Day in the kulla

[Richard]: Chelle and I participated in a workshop last weekend (11/3/07) about the traditional culture of the Albanian highlands. Albania lies adjacent to southwest Kosovo; it extends west to the Adriatic coast, and the north part of the country (like the southwest part of Kosovo) is rugged, mountainous, and beautiful. The mountains there top out around 2600 meters (about 8000 feet), and this region is still home to some of the most traditional -- some would say backwards -- population in the Balkans. The people here have lived in self-governing clans since time immemorial. Because of the remoteness and impenetrability of this highlands region, it has remained more or less impervious to the national government's attempts to "civilize" it. This was strikingly true during Albania's post-WWII communist period, when the rest of the country was subjected to some of the more repressive Stalinist and then Maoist regimes anywhere in eastern Europe. It was also true, we learned, in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the region was ruled by the Ottoman Turkish empire. And this remains true today, in Albania's current age of liberalization and America worship.

The workshop was held in a historic Kosovan village called Dranoc, which sits fairly near the opening of a deep gorge in the Decan Mountains near the Kosovan/Albanian border. The nearest sizable city is Peja, a place notable for some of the more vicious Serbian ethnic-cleansing violence during the 1999 war, as well as for a popular regional beer of the same name. Specifically, the workshop was held in the lovingly restored Mazrekaj kulla. A kulla is a traditional stone and lime fortress structure, whose architectural style dates back to at least 1400. Unfortunately, both because of the war and general neglect, the remaining old kullas of this region (which used to number almost 1000) have declined to less than a dozen. But in the past few years, there have been some collaborations between international groups, local landowners, and Kosovan architectural students to restore some of the remaining kullas. The Mazrekaj kulla is a showcase example and now functions as a B&B and a conference center.

The kulla style evolved in response to the danger of living in a region that was raked by vendettas and blood feuds in the absence of any other respected legal system for settling disputes. And the logic behind these blood feuds (which were primarily about honor and "saving face") was meticulously laid out in the Kanunin, a text that was precompiled by Leke Dukagjini (1410-1481). More generally, the Kanunin chronicled the common-law practices governing essentially all aspects of life in the Albanian highlands from long before the time they were finally written down in the 19th century.

For example, here's what the Kanunin says about the family:

"The family consists of the people of the house; as these increase, they are divided into brotherhoods (villazní), brotherhoods into kinship groups (gjiní), kinship groups into clans (fis), clans into banners (flamur), and altogether constitutes one widespread family called a nation, which has one homeland, common blood, a common language, and common customs."

As an aside, I have to admit the first thing that crossed my mind upon reading this was "what an uncanny similarity this has to the modern rationale for ethnic cleansing." If the traditional underpinning for the definition of a particular nation is a common blood, a common language, and common customs, it's not much of a leap to understand how such a nation might be moved to defend itself against the "defilement" of its familial blood, of its ethnic and linguistic purity.

I did, in fact, think about posing this question/observation to the workshop facilitator, but I shied away from doing so, fearing that I wouldn't find a measured, diplomatic way to voice it on the fly. (The last way I wanted to come off was as some holier-than-thou, hypocritical American, of all things.) Maybe the most interesting thing about that unasked question, though, is what it suggests about the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness. As we learned during the workshop, the codes laid out by the Kanunin, far from providing an excuse for what today seems like a rigid eye-for-an-eye barbarism, in fact exerted a profoundly civilizing influence on the 15th Century highlands culture. That is, the Kanunin actually represented a great leap forward out of chaos. Before these codes of accepted behavior were compiled and written down, the culture of the region was evidently far more subject to the so-called law of the jungle, whereby the more powerful and ruthless clans were free to wreak havoc over the less powerful without restraint. The Kanunin, by organizing and documenting the common-law practices that had evolved over the centuries, gave a big boost to what we would today call civilization and the rule of law. As the cliché goes, it all depends on your perspective.

A question I did end up asking the workshop facilitator was whether a clan might ever decide to absolve a blood debt without receiving a balancing blood payment from the offending clan. For example, assume that a male member of a particular clan was killed by someone connected to a neighboring clan. Did the notion of mercy or forgiveness ever arise, or was the offended clan irrevocably honor-bound by tradition and common law to take the life of a male member of the offending clan? What I was thinking about, by analogy, was the line separating Old Testament and New Testament notions of justice. In the Old Testament, traditional Hebrew sensibility and law holds sway, which is also bound up in eye-for-an-eye notions of justice and karma and debt. But in the New Testament, Jesus comes along and introduces a more transcendental notion of justice -- one based on ethereal values like mercy and forgiveness and love rather than the rigid materialism of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, an act of revenge to balance a transgression of one's honor. So what I was asking the facilitator was whether these arguably more evolved New Testament notions of justice ever held any sway in the clan culture of the Albanian highlands.
(To be continued)