Albanians in Ukraine: The Four Villages and Their Language

Ukraine has the smallest Albanian community in this guide and by some distance the most remarkable one. It is not a diaspora built by modern migration. It is a language island: four villages founded between 1811 and 1862 by Orthodox Albanians who had already spent three centuries in Bulgaria, and whose speech preserves forms that southern Albania itself lost around 1500. The last time anyone counted, in the census of 2001, there were 3,308 of them. There has been no census since, the working estimate is about 5,000, and three of the four villages have been under Russian occupation since 24 February 2022.

Until the 1930s the people of these villages could not tell a visiting ethnographer what they were. They called their neighbours ga tantë, “of ours”, and their language si neve, “like us”. It was the Slavist Nikolai Derzhavin, looking for Bulgarian colonies in the steppe, who stumbled on villages speaking something else entirely and told the villagers what it was. That is the fact to hold on to when you read the numbers below: this is a community that learned its own name from the scholars who came to study it, and every count anyone has made of it has been made through that fog.

How many Albanians live in Ukraine?

The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the reason is worth stating plainly before any number is quoted. Ukraine has run exactly one census since independence, in December 2001. A second was ordered for 2023; that order lost legal force on 20 October 2023, and no census has been held since. Every figure for the Albanian community that postdates 2001 is therefore an estimate, not a count.

For more on this topic, read Albanians in Croatia and Albanians in Italy.

What the 2001 census recorded is precise. Across Ukraine, 3,308 people declared themselves Albanian. Of those, 1,740 gave Albanian as their mother tongue, 1,181 gave Russian, 301 gave Ukrainian and 84 gave another language. That single row already tells you that roughly half the people who called themselves Albanian no longer called Albanian their first language, and that the language they had moved to was overwhelmingly Russian rather than Ukrainian.

Set against the Soviet series the 2001 figure looks stable rather than collapsing: 3,809 in 1959, 3,972 in 1970, 3,874 in 1979, 3,343 in 1989, 3,308 in 2001. But a stable declared count in a community that has been intermarrying for eighty years is not the same as a stable community, and the researchers who work in the villages have always said so.

The two most authoritative modern estimates both land in the same place. The Kunstkamera team who have done fieldwork in the villages since 1998 wrote in 2016 that “about 5,000 Albanians” live in Ukraine, adding at once that an exact number cannot be given and that no official statistic they would trust exists. Aleksandr Dermentli, who heads the Union of Albanians of Ukraine, gave the same figure of around 5,000 to Radio Free Europe in May 2022. Broader ranges circulate — Ukraïner reports 5,000 to 10,000 from various sources, with fewer than half speaking the language — but they are not counts.

Source: 1897 Russian Empire census; Soviet censuses 1926–1989 (Ukrainian SSR); State Statistics Service of Ukraine, census 2001.

From the census floor to a working figure

Read the ladder downwards, not upwards. The census row is the only counted number; everything below it is somebody's estimate, and the top of the reported range has no published method behind it. This page uses 4,000–6,000 as the range a careful reader should carry, centred on the 5,000 that both the scholars and the community's own association give.

Where the 3,308 were counted

Two oblasts held 83 percent of everyone counted. Odesa oblast — meaning, in practice, the single village of Karakurt in the Budzhak steppe near the Moldovan border — had 1,862. Zaporizhzhia oblast, meaning the three villages inland from the Sea of Azov, had 892. The remaining 554 were scattered across every other region of the country, with the largest groups in Donetsk oblast (112), Dnipropetrovsk oblast (102) and the city of Kyiv (74).

The interesting number is not the total but the split. In Odesa oblast, 1,484 of the 1,862 — just under 80 percent — still gave Albanian as their mother tongue. In Zaporizhzhia oblast only 198 of 892 did, barely 22 percent, while 608 gave Russian. Two branches of one small community, separated in 1862 by six hundred kilometres of steppe, had ended up in completely different linguistic places. Everything else on this page is, in one way or another, an attempt to explain that gap.

Source: State Statistics Service of Ukraine, census 2001, table 5.1, by region.

The four Albanian villages of Ukraine

There are four of them, and they are the whole story. One sits in Budzhak, the wedge of steppe between the Danube and the Dniester in the far south-west of the country. The other three sit within a few kilometres of each other in the Azov steppe, in what is now Melitopol raion of Zaporizhzhia oblast, and were founded by families who left the first village in 1862.

