Albanian Women (1910)

Of all the women of Europe, Albanian women have traditionally been the most disadvantaged. Even today, despite some emancipatory measures during the communist period (one of the few positive things the communist regime in Albania ever did), they are still victims of deeply patriarchal values, especially in the countryside. The German journalist and author, Paul Siebertz (1877–1954), described their situation as he experienced it during an expedition to the mountains of Northern Albania in 1910. Siebertz was editor-in-chief of The Fatherland (Homeland), "a newspaper for the Austrian monarchy", in Vienna, from 1907 to 1911, and was also the author of several books.

By: Paul Siebertz[1]
Translated into English (from German): Robert Elsie
Translated into Albanian (from English): Agron Shala

The low level of cultural progress of the Albanian people can be seen more than anywhere else in the lack of importance of the female population. Women play a very subordinate role in public and private life among the Albanians. As Baron Nopcsa has rightly observed, women in Albania are untouchable, as in other countries in Turkey, but this should not be interpreted as a sign of respect, but on the contrary as a sign of contempt. A woman will never be accused or punished for an offense. She can go wherever she wants without fear, even if her family is involved in a blood feud, but this is only because it is considered shameful to take revenge on a woman.

What Albanian men expect from their wives is to bring firewood, cook food, bake bread, and make clothes. They use women to transport goods when horses and mules are sick or missing. Women do all the heavy work in this country.

“Since children are betrothed to each other at a very early age,” writes Baron Nopcsa, “love is something quite unknown. This is seen in the fact that a man mourns the loss of his wife, but not as a wife. What he usually misses is his wife as a housemaid.” It is interesting to note that the Albanian language has no word for “love” or “to love” [sic.].

As a rule, women meet their husbands for the first time on the day they are married, because engagements are always arranged by the parents. Only among the highland Albanians, among the harsh mountain tribes, do marriages of love sometimes occur, because there is less communication. But even here, getting to know each other before marriage is extremely difficult, because most tribes do not approve of marriages within the tribe itself. The man and the woman must be from different tribes, because members of a tribe see themselves as blood-related, heirs to one ancestor, and marriage with a blood relative, no matter how distant, is considered incest. An illustration of this is the following incident described by Karl Steinmetz that occurred in Nikaj. A man from Nikaj was engaged to a girl from Shoshi, but the future bride ran away to her married sister in Shala, shortly before the wedding. Her brother, as the head of the family, was in a very difficult situation, because the groom wanted the bride and failure to fulfill the engagement would lead to a blood feud. To solve the problem, he took the married sister from Shala who was visiting the family and gave her to the man from Nikaj - instead of the younger sister who had run away. The groom was happy with this situation, because he had not seen either of the girls before. The problem was thus solved. However, the wife later ran away and returned to her first husband, and the man from Nikaj was shot dead by Shala's men when he tried to return her.

In the rare cases of love marriages in the highlands, the young man has already visited the girl's family and seen her. He then sends the mother or another relative with a gift to the father of the girl in whom he is interested. If the father accepts the gift, this is a sign that he has no objection to the relationship. If the father refuses, but the girl agrees, then she is abducted by the young man and his friends. He is, however, the subject of a blood feud by her family. According to Steinmetz, girls are often abducted willingly.

The bride does not receive a dowry. On the contrary, it is the duty of the young man, before the marriage, to pay the bride's family, according to his financial means, 1000-1500 piastres (220 to 300 Austrian krones), and in some cases up to 3000 piastres (700 krones). The bride is, therefore, in fact bought, as Carl Patsch notes in detail in his study of the Sandzhak of Berat.

Polygamy occurs quite frequently in the highlands. In one case it is determined by custom: if one of the two brothers dies, the surviving brother takes the widow as a second wife. The same applies to the wife of an uncle. Views on marital fidelity are much more lenient in the highlands. Steinmetz claims that the main cause of blood feuds is “the marital infidelity of women.” This very reliable scholar writes as follows: “Earlier foreign travelers, who emphasized the strict morality of the highlanders and praised them as exemplary, did so from a superficial knowledge of the reality of things. Of course, no one would like to assert that the highlanders are generally immoral. On the contrary, like Orientals in general, they have very strict views on the female sex, and an unmarried girl would not dare even exchange words with a man. But it is different for married women. Women who cheat are by no means rare here.”

In my chapter on Albanian costumes, I noted that unmarried women can be distinguished from married women in that the former do not wear the color red, even though their clothes are otherwise the same.

Scholars have given very different opinions on the external appearance of Albanian women. Steinmetz claims that there are many attractive, albeit rustic, faces among the women of the highlands - as is the case in our country. Baron Nopcsa, who, on the other hand, is less polite, but perhaps more reliable, insists: "Early marriage and hard work have helped to transform the physiognomy, generally common to Albanian women, into ugliness within a very short time. Even more or less pleasant faces are extremely rare". However, as Baron Nopcsa points out, to be fair, the clothes that the women wear leave an unfavorable impression. They can be described as ugly and tasteless.

It is worth noting that Albanian women, even Muslim ones, do not cover themselves when they go out and make no effort to avoid or hide their faces and hands from the view of strangers.

It is extremely rare for an Albanian woman to sit at a meal with male guests. In Muslim homes, women are in another room with the children, and male guests rarely see them. Otherwise, the provisions of the Quran are not taken very seriously by Albanian Muslim women; in any case, they are not enforced.

Women accompany men in battle, but serve more as bearers of weapons and goods than as equal wives. Women are used for bargaining purposes. They also bury the dead and care for the wounded. There are reports that during periods of fierce and savage fighting between Albanians and Montenegrins, women have been killed - most likely by stray bullets.

Every Albanian is obliged to marry. Therefore, there are very few unmarried girls. However, it happens from time to time that girls refuse the yoke of marriage or are unable to marry for family reasons. They then go to church and solemnly declare that they will never marry. In this way, they acquire all the privileges of men and, from that moment on, wear men's clothes and carry weapons. These girls, called sworn virgins [burrnesha], are under the protection of the church. Many of them struggle to cope with the work of the farms they inherit from their fathers. Some of them are much sought after as singers and travel freely around the country singing heroic local songs. It often happens that girls are declared sworn virgins to save the family property from relatives, when there are no direct male heirs in the family. Moreover, this "gender change" is the only way out for a girl who wants to escape an unwanted engagement without exposing her family to the bloody revenge of a rejected groom.

Johann Georg von Hahn tells us about the most famous of these sworn virgins, Marla of Perlataj, whose uncle betrothed her to a Turk from Luria when she was still a child. When Marla turned seventeen and the Turk wanted to take her, she appeared before the assembly of elders in her village and declared that the Turk would force her to change her religion. To save her soul, she wanted to become a man. She asked her uncle for her father's weapons and kept them until her death as "Peter of Perlataj". Another Albanian girl, Marçala of Lasa, was in love with a boy who, however, had been betrothed to another girl since childhood. When the boy was forced to marry his fiancé to avoid causing blood feuds with her family, Marçala "changed her gender" and was called Gjin from then on. /Telegrafi/

[1] Excerpt from Paul Siebertz: Albania and the Albanians, Vienna 1910, pp. 144-147. Translated from the German by Robert Elsie.