The Albanians are all Orthodox. (Most but not all Albanians are Muslim.) When this part of Bessarabia fell under Romanian rule in 1856, some families moved to three more villages close to the Sea of Azov, which flows into the Black Sea, where their descendants remain. Albanians also lived in Odessa, but Zhovtnevoe, whose original name was Karakurt, which means “black wolf” and is still in wide use today, remained a sort of Ukrainian Albanian capital village.
