This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1967, Communist Albania's leader Enver Hoxha declared his country the world's first constitutionally atheist state, and by that May the regime had nationalized every religious building it could reach, 2,169 of them in total. Orthodox and Catholic churches came down alongside mosques and Bektashi shrines, closed, demolished or repurposed to some other use, in a campaign aimed at religion as such rather than at any one faith in particular.
The Orthodox and Catholic communities of Albania felt that campaign with the same severity Muslims and Bektashi Sufis did. Public worship of any kind became illegal country wide, and it stayed illegal for close to a quarter century, through Hoxha's death in 1985 and into the rule of his successor Ramiz Alia, who began allowing a more tolerant policy only after taking power.
The ban itself was formally lifted in December 1990, in time for Christmas services to be held openly again after decades of enforced silence, though one account of the period places the ban's official termination in 1991 rather than 1990, a discrepancy the record has not resolved.
What Hoxha's ban changed for Christianity's spread in Albania was total suppression rather than mere restriction. Every church building the state could reach was seized or destroyed, and an Orthodox and Catholic presence that had stood in Albania for centuries went, for over twenty years, without a single legally open place of worship.