The Weight of the Sworn Word

Albania has one of the most female-dominated cabinets in the world. Twelve of its seventeen ministers are women. Five of the eight specialised committees in its parliament are chaired by women, including Legal Issues, Foreign Policy and European Integration.

It is also a country where only 8% of registered land stands in a woman's name, and where a daughter is still commonly described as a guest in the house she was born in.

Both things are true at the same time. Neither is a leftover the other has not yet caught up with. They are two halves of a single arrangement, and to see how they came to fit together you have to go back a long way: to a body of unwritten law that governed the northern highlands for five hundred years, to the women who escaped it by ceasing, legally and socially, to be women at all, and to a state that put women into factories without ever asking who would cook when they got home.

For centuries, the highlands beyond the reach of any central authority ran on the Kanun, a body of oral customary law organised around family honour (nderi), hospitality (mikpritja), the given word (besa) and loyalty to the clan (fis). Under it, gender was not a fact about a body. It was a legal category. A woman had no standing of her own, and the written compilation of the code says so in as many words: she is "a sack, made to endure."

Before Rome

That was not always the arrangement. Before the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires arrived, the western Balkan peninsula was inhabited by Illyrian tribes, widely recognised as the ancestors of the modern Albanians. Where the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome shut women inside the private household (oikos) and treated them as the legal property of their husbands, Illyrian society gave them a good deal of liberty and something close to equality.

Greek and Roman historians noticed, and wrote about it with a mixture of fascination and disapproval. Illyrian women took part in feasts and public banquets, sitting beside men, which would have been unthinkable in the segregated public spaces of Athens. The ancient constitution of Epirus, a state closely tied to Illyrian-Pelasgian heritage, regulated divorce and the rights of children from dissolved marriages in ways that protected the woman's place in the kinship structure. Among the Molossians, women could own, buy and dispose of real property in their own right, and routinely acted as legal guardians of their minor children. That was an independent legal persona which Roman law denied to its own female citizens.

The ruins of Apollonia, a classical city on the Albanian coast, record the same thing visually. Landscape paintings, vase illustrations and subscription texts show Apollonian women as respected, self-confident citizens, depicted in public and ceremonial settings with an air of authority. When the Roman legions first crossed the Adriatic to take Illyria, what struck them was that the social standing of Illyrian women was considerably higher than that of Roman matrons, who lived under the absolute authority (patria potestas) of a male patriarch.

The clearest case is Queen Teuta, who ruled the Ardiaean Kingdom as queen regent from roughly 231 BC to 228/227 BC, after the death of her husband King Agron. Her position was not decorative. She held executive, military and diplomatic power in the Mediterranean, continued her husband's expansionist policies, and commanded a navy of Illyrian pirates that dominated the trade routes of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. When Roman ambassadors came to her court at Scodra, modern Shkodër, to demand an end to the piracy interfering with Italian merchants, Teuta defended it as a sovereign traditional right, telling them it was contrary to the custom of Illyrian kings to hinder their people from winning booty from the sea.

Her reign ended in defeat at the hands of the Roman Republic in the First Illyrian War of 228 BC, but the memory did not. Teuta is still one of the most common given names for Albanian women, and her face is on public monuments and coins.

What followed the Roman conquest has been described by historians and linguists as the beginning of "long, dark nights" for the region's women. The relative equality of tribal society was dismantled and replaced by the stratified, male-centred legal and class systems of one occupier after another: Rome, then Byzantium, then the Ottomans. The pagan and matriarchal traces still lingering in the social fabric were suppressed. Across centuries of foreign rule and economic underdevelopment, women lost the right to inherit property and to sit in public assemblies, and became marginal figures inside a conservative feudal order. By the time feudal relations reached the mountains of northern and central Albania, the household had become a space of unquestioned male authority. The ground was ready for the customary law that would govern the next five hundred years.

The Kanun

The northern highlands, the Accursed Mountains (Bjeshkët e Nemuna), stayed largely beyond the reach of whichever empire claimed them. With no central state to answer to, the highlanders built their own self-regulating body of customary oral law: the Kanun. Regional versions existed across the Albanian-speaking lands, among them the Kanun of Skanderbeg in the centre and the Kanun of Labëria in the south, but the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini was the one that carried furthest. Attributed to the fifteenth century prince Lekë Dukagjini, a commander in the Albanian resistance to the Ottomans, its 1,262 articles passed orally through tribal elders for five hundred years before the Catholic priest Shtjefën Gjeçovi compiled and wrote them down in the early twentieth century.

The Kanun regulated nearly everything: property boundaries, agricultural disputes, hospitality, marriage, and the ritualised practice of blood vengeance (gjakmarrja). As an ethical system it rested on the preservation of family honour, the given word, and loyalty to kin. The stability it produced came at a price, and the price was paid almost entirely by women, because the structure holding it up was patrilineal, patrilocal and severe.

A woman under the Kanun had no independent legal personality, no civic agency and no property. She was treated as a legal object rather than a subject, a functional utility handed from her father's household to her husband's on marriage. Gjeçovi's compilation is not coy about it. It defines a woman as "a sack, made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's family," and states plainly that "the blood of a woman is not equal to the blood of a man." In the arithmetic of blood vengeance her life was worth exactly half of a man's.