All three of the Azov villages appear on the Ukrainian government's official register of temporarily occupied territories, each with the same start date: 24 February 2022. Karakurt does not appear on that register. As of March 2026 the Bessarabian outlet Mahala described it as the only village with an Albanian-speaking community still on Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Source: settlement coordinates from the Ukrainian Centre for Social Data; occupation status from the Ministry of Development of Communities and Territories register, order No. 376 of 28 February 2025 as amended.

Karakurt, in the Budzhak steppe

Karakurt lies in Bolhrad raion, seven kilometres from the district town of Bolhrad and a short drive from the Moldovan border. Its name is Turkic and predates the village: an 1808 document lists a Nogai clan holding two auls here, one of them called Karakurt. What the word means is still argued in the village — most take it for the black widow spider that is common in the southern steppe, others read it as “black wolf”. From 1945 the village was called Zhovtneve, after the October Revolution; the historic name was restored under Ukraine's decommunisation law in 2016, and locals treat that restoration as a matter of identity rather than paperwork.

The 2001 census counted 2,707 people in Karakurt and asked all of them their mother tongue. The answers came back in eight languages: Albanian 1,322, Bulgarian 500, Russian 409, Gagauz 311, Ukrainian 125, Romanian 37, Belarusian 2, Armenian 1. That is the single most useful piece of data anyone has on this community, because it is the only place where the census reaches down to the village and finds a working Albanian majority-of-plurality. The community's own account is that the village was more than three-quarters Orthodox Albanian at its founding, laid out in three parts — Arnaut, Bulgarian and Gagauz — with the Gagauz quarter across the Karasulak river.

The three villages by the Sea of Azov

Divnynske, Hamivka and Heorhiivka lie in a line along the Akchokrak and Domuzla rivers, ten kilometres or so south of the town of Priazovske. Each was founded on the site of a Nogai settlement that had been abandoned a generation earlier, and each kept the Nogai name in everyday speech long after it was given a new one on paper: Taz for Divnynske, Dzhandran for Hamivka, Tyushki for Heorhiivka. Divnynske was named for Devnya, the village near Varna the founders' grandparents had left; Heorhiivka for Georgi Kirchev, who led the move.

They were small from the start and they stayed small. Klaus, writing a few years after they were founded, recorded 213 male souls at Divnynske, 166 at Heorhiivka and 111 at Hamivka. In 2001 the three together held 1,593 people. Devninske and Heorhiivka began as almost purely Albanian settlements; Hamivka was Albanian and Gagauz together.

How Albanians reached the Ukrainian steppe

The route runs Albania to Bulgaria to Bessarabia to the Azov steppe, over roughly three hundred and fifty years, and each leg was a flight from something. It is unusually well established for a community this small, because the linguistic evidence and the archival evidence agree.

The homeland: Korça, Devoll, Kolonja

The ancestors came from the south-east of what is now Albania — specifically the krahina of Devoll and Kolonja and the country around Korça, with its old towns of Voskopoja and Vithkuq. That localisation is not a family tradition; it is a conclusion drawn from the dialect, which belongs squarely to the north Tosk type spoken on the eastern edge of that area. The families were Orthodox Christians, and what pushed them out was the Ottoman conquest and the tax, seizure and conversion pressure that followed it.

They went east because their people had gone east before. Seasonal and multi-year labour migration from the hills around Korça into central and eastern Bulgaria is attested long before the Ottomans arrived; the land was poor, the plains marshy and the population too large for it. When leaving became permanent rather than seasonal, the road was already known. The most likely date for the move into north-eastern Bulgaria is the 16th century, with the 17th as a weaker possibility; they settled in the country around Varna, and lived there among Bulgarians and Gagauz for about three hundred years.

One sister community from the same movement survives inside Bulgaria: Mandritsa, in Ivaylovgrad municipality on the Greek and Turkish border, founded by Orthodox Albanians from the Korça area and dated by the available evidence to 1635. Every other Albanian village in Bulgaria was absorbed into Bulgarian. Comparing the two dialects is how the linguists date the Ukrainian one: the Mandritsa speech is closer to modern Albanian, which implies the ancestors of the Karakurt villagers left the homeland earlier.

