Mother Teresa — the Albanian saint of Calcutta

She was one of the most recognised human beings of the 20th century, yet she spent almost none of her life in the land her people claim as home. Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu — the world knows her as Mother Teresa — was born in 1910 into an ethnic Albanian family, and Albania has embraced her memory ever since.

An Albanian daughter of the wider Balkans

Anjezë was born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and today the capital of North Macedonia, to a devout Catholic Albanian family with roots in the wider region. She left home as a teenager to join a religious order and never lived in Albania itself — a reminder that "Albanian" describes a people spread across Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia and beyond, not only one state.

From Skopje to Calcutta

After training in Ireland she was sent to India, where in Calcutta she founded the Missionaries of Charity, an order devoted to caring for the destitute and the dying. Her work brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and made her, for millions, the very image of compassion. She was canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016.

Communist Albania, officially atheist, kept her at arm's length for decades; she was only able to visit the country as the regime crumbled at the end of the 1980s.

Her presence in Albania today

You don't have to look hard to find her. Most travellers meet her name first at the door: Tirana's international airport is officially Nënë Tereza. In the capital you'll also find Mother Teresa Square, a grand civic space fronting the university, and her image recurs in churches and on monuments in Shkodër and other Catholic-rooted towns of the north. For Albanians of every faith — Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic alike — she is less a religious figure than a shared point of pride, proof that a small nation can give the world an outsized name.