Albania held its culture in the mouth before the page

How a language went unwritten for centuries

Albanian is an Indo-European language and the only surviving representative of the Albanic branch of the Paleo-Balkan group. It has as many as 7.5 million native speakers, about 6 million of them in the Balkans, and divides into two dialect groups along the line of the Shkumbin river, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south. The split is thought to have opened after the Christianisation of the region in the fourth century and probably no later than the sixth, which leaves the two halves of the language something like fifteen hundred years of divergence behind them.

What the language lacked for most of that time was an agreed way of being written. The first written mention of it is a witness statement recorded in the Republic of Ragusa in 1284. In 1332 the Dominican friar Guillelmus Adae, Archbishop of Antivari, reported that Albanians wrote their books in Latin letters although their speech was nothing like Latin. The oldest surviving attestation of the language itself is a baptism formula of 1462, set down in Albanian inside a Latin text by Pal Engjëlli, Bishop of Durrës.

Official and ecclesiastical business ran in Latin or Greek, and writers used whichever alphabet their religion had handed them. Latin letters served the Catholic north, Greek letters the Orthodox south, the Ottoman Turkish form of the Arabic script the Muslim population, and Cyrillic and a series of locally invented systems filled the gaps. The century between 1750 and 1850 saw Albanian put into writing in at least ten different alphabets, which is very likely a record for a European language, and most of those systems have since been forgotten by the people whose language they recorded.

One national alphabet was adopted at the Congress of Manastir, held from 14 to 22 November 1908 in what is now Bitola in North Macedonia. It is the Latin alphabet with the added letters ë and ç and nine digraphs, and it is still the one in use. The literary standard came later: printed matter appeared in Tosk until a Congress of Orthography convened in Tirana in 1972 and established a unified language based on it. In the 2023 census, 91.07% of the population reported Albanian as the language spoken at home.

Why Albanians never wrote their law down

The Kanun is a compilation of customary law codified by Lekë Dukagjini, a feudal lord of the fifteenth century, and transmitted from one generation to the next by mouth. It governed marriage, death, family, property, religion and hospitality, and it carried legal practices of great antiquity with precise echoes in Vedic India and in ancient Greece and Rome. Some of its provisions have been traced back to Illyrian tribal law.

Its most quoted element is besa, the given word. Besa binds a person to a promise and, at its most demanding, to the protection of whoever arrives at the door. The obligation was tested inside living memory. During the Holocaust Albania sheltered almost two thousand Jews, and households gave them Albanian clothes and Albanian names and treated them as family instead of hiding them in attics or in the woods. Albania was the one country in Europe whose Jewish population grew in those years. After the mass emigration to Israel that followed the fall of communism, about two hundred Albanian Jews remain, and a new synagogue began providing services for the community in Tirana in 2010.

The same code carried an obligation far harder to live with. It recognised the right to avenge a killing, and gjakmarrje, the blood feud, organised life in the northern highlands, where chieftains called bajraktars presided over territories held by clan. The state that took power in 1944 set out to destroy the whole arrangement, suppressing the feud, breaking the patriarchal structure of the family and the clan, and dismantling the bajraktars along with the landowning beys of the south. Cases of blood feud were still recorded in parts of northern Albania in the twenty-first century. Albania: history takes up the state that tried to end it.

Where the history is sung rather than read

The south sings in parts. Albanian iso-polyphony is built from two solo lines, a melody and a countermelody, over a choral drone, and the word iso comes from the ison, the drone of Byzantine church music. Among the Tosks the drone is continuous, sung on the syllable e with the singers staggering their breathing so that it never breaks; among the Labs it is sometimes rhythmic and sung to the words of the song. It is performed mainly by men at weddings, funerals, harvest feasts and religious celebrations, and at the folk festival in Gjirokastra. UNESCO proclaimed it in 2005 and inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

The north sings alone and at length. Gheg epic poetry is carried by singers who memorise verses running to hundreds and sometimes thousands of lines on the recurring subjects of honour, hospitality, treachery and revenge, and many of its characters belong to the cycle known as the Songs of the Frontier Warriors. The instruments are small and made at home: the lahuta, the çifteli, a long-necked lute with two strings, the sharki, the frame drum called the def, and the shepherds' pipes, the zumarë and the gërnetë.

The room the songs were sung in has a name of its own. The oda is the large room of a traditional house kept for receiving guests, where the men of the household and their visitors talked, argued politics and sang epic until late, and from which women and boys were excluded until the end of the twentieth century. Historical events and traditions were passed on there through those discussions and songs, which made a domestic room the working archive of a district.