Bessarabia, 1809 to 1819

The next move was triggered by the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–1812. Köppen, collecting material on the non-Russian peoples of the empire, records that in 1809 or 1810 the Albanians — “the only Arnauts in Bulgaria”, he calls them — living around 300 households strong in the village of Devnya near Varna, went out through Galați into Bessarabia and were settled in the Tatar village of Chumai on the Yalpuh. Villagers' own memory, recorded by the linguist Nina Kotova in the 1950s, is that around 20 families came in the first group.

The 1810s went badly. Numbers fell, some died, some probably went back. Under an imperial decree of 29 December 1819 on the settlement of Bulgarians and other trans-Danubian colonists in Bessarabia, the survivors were granted land, and from that point they lived permanently at the colony of Karakurt on the left side of Lake Yalpuh. Skalkovsky dates the colony itself to 1811, founded “near the ashes of the old Tatar settlement of Karakurt, deserted in 1807, by Albanians, or Arnauts, who moved here from Turkey during the war of 1808–1811”. Not every historian accepts that the 1811 colony stood where the village stands now.

After 1819 Karakurt was one of the larger settlements of the district around Bolhrad, with 182 families. A crop failure and famine thinned it in the early 1820s: by 1826 the whole Bessarabian region held 119 Arnaut families, 305 males and 285 females. A second wave arrived after the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829, probably Arnauts from the Razgrad area. By 1850 Köppen found 109 Arnaut families in Karakurt, 1,060 people, alongside just 118 Bulgarians and 13 Ukrainians — and 154 Albanian families, 1,328 people, in Bessarabia as a whole.

The move to the Azov steppe, 1861 to 1862

The Crimean War moved the border, not the people. Under the Treaty of Paris southern Bessarabia was handed to the Principality of Moldavia — 40 colonies with 22,365 inhabitants — and Karakurt, with 123 families, found itself outside the Russian Empire. It would not return until 1878.

Russia, wanting the Azov steppe settled, offered land in Berdiansk uezd of Tavria governorate to colonists willing to move back into the empire. Up to 27,000 Bulgarian, Gagauz and Vidin colonists took it in 1861 and 1862, and part of the Albanians of Karakurt went with them. Delegates chose the plots in the summer of 1861; the mass move followed in 1862. On three abandoned Nogai sites they founded the villages that are now Divnynske, Hamivka and Heorhiivka.

1. 16th c. · Orthodox Albanians from Devoll, Kolonja and the Korça country move east into the Varna region of Ottoman Bulgaria.
2. 1635 · Mandritsa is founded in southern Bulgaria by Albanians from the same corner of the homeland — the only Albanian-speaking village left in Bulgaria today.
3. 1809–10 · Around 300 households leave Devnya near Varna through Galați for Bessarabia and are settled at Chumai on the Yalpuh.
4. 1811 · The colony of Karakurt is founded on the site of an abandoned Nogai settlement.
5. 1819 · An imperial decree of 29 December grants the trans-Danubian colonists land; the Albanians settle permanently at Karakurt.
6. 1826 · 119 Arnaut families remain in the Bessarabian region — 305 men and 285 women — after famine and crop failure.
7. 1850 · Köppen counts 109 Arnaut families and 1,060 people at Karakurt; 1,328 Albanians in Bessarabia as a whole.
8. 1856 · The Treaty of Paris puts southern Bessarabia under Moldavia; Karakurt, 123 families, is outside the Russian Empire.
9. 1861–62 · Delegates pick land in the Azov steppe in 1861; in 1862 part of Karakurt moves and founds Divnynske, Hamivka and Heorhiivka.
10. 1897 · The imperial census finds 848 Albanian speakers in Bessarabia governorate and none at all in Tavria — the Azov villagers are written down as Turks or Tatars.
11. 1926 · The Soviet census counts 3,023 Albanians in the Ukrainian SSR, 2,992 of them in the Melitopol okruh. Budzhak is in Romania and is not counted.
12. 1932–33 · The Holodomor kills around 500 people in Divnynske and more than 200 in Heorhiivka.
13. 1945 · Karakurt is renamed Zhovtneve by decree of 14 November.
14. 1948 · Yulia Ivanova begins the Kunstkamera's Priazovia expedition, which is still running seventy years later.
15. 2001 · Ukraine's only post-independence census counts 3,308 Albanians; 1,740 give Albanian as their mother tongue.
16. 2016 · Zhovtneve gets its historic name back under the decommunisation law and becomes Karakurt again.
17. 2022 · On 24 February the three Azov villages fall under occupation, where the official register still places them.

