As years go, 1983 was rather uneventful in Albania and its summer sleepy. But in hindsight, just how quickly and thoroughly the country would change only a few years later was perhaps forewarned one late morning that June, when a young man drove off in a government car down the main avenue of my neighborhood, Myslym Shyri Street. He skirted the sidewalks left and right, wheels screeching, ultimately slamming the belching car into a plane tree next to Rriku’s newsstand at the end of the street.

Halfway through the joyride, and right in front of the movie theater, the Polish-made Fiat swiped the bicycle cart of the neighborhood’s ice cream man, our Gega, knocking him over. His four canisters of ice cream smashed on the ground with a blast. Curious onlookers thronged. Then came the sirens, the investigators and the ambulance that took the graying man to the hospital.

It was the Tirana of 40 years ago — the few cars that existed served party bosses and government officials, so the rumor that a car-gone-mad had run Gega down, scoop in hand, spread through the neighborhood like wildfire.

Who knows if that distant memory would have resurfaced if three years ago I hadn’t seen a photo of the ice cream man on one of those Facebook pages that ooze with nostalgia? This one focuses on late Communist Albania and is named “Na ishte dikur” in Albanian, “Once upon a time.”

In the photo, Gega is shown pushing his cart on Tirana’s central square and a young girl walks towards him with an ice cream cone in hand. A giant portrait of Enver Hoxha, hanging from the colonnade of the Palace of Culture, looms in the background. It looks like a glossed mise en scène for the period’s propaganda magazines.

Half of the hundreds of comments under that Facebook post were in loathing of the dictator and half in longing for the ice cream man. The post itself was shared 200-odd times. Hoxha and Gega were two of the main fixtures of my childhood, so I shared it too.

“Do you recall when that car hit him?” a neighbor wrote when he saw my re-post. I did not. I hadn’t even been aware it happened. But when my neighbor mentioned it, I began to reconstruct the story and the world it came from. What happened to Gega, I wondered? Who was he? Did he — did these guys — have a name even?

Three or four generations worth of kids had known him as the tall Gega, the tall Gheg, to distinguish him from Ali, the short, plump one with whom he’d shared the territory. There were quite a few of them in town and we called them that because they came from the north. Albanians are divided between Tosks in the south and Ghegs in the north, but from Tirana on down to the south of the country, when we said Gega it was not the origin of these people we had in mind. It had become the generic name kids had for ice cream men and peddlers of sweetmeats.

Moreover, the Gheg dialect — the Albanian of Kosovo, northern Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia — with its soft R’s and nasal vowels chewing up participle endings, was not how they spoke, or at least most of them didn’t. Our ice cream man’s participles were complete and his baritone A-koo-llo-RRREY! rolled and boomed.

Most Gegas were not born to Albanian-speaking families. They were Goranis, a community of Muslim Slavs from the high plateaus and remote valleys on the borderlands of present day Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia. We’re talking here about 29 villages, a few tens of thousands of people, in a patch of the Sharr mountains between Kukës, Prizren and Tetovo.

Their language — they call it “našinski,” that is, “ours” or “our language” — is closest to western Macedonian dialects, but with distinct grammatical features and peppered with Serbian, Albanian and archaic Turkish words. During the Ottoman period, they were a pastoral community that would take their flocks as far south as the plains of Thessaly for the winter. According to oral tradition, brigandage then forced some to give up herding and move to urban areas where they practiced wrestling and sold boza, roasted nuts or halva in the market.

Of halva and wrestling

But it might have been simply overpopulation that forced many Gorani men to wander the Ottoman orbit for work. “Theirs was a seasonal migration,” Thomas Schmidinger, an Austrian ethnologist, told me. Men would ritualize their departure around the day of Saint Demetrius in October, making sure to be home for Djuren, Saint George’s Day, in late spring. Summers were a time for plowing the land, dealing with livestock, marriages and circumcision parties accompanied by wrestling performances.

During this seasonal labor migration, which they referred to with the Turkish word “gurbet,” they were known for being street-food peddlers: roasted chickpeas, grilled tripe, calf liver cubes and kebabs. With time, they became associated with beverages, ice cream and pastries.

It may have been in Prizren — nestled up against the Sharr’s foothills and the center of the regional market — that the Goranis first established their reputation for sweets and refreshments, food researcher Jeton Jagxhiu told me. Well into the 1950s, one family of confectioners had a snow-storage pit — essential to making ice cream and cold soft drinks in the summer during the pre-refrigerator era — in their courtyard. Not long ago, the town numbered about a dozen Gorani pastry shops.

The end of the Gheg profession

A tribe of ice cream men exits the scene.

Altin Raxhimi

The end of the Gheg profession

A tribe of ice cream men exits the scene.

Altin Raxhimi