Ismail Kadare was Albania's grand man of letters. He died in 2024. Over the course of his long career he wrote at least 80 novels, plays, essays and story collections, dominating the foreign-language section of the bookshop in Tirana's central square by sheer volume of output. Mr Kadare has since been eclipsed internationally by Lea Ypi as the world's best-known Albanian writer.
You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?