The language: a Tosk island two centuries old

The dialect spoken in the four villages is the reason linguists have been travelling to them for a century. By its sound system and its morphology it belongs to the north Tosk type — the group spoken between the Shkumbin and the Vjosa, and specifically to its eastern branch, around Korça, Pogradec, Devoll and Kolonja. What makes it valuable is that it has been cut off from every other Albanian dialect for two hundred years and from the homeland for four hundred, so it has preserved things the homeland lost and invented things the homeland never had.

It is also, on the census evidence, in two different states of health depending on which village you stand in. In Odesa oblast in 2001, 1,484 of 1,862 people who called themselves Albanian still called Albanian their mother tongue. In Zaporizhzhia oblast, 198 of 892 did. A generation earlier the gap was already opening: in 1959, 65.4 percent of the Albanians of the Zaporizhzhia Azov region gave their own language as their mother tongue, a share that had fallen to about a fifth by 2001.

Forms Albania lost around 1500

The archaisms are the headline. The dialect keeps the consonant clusters klj and glj where standard Albanian and almost every modern dialect have shifted them to q and gj, and it keeps the old palatal lj between vowels and in the clusters lk and lg, where the rest of the Albanian-speaking world long ago turned it into j. Both features were normal in the “mother” region until at least the end of the 15th or the start of the 16th century, and were gone from it afterwards. Outside Ukraine they survive only in the far south of the Tosk area, in Çamëria, and in the other island dialects — in Greece, in southern Italy and in Bulgaria.

Set beside those archaisms are innovations the dialect made on its own. The commonest is the flattening of the old Albanian diphthongs: ua becomes u, ie becomes i or e, ye becomes y. In the main Albanian-speaking area that change belongs to the Gheg dialects in the north, which is the opposite end of the country from where these families came — so this is a Tosk dialect that arrived at a Gheg-looking outcome by its own road.

Five languages in one village

The dialect has spent its whole recorded life inside other people's languages, in a fairly strict order. Before the migration it sat in a north Tosk region of heavy Slavic and Aromanian contact. For about three centuries in eastern Bulgaria it developed under Bulgarian and probably Gagauz influence. After the move into the Russian Empire it went on rubbing against Bulgarian and Gagauz, because those were the neighbours who had come with it. Only from the second quarter of the 20th century did Russian become the dominant pressure, and it has been the dominant pressure ever since.

Karakurt is where you can still hear the whole stack. Albanian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Ukrainian and Russian are all spoken in the village; the 2001 census picked up three more as somebody's mother tongue. Almost every Albanian speaker in the village also spoke Gagauz until the last decades of the 20th century — which matters for the next section, because the Gagauz word for an Albanian is arnavut.

Albanian at a distance

Very few Albanians in Ukraine have an Albanian partner available to them. That is not a sentimental observation — it is what the census shows. The community is small, dispersed across a country of forty million, and by 2001 already more likely to speak Russian at home than Albanian. Fewer than four thousand people were declared, and half of them lived outside the two oblasts where the villages are.

That is the situation dua.com was built for. It is the Albanian dating app, used by Albanians in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia and across the diaspora — the people who, in Karakurt, would be a two-thousand-kilometre drive away. If you have Albanian roots and no Albanian community within reach, that is precisely the gap an app closes, and it costs nothing to look.

What they call themselves

The community's own name for itself is not Albanian, or shqiptar, or anything a map would recognise. It is a phrase: ga tantë, “of ours”. You hear it as a question — Ti ga tantë? “Are you one of ours?” — and as an answer, Jam nga tantë, “I am one of ours”. The language has a matching name: si neve, “like us”. To say that somebody speaks Albanian, you say zallahit si neve, “he talks like us”.

That phrase is a dating tool as much as a name. The modern Albanian ethnonym shqiptar arose in the Albanian lands no earlier than the 18th century; it comes from the verb shqiptoj, “to pronounce clearly”. The Ukrainian villagers left before it existed and never acquired it — which on its own puts their departure before the 1700s. And there is a small linguistic bonus in it: their dialect keeps the verb shqiptoj with the older meaning “to understand”, so the ethnonym would mean “one who understands”. A village in the Ukrainian steppe may be the last place preserving the sense that produced the word for “Albanian”.

Are you one of ours? Listen — whose are you? — I am one of ours.

Ti je ga tantë! More, ti ga të kujtë je? — Jam nga tantë. Recorded in Heorhiivka, 2005, and published in Novik & Buchatskaya, “The identity of the Albanians of Priazovia”, 2016.