The first compilation of Albanian folk music was made outside the country. Two musicians from Himarë, Neço Muka and Koço Çakali, recorded it in Paris while working with the soprano Tefta Tashko-Koço, and the gramophone discs that resulted eventually carried iso-polyphony to international recognition. The tradition behind them is now under strain. UNESCO records that transmission is maintained by professional folk artists rather than within the family, pressed by poverty, the absence of legal protection and the movement of young people to the cities and abroad, and the epic singing of the north has attracted few young performers at all.

What the printed record actually holds

Print, when it arrived, was almost entirely religious. Gjon Buzuku's Meshari, a translation of the Catholic liturgy published in 1555, is treated as the first substantial literary work in written Albanian, and Buzuku was attempting for Albanian what Luther had done for German. The refinement of his language and the steadiness of his spelling both point to an earlier written tradition that has not survived. What follows him over the next century and a half is a catechism, a doctrine, a defence and a treatise.

Barleti is the exception in that list and he wrote in Latin. His History of Skanderbeg of 1508 remains the foundation of scholarship on the fifteenth-century resistance to the Ottomans and was decisive in the formation of Albanian national self-consciousness. In the Siege of Shkodër of 1504 he mentions leafing through chronicles written in the language of the people, which is the strongest evidence available that a secular Albanian literature once existed and was lost.

The oldest books held in the country are older than any of this. The Codices of Berat are two Gospels from the sixth and the ninth centuries, and they were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2005.

How the towns keep what books could not

Berat and Gjirokastra were inscribed on the World Heritage List as rare surviving examples of Ottoman-period urban architecture, Gjirokastra in 2005 and the property extended to take in Berat in 2008. Gjirokastra sits in the Drinos valley in the south, built around a thirteenth-century citadel by major landowners, and it is made of kulla, tower houses whose name is the Turkish word for tower. The type is fixed: a ground floor raised off the earth, a first floor for winter, a second for summer, and painted interior decoration that reaches its most elaborate in the room kept for guests.

Berat is the other case, a town fortified but open, inhabited over a long period by craftsmen and merchants, its houses tiered up the slope and laid out horizontally to take in the daylight. The castle, known locally as the Kala, is largely thirteenth century over origins reaching back to the fourth century BC. Inside the citadel walls stand Byzantine churches of mainly the thirteenth century alongside mosques from the Ottoman era that began there in 1417, and the churches hold the icons and frescoes of Onufri, the painter known for his use of colour, and of his successors David Selenica, Kostandin Shpataraku and the Zografi brothers.

Butrint, in the far south near Sarandë, is the deep end of the record. Occupation there runs from prehistory, with the earliest evidence dated to 50,000 BC, through Greek influence from 800 BC, a Roman colony from 44 BC, an episcopal centre fortified in the fifth century AD, Byzantine reconstruction in the ninth, Angevin and then Venetian control in the fourteenth, and a fortress raised by Ali Pasha at the mouth of the Vivari Channel early in the nineteenth century, after which the site was left to the marsh. What came down belongs to the same story: many historic and sacred buildings were demolished under socialist classicism after the Second World War, when town squares were redesigned and the wide roads and complexes went up.

What the weavers put into the cloth

Traditional Albanian dress runs to more than two hundred distinct forms across the country and the neighbouring Albanian-speaking regions, worked in leather, wool, linen, hemp fibre and silk. The embroidery carries pagan symbols inherited from the Illyrians, suns, eagles, moons, stars and snakes, and above all the zig-zag and the concentric circle, patterns found across the Balkans since antiquity. Those motifs are a record kept in thread, and the textiles are still embroidered in the old patterns today.

White dominates the national costume of Ghegs, Tosks and Chams alike, and the language keeps the preference: fatbardh, literally white fate, means good luck, and a white face means intact honour. Gheg men wear the tirq, wide trousers fastened with a woven belt, under the xhamadan, a red woollen vest patterned in gold. Tosk men wear the fustanella, the pleated white kilt taken as the national costume. The domed white felt cap, the qeleshe or plis, is worn the length of the country and its shape is traced to the Illyrians. The xhubleta, the bell-shaped black garment of northern Albanian women, embroidered with ethnic motifs and built through a sequence of stages that begins with the preparation of shajak cloth, has been inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in its own right.

Why religion sits lightly on the country

Albania has never had an official religion, as a kingdom or as a republic. The 2023 census recorded 45.86% Sunni Muslim, 8.38% Catholic, 7.22% Eastern Orthodox and 4.81% Bektashi, with 13.82% describing themselves as believers without religion or denomination, 3.55% as atheists and 15.76% declining to answer. Muslims are spread throughout the country, Catholics live mainly in the north around Shkodër, and the Orthodox and the Bektashi mainly in the southern districts. In 2008 the country held 694 Catholic churches, 425 Orthodox churches, 568 mosques and 70 Bektashi takyas.

