like Dimas, exactly as he says it.
The cinema of the migration has its own landmark: Xenia (2014), the story of two Albanian-Greek brothers crossing Greece, which made leads of two of the second generation’s actors. Nikos Gelia came from Tirana as a small child and says his first role came “precisely because I was an Albanian immigrant”; Kostas Nikouli, born in Athens to a family from Sarandë, went on to become a household face through the hit series Sasmos. In letters, Christos Armandos Gezos, born in Himarë of the Greek minority, won the Greek State Literary Award for best debut. And in the javelin, Savva Lika, born in Krujë, threw for Greece in world finals after a career begun under the Albanian flag — proof, alongside the Himarë cohort, that this migration’s athletes came from both of Albania’s communities.
How do Albanians in Greece connect today?
The commute is the connection: the Kakavia crossing sits ninety minutes from Ioannina, four hours from the Riviera beaches, an overnight bus from Athens. In July 2026 alone, more than 304,000 passengers crossed Albania’s Greece-facing border points — 166,000 of them at Kakavia — a record; at Orthodox Easter 2025, more than 18,600 people entered Albania from Greece in a single day, most of them emigrants going home for the feast. The Athens–Tirana buses run every day of the year but one; Corfu–Saranda ferries cross up to ten times a day in summer; Aegean and Wizz fly Athens–Tirana around 23 times a week.
Paper follows the road. Greece permits dual citizenship, and Albania’s law does too — so becoming Greek has not meant surrendering the other passport. When Albania held its first diaspora postal vote in May 2025, Greece was the second-largest voting bloc in the world after Italy. The weekend schools ship textbooks from Tirana; the associations bus folk ensembles both ways; the summer villages of southern Albania fill each August with cars on Greek plates.
If you wanted to meet another Albanian, where did you go?
For thirty years the answer was: through family, through the neighbourhood, through the village network stretched between two countries — and for this community those networks are dense. But they have edges. The community is Athens-heavy and second-generation now; the cousin network knows everyone in the village, and nobody two neighbourhoods over. For a generation schooled in Greek, raised Albanian at home and busy, the odds that the next person you meet by chance shares the language, the memory and the intent are as thin in Kypseli as anywhere in the diaspora.
dua.com starts where the cousin network ends. Everyone in the pool already carries both countries — the Greek schooling and the Albanian Sunday — so the first conversation can skip the explanations. Finding the right person stays as hard as it ever was; finding an Albanian in Kypseli stops being the hard part.
Love, family and the next generation
The statistics stop at the front door. Arta and Dreni’s story started nowhere near Greece — a profile made secretly in Kumanovo, an entrepreneur in Stuttgart — but the life they built from it is a Thessaloniki life, which is how this diaspora works: the road in is rarely the address.
Arta & Dreni: when fate decides to find you love
Arta, a psychologist from Kumanovo, had her dua.com profile made secretly by her sister in December 2021. Dreni, an entrepreneur from Ferizaj living in Stuttgart, almost scrolled past — then couldn’t stop the conversation. He travelled to Kumanovo in early 2022 and knew. They married that year; their sons Rron and Lion arrived in 2022 and 2025 — and the family settled in Thessaloniki. They chose to keep their photos private; some of the best stories on this platform belong first to the people living them.
Practical directory for Albanians in Greece
Primary and community-run resources. Always verify current requirements on the linked site.
| Need | Where to start | Why this source |
|---|---|---|
| Albanian consular services | Embassy of Albania in Athens · consulates general in Thessaloniki and Ioannina | Official Albanian missions (Filothei, Athens; Tsimiski 43, Thessaloniki) |
| Greek residence and permits | Ministry of Migration and Asylum | Official permit categories, statistics and procedures |
| Greek citizenship | Ministry of the Interior — citizenship | Naturalisation and second-generation (L.4332/2015) routes |
| Co-ethnic (EDTO) matters | mitos.gov.gr — EDTO service page | The official process registry for the special identity card |
| Community organisations | National Diaspora Agency registry | 32 verified associations across Greece, with contacts |
| Albanian classes for children | QBD — courses in Greece | The official directory of ~60 weekend courses, with textbooks |
| Community news | Diaspora Shqiptare — Greqi | Continuous coverage of the community, schools and associations |
| Migrant rights | Greek Forum of Migrants | The umbrella body where the community’s advocates work |
| Buses and ferries home | METRO Europe (Thessaloniki–Tirana) · Corfu–Saranda ferries | Daily connections on the two main corridors |
The full ledger: how the total is built
This is the section where the headline number earns its keep. More than 600,000 is this page’s description of the community of people from Albania in Greece; 641,896 is what the two measured blocks come to before honest discounts.