Arnaut, and the streets of Odesa

The second name arrived with the scholars. Nikolai Derzhavin (1877–1953), a Slavist working on the Bulgarian colonies of southern Russia, found villages in the Azov steppe that were not speaking Bulgarian, worked out what they were speaking, and published a series of papers in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. From the 1930s the villagers began to describe themselves as arnauts — the Ottoman-derived word their Gagauz and Turkish-speaking neighbours had always used for Albanians — and their language as arnautçe. Yulia Ivanova, who did fieldwork in the villages from 1948 for the next half-century, recorded the same sequence: before the researchers came, most people could not say what nation they belonged to.

The word albanets, “Albanian”, came later still, borrowed from Russian, and only settled in after the Second World War. Ivanova's conclusion, which the current Kunstkamera team repeat, is blunt: the villagers began calling themselves Albanians because visiting scholars told them that is what they were. Ask the question in Russian today and you get the Russian answer — “I am an Albanian, that is our nation” — but among themselves, and especially when outsiders are in the room, it is still ga tantë.

Arnaut left two other traces. The hard durum wheat grown across southern Ukraine is called arnautka, and the villagers have connected the variety to their own name since at least the early 20th century. And Odesa has two streets in the historic centre, Velyka Arnautska and Mala Arnautska, named for the Balkan settlers — Greeks and Albanians in the classification of the day — who came to the young city. Karakurt informants cite those street names as proof that there were once many more of them in the region.

The Soviet century: famine, war and Russian

The Soviet century is where the numbers move, and almost all of the movement is loss. The Ukrainian SSR recorded 3,023 Albanians in 1926 — 2,992 of them in the Melitopol okruh, and only 11 in the Odesa okruh, because Budzhak and Karakurt were inside Romania and outside the count altogether. Thirteen years later, in 1939, the same republic recorded 1,567.

That is a fall of nearly half in a single intercensal period, in the villages that had held almost the whole community. Two things happened in between.

The Holodomor in Divnynske and Heorhiivka

The first was the famine. The National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide's register of mass burial sites carries entries for two of the three Azov villages. In Divnynske, according to eyewitness accounts collected for the register, around 500 local residents were killed by the famine of 1932–33, of whom 66 have been identified by name. In Heorhiivka more than 200 residents were killed, and 129 names have been established. Memorial stones were placed on the mass graves in the village cemeteries on 24 November 2007 and 22 November 2008.

Set those figures against the villages themselves and the scale is clear: Divnynske had 668 people at the 2001 census, Heorhiivka 446. The Holodomor took a number of people from each village comparable to its entire present population. Karakurt has no entry in the register, for the same reason it barely appears in the 1926 census — in 1932 it was in Romania.

Source: National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide, register of mass burial sites

The Second World War

The second thing was quieter and lasted longer. During the Second World War the Soviet authorities decided not to send Albanians — or Gagauz — to the front, on the reasoning that Bulgaria had joined the Axis and these were people from Bulgarian colonies. Men already serving stayed in the army; new conscripts were sent to the labour battalions instead, where conditions were severe and, by the villagers' account, many did not come home.

After the war there were no deportations and no bans on professions, which was not the treatment the Bulgarians received. But the lesson many drew was that the nationality line on a Soviet document was a risk, and that it was safer to write something else — a habit that shows up in every count taken afterwards.

Why the counts kept falling

Then came intermarriage. Men returning from the army brought wives from Mordovia, the Urals, the Far East. Before the 1930s a mixed marriage in these villages usually meant a Bulgarian or a Gagauz partner — people the Albanians had lived beside for centuries. Afterwards it could mean anyone, and the children of those marriages were registered by preference rather than by father, which in practice meant Russian: the nationality of the largest Soviet people and, to many, of the new Soviet identity itself.

And finally language policy did the rest. Parents in Karakurt switched to Russian on purpose, so their children would “socialise” better; speaking Bulgarian, Gagauz or Arnaut marked you as a villager. The declared counts fell from 3,972 in 1970 to 3,874 in 1979 to 3,343 in 1989 — a slope that says less about how many people had Albanian grandparents than about how many were still willing, or able, to say so.

Since 24 February 2022

On 24 February 2022 Russia's full-scale invasion split the community in two, and the split runs exactly along the 1862 migration.