Each of the three faiths is old here. The first known bishop in the country was the Bishop of Scutari, established at Shkodër in 387; Jewish migration from the Roman Empire may have reached the territory in the first century BC, and the first synagogue was built at Sarandë in the early fifth century; Islam arrived with Arab raids on the eastern Adriatic in the ninth century and became the majority religion during the centuries of Ottoman rule that began in the fifteenth.

The flatness of belief has a specific and recent cause. After Enver Hoxha's speech of 6 February 1967, the state ran a campaign to extinguish religious life on the argument that religion had divided the nation and obstructed its development. Student agitators combed the countryside; by the end of that year every church, mosque, monastery and religious institution had been closed or converted into a warehouse, a gymnasium or a workshop, and a decree abrogated the charters under which the main religious communities had operated. Albania announced that it had become the world's first atheist state. The 1976 constitution put it in writing, declaring that the state recognised no religion and supported atheist propaganda. Religious freedom returned after the regime fell, and Albania is still counted among the least religious countries in the world.

What Albanians cook and pour

The cooking is Mediterranean and built on olive oil, which has been pressed along the coasts since antiquity. A small territory of virgin forest, narrow valleys and broad plains produces lemons, oranges, figs and olives, wheat, maize, barley and rye, and the herbs that season nearly everything: oregano, mint, basil, rosemary and thyme. Lamb, goat, beef and poultry are the usual meats, and the Adriatic and Ionian coasts put fish and shellfish into the daily diet.

Tavë kosi, the national dish, is lamb and rice baked under a thick tart layer of yoghurt. Fërgesë, made of peppers, tomatoes and cottage cheese, is the other dish claimed nationally, and pite is a baked pastry filled with spinach and gjizë curd or with minced meat. Petulla, a fried dough, comes with powdered sugar or with feta and fruit jam, and flia is built from crêpe-like layers brushed with cream. Kukurec, sheep intestines broiled on a spit, is common in the south, koran trout is the prized freshwater fish, and oshaf, a pudding of figs and sheep's milk, closes the meal that raki, a grape brandy, opened.

Lamb is the traditional meat for the festivals of Christians and Muslims alike, which is one of the few places where the census categories meet at a table. Coffee runs through the day, and the country carries an unusual number of coffee houses for its population. Mountain tea, çaj mali, made from Sideritis grown across the south, is part of the daily routine, and wine has been made on this ground for thousands of years. Serving food is integral to hosting, visitors are frequently invited to eat and drink by people they have just met, and the reason is the code again rather than an idea about strangers. Albania: travel sets out what that looks like from the outside.

How Kadare wrote past the censors

Communist Albania censored the press, publications and the performing arts, and put cultural work at the service of the state. The writer who came out of that system, Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 and died in 2024, has been translated into 45 languages. Censors banned three of his books, and he worked around them with parable, myth, fable, folk tale, allegory and legend, sprinkled with double meaning, allusion, insinuation and satire, which is to say that he wrote a modern European novel using the forms that had carried Albanian culture when putting it on paper was impossible.

His subject was totalitarianism and the machinery of it. The General of the Dead Army appeared in 1963, Chronicle in Stone in 1971, Broken April in 1980, The Palace of Dreams in 1981 and The Successor in 2002. He defected to Paris in 1990 to escape the regime and the Sigurimi. He took the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2009 and the Neustadt International Prize in 2020, and was nominated for the Nobel fifteen times. Both major Albanian parties asked him to serve as a consensual president and he declined. The New York Times described him as a national figure comparable in popularity to Mark Twain in the United States, and reported that there is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book.

The poets before him worked the same seam. Gjergj Fishta, who lived from 1871 to 1940, wrote where the epic tradition met print; Asdren, from 1872 to 1947, supplied the words of the national anthem adopted after independence in 1912; and Fan Noli, from 1882 to 1965, an Orthodox bishop, translated classic world drama and poetry into a language that had fixed its alphabet within his own lifetime.

That sequence is the shape of the whole thing. The alphabet is a little over a century old, the literary standard is younger than many of the people using it, and the material that a printing press would have carried elsewhere was held instead in a code nobody wrote down, in songs that ran to thousands of lines, and in a room at the front of the house. What is fragile now is the carrier rather than the content. The code survives as a memory, the singers who held the epics are ageing out of the work, and the language that took ten alphabets and two congresses to settle has become the most secure part of the arrangement.