The arithmetic in full view
The first block — 374,926 — is the 2021 census count of Albanian citizens, taken as published. The second — 266,970 — is the sum of Eurostat’s annual counts of Greek citizenship acquisitions by Albanian citizens, 2007 through 2024. Adding them yields 641,896. Three honest discounts apply: some of the naturalised have died; some have moved onward (not least the naturalised second generation, now EU-mobile); and the series starts in 2007, so it also misses everyone naturalised before then — a gap that pushes the other way. After all three, “more than 600,000” survives comfortably, and no tighter number would be honest.
The identity split, stated once more
This total counts people from Albania, whatever their ethnicity. Inside it are the large ethnic-Albanian majority of the migration and the ethnic-Greek omogeneis of southern Albania — including most of the roughly 200,000 who once held EDTO cards and whose fast-track naturalisations dominate the early years of the citizenship series. Greek statistics cannot separate the two groups in the totals, and neither can this page — so it says so, here and wherever the difference matters, instead of pretending.
What is deliberately left out
| Group | What is known | Why it is not added |
|---|---|---|
| Naturalised before 2007 | Co-ethnic naturalisations ran through the 1990s–2000s | No consistent pre-2007 series; adding an estimate would be invention |
| Children of the naturalised | Born Greek, in no origin row at all | No official count exists |
| Present without papers | The 1990s population peaked far above any legal count | By definition uncounted today |
| The Arvanites | An estimated 30,000–200,000 people in Greece still speak or carry Arvanitika, depending on how one counts; 97% identify as Greek | They are Greeks with a six-century heritage — counting them into a migration total would be wrong twice over |
| Cham Albanians’ descendants | The expellees of 1944–45 and their descendants live in Albania and its diaspora; only a remnant of 117–127 stayed | They are not resident in Greece — and the remnant’s descendants, intermarried into Thesprotia, are uncounted and uncountable |
Measures that must never be mixed
Five universes appear on this page, each labelled where used: census residents by citizenship (374,926); valid residence permits (273,200 — excludes EDTO holders and the naturalised, so it always runs below the census); naturalisation flows (annual) and their 2007–2024 sum (266,970); EDTO cards (14,531 valid — a legal status, not an ethnicity count); and insured employees (131,771 — a labour-market measure, not a population). Most wrong numbers about this community come from mixing two of these. Where a figure you have seen disagrees with this page, check its universe first.
Frequently asked questions about Albanians in Greece
How many Albanians live in Greece?
More than 600,000 people from Albania, on the best evidence. The 2021 census counted 374,926 Albanian citizens, and Eurostat records another 266,970 people who took Greek citizenship from 2007 to 2024 — before counting anyone naturalised earlier, children born to naturalised parents, or people present without papers. Albanian citizens alone are 49 percent of all foreigners in Greece.
Why does the official number of Albanians in Greece keep falling?
Two reasons, and disappearance is neither. Greece has naturalised Albanians at an extraordinary pace — 59 to 88 percent of all Greek citizenship grants every year since 2007 — moving hundreds of thousands out of the “Albanian” row. And the debt crisis sent roughly 94,500 adult Albanians home from Greece between 2009 and 2013. Naturalisation plus return migration together explain the census fall from 480,851 to 374,926.
Who are the omogeneis and what is an EDTO card?
Albanian citizens of documented Greek ethnicity — mostly from the recognised Greek-minority areas of southern Albania — whom Greece treats as co-ethnics (omogeneis). They received a Special Identity Card (EDTO) issued by the Greek police, valid indefinitely and counted outside the residence-permit system, plus a fast track to citizenship. Roughly 200,000 cards were issued by the late 2000s. Fewer than 15,000 were still in circulation by mid-2026 — most holders no longer need one, having taken Greek citizenship.