The three Azov villages are listed on Ukraine's official register of territories where hostilities are or were fought or which are temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation — the list approved by the Ministry of Development of Communities and Territories, order No. 376 of 28 February 2025 and amended since. Heorhiivka and Divnynske appear under Oleksandrivka rural hromada, Hamivka under Priazovske settlement hromada, all three in Melitopol raion of Zaporizhzhia oblast, all three categorised as temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, and all three with the same start date: 24 February 2022. None of the three has an end date. What has happened inside them since is not something this page can responsibly describe; we have found no dated, verifiable reporting from the villages themselves, and we are not going to invent any.

Karakurt, six hundred kilometres away in Budzhak, is not on that register. In May 2022 Aleksandr Dermentli, who heads the Union of Albanians of Ukraine and lives in the village, told Radio Free Europe that the situation there was still calm, that explosions were audible only at night, and that the village had filled with displaced people from the Kyiv and Odesa areas — including Albanians. He said he had helped women and children get out of the country: one family from Irpin to Albania, many to Germany, many to Poland, a few to Switzerland. In March 2026 the Bessarabian outlet Mahala described Karakurt as the only village with an Albanian-speaking community remaining under Ukrainian control.

The village has its own losses. Anatolii Dermentli, a native of Karakurt, was the first soldier from the village to be killed; a memorial plaque went up on the wall of the Karakurt lyceum at the end of 2023, and in March 2025 the Order For Courage, third class, awarded to him posthumously, was handed to his mother.

Whatever happens in Ukraine, I will be here.

Aleksandr Dermentli, head of the Union of Albanians of Ukraine, Karakurt, to Radio Free Europe, 8 May 2022.

Everything in this section is dated to the source that reports it: the occupation register as amended to 16 July 2026, Radio Free Europe on 8 May 2022, and Mahala on 13 March 2026 and 14 March 2025. Nothing here should be read as a description of the situation on the day you happen to be reading it.

Karakurt today

Karakurt is a village of a few thousand people where four languages are still normal in one household and nobody thinks that is unusual. The census found eight mother tongues in 2001; residents will tell you that if three people of different backgrounds meet and one of them is an Albanian speaker, the conversation tends to switch to Albanian, because that is the village's shared language. Families describe two children of the same parents identifying differently — one Bulgarian, one Gagauz — depending on which grandmother they spent more time with. Women who married in from elsewhere in Ukraine and Moldova end up speaking three or four of the local languages within a few years.

What holds it together is not policy. It is grandmothers, church calendars and marriages. And the people who study the village keep saying, in the same breath as they admire it, that the arrangement has an expiry date.

The school

The village school was built in 1965 and took its first graduating class in 1966. In March 2026 it had 164 pupils, taught in a mixed format with part of the teaching online, and a staff of 24 teachers plus two part-timers. Albanian is taught there — but as an elective, and for between thirty minutes and one hour a week. Before 2022 the community was planning a proper Albanian-language school in Karakurt; the war ended that.

The teacher of Albanian in the school, Nataliia Kircheva, puts the naming problem in a sentence: the residents themselves did not always know what their language was called, and her grandmother always told her she spoke Arnaut. The school's director is blunter about where it is heading.

I will say it honestly — our children do not know Arnaut. Some know Bulgarian, some Gagauz. But not even all the adult residents speak Arnaut any more.

Valentyna Popazova, director of the Karakurt school, to Mahala, 13 March 2026. Her estimate is that in about thirty years the language may stop being living and simply disappear.

What is still kept

What is still practised is mostly seasonal and mostly shared with the neighbours. The village revived Paparuda, the spring rain-calling rite, in which a girl in a skirt woven from vine and thin branches dances along the village streets while householders pour water over her; by tradition the role should go to an orphan, because God will look on her more kindly. Albanians and Bulgarians keep Trifon Zarezan, the vine-pruning feast, together. The community marks Skanderbeg on 6 May — the same day their Gagauz neighbours keep the Orthodox St George's Day, so both cook kurban and everyone eats together. A monument to Skanderbeg stands in front of the village House of Culture.

The institutions are small and mostly recent. The Association of Albanians of Odesa, founded in 1993, no longer exists; the Rilindia cultural and educational association and the Karakurt Centre of Albanian Culture, opened in 2016, carry the work in Bessarabia, and the Dardania society did so in Priazovia. The Union of Albanians of Ukraine is the body that speaks for the community nationally. Karakurt has had its own seal since 1867, with a bunch of grapes on it.

