The complexity of Ulcinj’s cultural identity is compounded by how its founding has been memorialized and by whom. Its strategic location on the Adriatic with access to the Mediterranean, makes it an ideal location for moving human beings through pipelines of servitude. Traveling along this route was not a straight through proposition; no, they stopped overnight or for a few days before continuing their journey. Whole environments were built to accommodate weary travelers with lodging, food and supplies, repairs to ships, entertainment, clothing and auction blocks. People who owned these businesses held various religious beliefs, spoke different languages, and possessed various hues. Who came to this region first was the pressing question before Ulcinj’s local historians; a consequence of centuries-long disruptions, displacements and illiteracy. Lack of financial investments in cultural heritage preservation, insipid scholarly research interests in non-Western history and inadequate translations of historical documents all contribute to the ambiguity of their history.

One belief is that Illyrians were decidedly Indo-European and the warrior gene pool from which Ulcinj ancestry descends. The other belief is that the Kolchians were their ancestors but only as a last resort provided the Illyrian theory was debunked. Local historians debate this issue with vigor, using the vestiges of a barrier wall to debate the accuracies in their truths. The wall, constructed in layers of stone, denotes the governing authority over time. For example, when the Byzantines were present, they added a layer of stones, when the Italians were the ruling authority, they added a layer and so on and so forth. The layer of contention is the first layer, was it Illyrian or Kolchian?

Ulcinj’s governing history, as it was shared with me, occurred in the order of the Kolchians/ Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Italian, Germans and Montenegrins. To answer the genealogy of Albanians, I consulted the population census records for Montenegro. In 2011 Ulcinj reported that 71% of the 19,921 residents self-identified as ethnic-Albanian, 0.37% identified as Egyptian and .80% identified as Romi/Roma.1 A deeper look at the population by ethnicity and “mother tongue” suggests 98.6% of the Ulcinj population self-described as ethnic-Albanian, .051% self-identify as Egyptian and 1.12% self-identify as Roma.2 The responses to the census was instructive in that there were semblances of resistance to embrace the nationalistic views of a unified Montenegrin identity evidenced by the penchant to identify as “ethnic-Albanian”. The binary of resistance also emerges in the responses by those who self-identified as Egyptian or Roma. In both cases, each group seemed to want to remain culturally relevant in their immediate communities.

The approach Montenegro used in executing a population census is similar to the way in which the Ottomans conducted theirs. All data was reducible to a system of linear inheritance of Islamic homogeneity— an identity forged under a nationalistic, religious and language umbrella rather than ancestral lineage, which expressly prohibits traditional cultural heritage, knowledge and expressions from integrating with Muslim belief systems. The problem with this methodological approach to the census is that it continues to deny the cultural identity of the population, a substantial portion of whom were African in the formative years of Ulcinj according to the historical genealogy of Ulcinj. There is no logical reason to hyphenate Albanian with “ethnic” unless the intended purpose is to place a social and political asterisk that indicates a difference between whites and non-whites.

Kolchians of Egypt

While the history of Kolchians is substantial, the lack of an Illyrian narrative written by Illyrians themselves aides in the confusion of origin but here are some clues. Lawrence A. Murray, wrote that “St. Matthias was one of five Apostles to have led a mission to Armenia…the lands to which Matthias sailed are now called Adygey, Abkhazia, Adzhar Karachay, Ossetia and Georgia but some ancients then called that region Ethiopia, others called it Albania and some called it Iberia.”3 Murray sheds light on how time, space and boundaries have shifted from the ancients to the present by giving us the possibilities of other references to describe the same place. In this passage, there are eight possible truths to the identity of Albanians.

The inference that Albania was synonymous with Ethiopia, implies a distinct African presence; presence includes African physiognomy that cannot credibly be confused with any other cultural group identity anywhere in the world. The distinct African presence in the Mediterranean also dispels conventional Western scholarship that Africans only left the continent by way of chains with neither the appetite nor curiosity to explore or even conquer the world around them. Specific placement of Ethiopians in the Mediterranean comes from the “late fourth century A.D., church fathers Sophronius and St. Jerome [who] referred to Kolchis as a “second Ethiopia” because of its large Black population4…[and] the ethnic composition of the Kolchians was similar to that of Black Egyptians.5 In his epic work, Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes attributes the founding of Kolchis, the region along the southern and eastern coastal borders of the Black Sea, to an Egyptian pharaoh who had ruled there before Greece even existed.6 Perhaps that is true, Figure 6, however suggests that Apollonians were located deep into the interior of Egypt, near Semá, long before the dispatch from the Egyptian king occurred.