Fans who attended the NBA game on the evening of April 1 between the Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers had a rare opportunity to experience a part of Albanian culture and heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was because the United Center in Chicago hosted an Albanian Heritage Night, organized by the Albanian-American Community in the state of Illinois.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the United Center we marked a first moment for our community. Together we brought Albanian culture to one of the biggest stages in Chicago \u2013 with representation from all our regions,\u201d the community wrote in a Facebook post. \u201cThank you to everyone who came and supported us. If we want more moments like this, we must continue to organize and grow together.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This marks the first time in NBA history that such a cultural event featuring Albanian music and dance has taken place during a game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was very good, 650+ Albanians,\u201d<\/em> said Fatos Brahimi, a board member of the Albanian-American Community in Illinois, for KosovaPress. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor the first time in history, our children danced \u2018xhamadani vija-vija\u2019 among the Bulls. It was heartwarming.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Performances at the United Center were delivered by the groups \u201cArb\u00ebria Chicago,\u201d \u201cShqiponjat e Chicagos,\u201d \u201cEnsemble,\u201d and the Albanian School \u201cKongresi i Manastirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The creative director and choreographer of the event was Altin Naska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such events are not uncommon during NBA games, which attract extremely large audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, never before in the nearly 80-year history of the world\u2019s strongest basketball league has an event of this kind, organized by Albanians, taken place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fans who attended the NBA game on the evening of April 1 between the Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers had a rare opportunity to experience a part of Albanian culture and heritage. This was because the United Center in Chicago hosted an Albanian Heritage Night, organized by the Albanian-American Community in the state of Illinois. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":82057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[301,296,299],"tags":[2761,5288,7991,7990],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82056"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82059,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82056\/revisions\/82059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}