Who has studied the Albanians of Ukraine

For a community of a few thousand people, the Albanians of Ukraine have a scholarly literature out of all proportion to their size, and it is the best reason to trust the little that is known. Nikolai Derzhavin found the Azov villages while working on Bulgarian colonies and published on them from 1926. The Albanian linguist Selman Islami came out from Tirana on an expedition in 1949. Nina Kotova worked in both Budzhak and Priazovia between 1950 and 1954, and Leonid Demko in Zhovtneve in the 1960s; Leningrad linguists returned through the 1960s and 1970s.

Yulia Ivanova (1922–2006) began the Kunstkamera's Priazovia expedition in 1948 and it has never stopped. Her successors — Aleksandr Novik, Maria Morozova, Denis Ermolin, Yulia Buchatskaya and Aleksandra Dugushina — did fieldwork in the villages from 1998 to 2016 and published the result as a two-volume collective monograph of 912 and 672 pages, with the grammar of the dialect, the dialect texts, the funerary and wedding rites, the dress and the medicine. It is the single indispensable source on this community, and this page leans on it throughout. Ukraïner filmed in the villages in 2019, before any of it was occupied.

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Frequently asked questions about Albanians in Ukraine

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How many Albanians live in Ukraine?

The last count was the 2001 census, which found 3,308. There has been no census since; the order for one in 2023 lost legal force in October 2023. The Kunstkamera researchers who work in the villages estimated about 5,000 in 2016, and the head of the Union of Albanians of Ukraine gave the same figure in 2022. A range of 4,000 to 6,000 is the honest way to carry it.

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Where do Albanians live in Ukraine?

In four villages and, increasingly, everywhere else. Karakurt in Bolhrad raion of Odesa oblast is the Budzhak village; Divnynske, Hamivka and Heorhiivka in Melitopol raion of Zaporizhzhia oblast are the Azov ones. In 2001, 1,862 declared Albanians lived in Odesa oblast and 892 in Zaporizhzhia oblast, with 554 scattered across the rest of the country.

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Are the Albanian villages of Ukraine occupied?

Three of the four are. Divnynske, Hamivka and Heorhiivka all appear on Ukraine's official register of temporarily occupied territories with a start date of 24 February 2022 and no end date. Karakurt, in the far south-west, is not on the register; as of March 2026 it was described in the Ukrainian press as the only Albanian-speaking village still under Ukrainian control.

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What kind of Albanian do they speak?

A north Tosk dialect from the eastern edge of that area — Devoll, Kolonja and the country around Korça. Because it has been isolated for two centuries it keeps sounds standard Albanian lost around 1500, such as the klj and glj clusters in kljumështë (milk) and gljuxë (language), where standard Albanian has qumësht and gjuhë. It has also flattened the old diphthongs on its own: grua became gru, miell became mjil.

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Can Albanians from Albania understand it?

With effort and after a while, in the way a speaker of standard Italian gets used to a rural dialect. The grammar and core vocabulary are recognisably Albanian, but two centuries of Bulgarian, Gagauz, Romanian and above all Russian contact have left heavy marks, and the villagers themselves say their speech has changed within living memory. The nearest comparison is Mandritsa in Bulgaria, whose dialect is closer to modern Albanian than theirs.

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Why is there no ethnicity data after 2001?

Because Ukraine has not run a census since. It was postponed from 2013 to 2016, then to 2020, then to 2023, and the 2023 order was revoked on 20 October 2023 with the war given as the reason. Registers and administrative records in Ukraine have not carried a nationality field in village household books since 2000, so there is no substitute source.

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Is the language dying?

In three of the four villages the census suggested it largely had by 2001: only 198 of 892 declared Albanians in Zaporizhzhia oblast still gave Albanian as their mother tongue. In Karakurt it is alive but thinning — 1,322 people named it in 2001, the school teaches it only as a half-hour to one-hour elective, and the school's director said in March 2026 that in about thirty years it may stop being a living language.

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How did Albanians end up in Ukraine at all?

In two moves, three centuries apart. Orthodox Albanians from Devoll, Kolonja and the Korça country left for eastern Bulgaria in the 16th century under Ottoman pressure, and lived near Varna for about three hundred years. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–1812 they moved again, into Bessarabia, founding Karakurt in 1811. In 1862 part of Karakurt moved on to the Azov steppe and founded the other three villages.