Who are the Arvanites — are they Albanians?
No — they are Greeks, and the evidence is emphatic: in the standard survey, 97 percent of Arvanites identified as Greek, and many find the label “Albanian” offensive. What they carry is a heritage: their ancestors settled Attica, Boeotia and the Saronic islands from roughly 1300 onward speaking Arvanitika, a Tosk-Albanian-rooted language now severely endangered. An estimated 30,000 to 200,000 people in Greece today still speak or carry the language, depending on how one counts — recorded on this page as heritage, never added to the migration total. Their families helped found the Greek state — from the fleets of Hydra to the Souliotes to several Prime Ministers.
What happened in Çamëria?
Between June 1944 and March 1945, EDES forces expelled virtually the entire Muslim Cham Albanian population of Thesprotia — roughly 17,000–23,000 people before the war, of whom only a remnant of a few hundred stayed. Historians count more than 1,200 directly killed; Albanian and Cham sources count between roughly 2,000 and 2,877, and up to about 5,000 dead in all. Part of the community had collaborated with the Axis occupation — the extent is debated, and the collaboration had Greek victims of its own — and the expulsion fell on collaborators and non-collaborators alike. Albania commemorates 27 June; Greece considers the case closed. The full treatment is in this page’s Çamëria section.
Where in Greece do most Albanians live?
Athens, decisively: the Attica region held 140,146 Albanian citizens at the 2021 census — more than a third of the total — with Central Macedonia around Thessaloniki second at 63,069. In rural regions the community is smaller but dominant: in Western Macedonia, more than three of every four foreign citizens are Albanian.
How many Albanians have become Greek citizens?
266,970 between 2007 and 2024, per Eurostat. A separate Ministry of Interior series counts 107,801 second-generation grants across all nationalities under the 2015 law by 2023 — in 2023, around four in five of the grantees were Albanian. At the 2018 peak, nearly nine in ten new Greek citizens had arrived as Albanians. The Eurostat series excludes anyone naturalised before 2007, so the true total is higher.
Can Albanians hold dual Greek and Albanian citizenship?
Yes. Greek naturalisation does not require renouncing a previous citizenship, and Albanian law permits dual citizenship. Most naturalised Albanians keep both passports — and since 2025 they can vote in Albanian elections by post, where Greece forms the second-largest diaspora voting bloc in the world after Italy.
Which famous people belong to this story?
Two rolls. From the modern migration and its children: Eleni Foureira, writer Gazmend Kapllani, rappers Sin Boy and Toquel, the “Xenia” actors Nikos Gelia and Kostas Nikouli, actor Laert Vasili, director Neritan Zinxhiria, goalkeeper Thomas Strakosha, and the 1991 weightlifting cohort around Pyrros Dimas — who is of the Greek community of Himarë, not ethnic Albanian, and says so. From the Arvanite heritage inside Greek history: Markos Botsaris and the Souliotes, Bouboulina, the admirals Miaoulis and Kountouriotis, and several Prime Ministers of Greece — Greeks all, presented as they saw themselves.
Do Albanians in Greece still speak Albanian?
The first generation does; the second grew up Greek-speaking faster than in any other diaspora — 1990s survival pressure even led many families to baptise children Orthodox and adopt Greek names, a documented strategy of the stigma years. The counter-movement is real: a weekend-school network of roughly 60 courses, coordinated by the League of Albanian Teachers in Greece and supplied with free textbooks from Tirana, teaches the language to the grandchildren of the walk.
How connected is the community to Albania?
By road, constantly. July 2026 set the record — over 304,000 passenger crossings at the Greece-facing border points in one month; Orthodox Easter 2025 brought 18,600 entries in a single day. Buses run Athens–Tirana daily and Thessaloniki–Tirana twice daily; Corfu–Saranda ferries cross up to ten times a day in season; Athens–Tirana flights run about 23 times a week.
How do Albanians in Greece meet other Albanians?
Traditionally through the village networks stretched across a land border — and each August through the return itself, when the villages of southern Albania fill with cars on Greek plates. Increasingly on dua.com, where the Greek community is among the platform’s largest and its matches reach across the Kakavia road into Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia. The couple in this page’s love-story section built exactly that bridge, and lives in Thessaloniki.
