Ethnic Greeks Leave Albania in Greater Numbers to Seek Fruits of West : Migration: Even a drowsy town across the border seems like Paris to a people who have been shut off from the outside world since World War II.

Four of six restaurants in this small village drowsing in the mountains of northern Greece close for lunch. The dry goods store is well stocked with red plastic table lamps, umbrellas in three fluorescent colors and dusty Hula Hoops.

But Filiates, Greece--population 4,000--might as well be Paris, for newcomer Vassiliki Dalani. Life tastes sweet here.

“I had an apple at lunch,” the 35-year-old farm worker marveled. And dressed in the finest clothes she had ever seen--hand-me-down gifts from Greek charities--Dalani strolled the wondrous streets of Filiates. A friend pointed out a curious, curved yellow fruit: A banana. One day, Dalani promised, she will eat a banana. Anything seems possible in this winter of luck and hope.

Dalani and several hundred like her in Filiates today are part of a stream of about 5,000 rural Albanians--most of them ethnic Greeks--who have walked into Greece in recent weeks from the last unabashedly Communist country in Europe.

Their decades-vaulting trek across snowy mountains and past border guards, who sometimes shoot and sometimes just stare, marks the second major exodus in recent months from a nation of 3 million that has systematically shut itself off from the outside world since the end of World War II. Several thousand Albanians who had sought refuge in foreign embassies in Tirana were ferried to Italy and new homes in Western Europe last July.

Ethnic Greeks among the Albanians fleeing the poorest and most repressive country in Europe are symbols of growing tumult in the Balkans where, with the departure of tight government control, ethnic tensions roil one country after another. Their flight also reinforces a well-known message to governments across Europe: With the death of the East-built Iron Curtain, it will take a West-built Paper Curtain to keep hundreds of thousands of poor East Europeans from rushing West where the wealthy live.

New refugees sheltering at a Greek government orphanage here talk about their thirst for freedom but quickly make plain that what they most want now is a decent paying job.

The calloused farmers of the new influx, for whom Filiates is the first glimpse of a long-forbidden new world, discomfit both Albania and Greece, but for different reasons.

While the world rivets anxiously on the Persian Gulf, Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis will become the first Western leader to visit Albania in more than four decades.

At a summit today, he is expected to urge Albanian President Ramiz Alia to help stop the stream of refugees from becoming a flood. More than 3,000 crossed on New Year’s Eve. Since then, each night has brought a few dozen cold, hungry and exhausted walkers to Filiates. The Greek government is striving to shut off the influx from a region of southern Albania that was once controlled by Greece and is still known to Greeks as Northern Epirus.

By Athens’ count, about 300,000 ethnic Greeks, one-tenth of the country’s population, live in Albania. Tirana counts only about one-fifth that many Albanians who speak Greek at home and are putative Christians. Religion, formally abolished in 1967, is legal again in Albania, where the majority is Muslim.

“The desire of the Greek government is for the Greeks of Northern Epirus to remain on their ancestral land--and they will, when living conditions improve,” said government spokesman Vyron Polydoras in Athens.

As a matter of geopolitics, with the Balkan future so unsettled, Athens wants ethnic Greeks to remain on land that was once Greece’s.

As a matter of economics, Greece could not afford an influx of great magnitude. Anything approaching the 1989 flow of 320,000 ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey, for example, would beggar the resources of a country that may look rich to newly arrived Albanians but, in the judgment of its own government, is economically the sick man of Western Europe.

Mitsotakis will ask Alia to grant immunity to any ethnic Greeks who return to Albania, and he will promise investment by Greek businessmen hoping to do business in the Albanian south. He may also echo a call from bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church to allow priests into Albania.

“We are Orthodox,” said Yotis Fotis, a 42-year-old tractor driver who walked across the border with 15 neighbors from Vagalati, an Albanian village with a population of 1,200, a few neighborhood television sets and one automobile.

“No one has been baptized since 1967, but we secretly kept the tradition alive at home. If you were caught, you went to jail for up to six years. But we celebrated all the religious holidays--we did everything. All we lacked was a priest and a church,” Fotis said.

For his part, Alia, who is seeking a measured way out of dead-end communism, promises liberalizing reforms and has scheduled elections for next month. However, thousands of Albanians exercised their right to leave--a new freedom--by dark of night.

In effect, they are voting with their feet against reform prospects in what one of the new arrivals here called “a pick and shovel country” where workers are paid the equivalent of $1 per day. Some Greeks suspect the Tirana government is behind it, but the flight of refugees represents an international embarrassment for Alia precisely when he least needs one.

For the new refugees, blinking in the bright lights of glamorous Filiates, their old lives, and Albania, are dead letters.

“Sure, I’ll go back one day--as a tourist,” Fotis said.

Christos Paris, a 21-year-old farm worker, walked nine hours across the mountains and then walked into Filiates to go window shopping.

“In this one small town, I counted nine butcher shops! In Albania, we ate meat rarely. It was rationed to us in small amounts, and at limited times, like a doctor’s prescriptions,” Paris said. “I came to work. I want to be like any other young person in the West. I’ll go anywhere there’s a job.”

Filiates--which boasts a textile plant, an army garrison and a large number of pensioners living off money they earned abroad--is suffering its own brand of culture shock. Confided a shopkeeper: “The Albanians are dirty, they steal and they molest our women.”

Such judgments, like the political consequences of his flight, are unknown to newcomers like Yotis Fotis. Nor would they interest him.

“I just want a job--nothing for free. The only thing we are truly familiar with is work,” he said. “The day before leaving, I went to the border to search for an area that wasn’t heavily guarded. I found one, but it’s mostly luck. We bet against death--and we won.”

For the newly lucky in Filiates today, it’s bright lights and apples--maybe even bananas--from here on in.