The highland areas of Albania have been claimed by various nations but governed by none. Authority has always rested with the Mal, the Albanian word for tribe and also—to give some idea of the cozy interaction among Albanian clans—the Albanian word for the mountain that each village is on top of. The tribalism that has disappeared from the rest of Europe (or been reduced to what tartan you wear on your golf slacks) is still a prime fact of existence in Albania. Tribal identification transcends the theological hatreds so avidly pursued in the rest of the Balkans. There are tribes with both Christian and Muslim members. “The true religion of the Albanian is being an Albanian,” said nineteenth-century nationalist Pashko Vasa. Tribal identification transcended atheism, too. In the 1960s, twenty-eight of the fifty-two members of the Albanian Communist Party’s central committee were related by blood. Blood being the key word. Albania is remarkable for the number and persistence of its blood feuds. As soon as a boy is of age, he is liable to become a Lord of Blood, a Zot i Gjakut, with responsibility for killing members of the clan who killed members of his clan, who killed members of their clan, and so forth —a sort of pyramid scheme of death, if you will. Men who are “in blood” can spend years shut up inside their fortified houses. Girls, however, are let off the hook unless they swear to be virgins and wear men’s clothes. Lest anyone accuse the Albanians of utterly eschewing all rule of law, this takes place under the auspices of the Kanun Lek Dukagjini, the Law of Lek, a voluminous compendium of tribal custom and practice dating back at least to the 1400s, copies of which may be purchased at book stalls in Tirana. According to James Pettifer, who wrote an essay on the subject for the Blue Guide to Albania, anthropologists estimate that there are some 2,000 blood feuds going on in Albania and that as many as 60,000 people are involved. (The Blue Guide is one of the few tourist manuals with a good section on the ins and outs of vendetta killing.) In 1992, a man was beheaded with an ax in a Tirana hotel lobby—revenge for a murder his father had committed in a northern village more than forty years before. The Albanians certainly have preserved their culture. Whether this is a good idea is a question that can be decided only, of course, by Albanians. But in these times of multiculti zeal, it may be worth noting that the Albanian language did not have a proper alphabet until 1908. The country didn’t get a railroad until 1947. The first Albanian university was founded in 1957. And there is an
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online