It is the First Balkan War, the Montenegrins have surrounded Shkodra, while the Serbs have occupied lands from the Zadrima plain to the Port of Shëngjin. An entire city is trapped in turmoil. Those within the siege live under the shadow of bombardments, the torment of hunger, and a thirst that no fire can quench. Survival seems like a curse, death a salvation. Kolë Laca must photograph this chaos. His camera not only immortalizes the chronicle of the city but also its fate. The tremor will freeze on the stone slab to save his word. A voice crying out from the castle stones will curse the given word, The Promise, leaving Esat Pasha sleepless, while Hasan Rizaj and the peaceful monk will point their fingers. Osja of the Fortune-Teller will witness it all, though imprisoned within the walls of solitude. Amidst all this chaos, Çerçiz Topulli, an Albanian national hero, roams in search of the enemy, even though he only encounters the promised one. An epic narrative of a nation’s resistance through the triumph of love. In the preface, the author writes: “It was a photograph, nothing more, just a photograph that led me on the path of this book. A few years ago, entirely by chance, thanks to those aimless wanderings on the internet, I came across the photo ‘Gjon Pali and his daughter’ by Kolë Maca. Observing this scene somehow caused a kind of bewilderment mixed with amazement. It was this fleeting moment that ignited my curiosity so strongly.
“The Siege” is not a historical book. It includes real events taken from the chronicles of the time, mainly concerning how the people of Shkodra or others who were caught in the turmoil of the siege lived. But anyone who knows the history or is familiar with this event may notice historical inconsistencies or “mistakes,” such as anachronistic characters. This arises as a result of embellishment or what we call in modern language “fiction”.
