So today we celebrate these tiny, underdog countries, the Rocky countries, who kicked ass against all odds.

You've got to love the underdog. It doesn't matter who they are or whether or not they're good at all, we just want the little guy to win--because in the real world, he usually doesn't.

6 Albania Cheats at War... and Kicks Extraordinary Amounts of Ass

If you're not familiar with the Balkans, here's a fun experiment that'll give you a quick education. Go to YouTube, and find any video from the region (Albania, or Greece, etc). Scroll down to the comments and lay witness to the terrifying spectacle of violent, unrestrained Balkan hate contained within.

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Something along these lines.

That's the Balkans. So when we hold up Albania as an example of a badass underdog of a country, well, you can see what kind of neighborhood they're from.

And it's been that way for a long time. More than 500 years ago, the small, mountainous, fiercely independent country was under attack by the Ottoman Empire, at the time a hugely powerful nation that had just torn through the whole of the Balkans like paper mache. Only tiny Albania stood in its way of total regional domination. The Ottomans promptly high-fived each other, said something about how "this was going to be fun," and prepared for a route.

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Waiting for them was a man named Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg--the name alone is so incredibly badass that it will make you shit yourself--who lead a hardened, patriotic army of Albanian resistance warriors all across the countryside, basically fucking up the Ottoman's shit every opportunity he got.

In one battle, he killed 22,000 Turks while losing a mere 2,000 of his own men. While defending the castle of Kruje, his 8,000 man army beat 160,000 Turkish troops, who were led by the legendary Sultan Mehmet II.

Shit, those are feats we can't even replicate in Age of Empires.



Pictured: Albanian resistance leader Gjergj Skanderbeg, tattooed onto the arm of a man who

we are going to assume will kill you just to see if his gun is still working.

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Gjergj Skanderbeg was what many consider the world's first guerrilla leader, using the mountains to his advantage and striking at the Ottomans in ways that would make any strategy game-playing nine-year-old cry out, "GAY! HAX!"

What was it that finally ended Albania's stand? Fucking malaria. Skanderbeg died in 1467, and though the memory of his name was enough to inspire Albania for another 10 years of resistance, they eventually fell.

That's right, it took mosquitoes to do what the most feared army on Earth at the time could not.