Nevruz in Albania

According to Gianfranco Bria:

The Baktāshis claim to have adopted an ecumenical nationalist rhetoric to achieve a path of accommodation (at most, negotiation) with the secular and multi-confessional roots of Albanian civil religion. In this sense, the celebration of the Nevruz by Baktāshis aims to achieve two goals. The first is to legitimize the monopoly of so-called mysticism within Albanian society, incorporating everything that could be seen as esoteric and/or new-age to portray ‘Albanian ecumenical peculiarity’. The second is to involve the highest number of believers, especially the young (the majority of the population) who have grown up in a post-secular society and are fascinated by western socio-economic models, by mixing the Baktāshi tradition with progressive scientific and political rationalism.

During the 1990s

On the occasion of the Nevruz festival of 1991, the Kryegjyshata (Bektashi headquarters) in Tirana was reopened after the Communist period, in a moving ceremony that was attended by Mother Teresa. During the Nevruz festival of 1999, Naim Frashëri (1846 – 1900), the prominent Albanian writer and patriot of the Albanian national movement, who was also a Bektashi, was nearly canonised as "Baba of Honor".