Her marginality began before birth. A pregnant woman was routinely greeted with "të lindtë një djalë," may it be a son, because a daughter was a financial liability, "a superfluity in the household," of no intrinsic use to the continuity of the line. Girls were kept out of the public sphere from childhood, confined to the family compound and trained in heavy manual and domestic labour. Marriages were arranged by the male heads of the two families, often while the children were still in their cradles. The girl had no right to choose her husband or to refuse the betrothal. If she resisted, the Kanun instructed that she be handed over to the groom's family by force, accompanied by a single bullet. If she then ran, her husband was entitled to shoot her in the back with her own parents' cartridge, and no blood feud followed, because her family had authorised her killing in advance to preserve their honour.

Inside the marriage the husband's power was total and explicitly sanctioned. Article 33 of the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini grants him the right "to advise and correct his wife," which is spelled out to include the right "to beat her and tie her when she does not obey his words and orders." A wife sent away for disobedience or infidelity left with the clothes she stood in, permanently separated from her children and forbidden ever to contact them. In Labëria in the south a comparable patriarchy held, with women carrying firewood and water over long mountain paths and remaining wholly subordinate to the male head of the house.

And yet the code contained a genuine contradiction. Having stripped the woman of public and economic agency, it then placed her under a sacred protection that men did not enjoy. The violence of the blood feud could not touch a woman or a child under any circumstances. If two enemies were shooting at each other on a mountain path and a woman stepped between them, both were obliged to lower their rifles muzzle-down and stop. To insult, assault or rape a woman was the ultimate dishonour, unforgivable, capable of ruining a family's name for seven generations. This was not an early form of respect for human rights. It followed from the belief that women, having no stake in the political decisions of the tribe, were non-combatants in the wars of men.

The written code also described a passivity that daily life did not entirely match. In the domestic sphere, the married lady of the house (zonja e shtëpisë) held real authority and directed the labour of every other woman in the extended family. In a crisis, the unwritten conventions of highland life often went around the formal rules altogether, and the counsel of respected older women was accepted in narrow tribal or village assemblies. It was inside this framework, which denied women everything while guarding their honour and crediting them with a kind of spiritual weight, that the burrnesha appeared.

Burrnesha

Two pressures made the sworn virgin necessary. The inheritance system was rigidly patrilineal, and the blood feud killed men at a rate that regularly left families without one. Out of that combination came the Balkan sworn virgin, the burrneshë (plural burrnesha), one of the most distinctive social institutions anywhere.

It is worth being precise about what it was. The burrneshë was not a rebellion against customary law. She was a workaround the Kanun itself sanctioned, a safety valve that let the pressure out of a rigid system so that exceptional families could keep their land and their honour without the code having to change any of its rules about women in general.

Three situations led a person assigned female at birth to take the oath.

The first was the absence of a male heir. Where land passed strictly through the male line, a patriarch who died leaving only daughters left his family facing collapse: the ancestral property would be absorbed by distant male relatives, and the daughters and the widow would be turned out with nothing. To prevent that, a daughter, often the youngest or the most strong-willed, could take the vow, become socially a man, assume the headship of the household, inherit the property and run the estate.

The second was escape from an arranged marriage. Refusing a betrothal was a mortal insult to the groom's clan and could set off a blood feud lasting generations. The one honourable exit the Kanun recognised was for the young woman to swear lifelong celibacy before twelve village or tribal elders. The oath closed off her marital prospects permanently, and both families kept their honour.

The third was widowhood. A young widow who did not want to remarry, or to be passed to her dead husband's brother, could swear the same oath and stay in his household as an independent male head of the family, raising her children and managing the estate.

The oath was besa-bound, and the change it made was total and irreversible. The name she was born with was retired and replaced by a man's: Sokol, Mark, Lulash. She burned her girl's clothes and put on the dress of the highland male, thick wool trousers (tirq), a man's vest, a leather belt carrying a knife or a pistol, and the flat-topped white felt cap (plis) that served as the visual signature of Albanian manhood. Her movements became deliberate and heavy, her smile was suppressed, and she drank and smoked in public company.

What she received in return for renouncing marriage, sex and motherhood was everything the law reserved for men. She could carry firearms. She could vote and speak with full authority in village councils that admitted no women. She sat at the men's table in the stone tower houses (kullë), drank raki and smoked among the patriarchs. She was also obliged to take part in gjakmarrja if her family's or her tribe's honour required it. Her community did not regard her as a woman in men's clothes. She was a social man, addressed with masculine pronouns and treated as a full citizen.

The custom has attracted an intense and often careless Western gaze. From Edith Durham in 1908 through to modern documentary crews on YouTube, anthropologists, journalists and travel writers have presented the burrnesha as exotic specimens, "Europe's last men-women," curiosities from a violent and backward corner of the Balkans. In that telling the burrneshë is a victim, forced by tradition into an unnatural bargain: her femininity and her sexuality traded away for basic human rights.

Jeta Luboteni's decolonial and queer critique A Heavy Word takes that narrative apart. Listen to what the burrnesha say about their own lives and a different picture appears. For many highland women the oath was not a tragedy imposed on them. It was a calculated and liberating act. In a society that offered women no independent existence outside domestic service and marriage, it was the only available route to personal freedom, bodily safety and social standing.

Interview after interview turns up pride and satisfaction rather than regret. They reject the suggestion that their lives were incomplete for want of sex and marriage, and describe instead something they found spiritually full: the care of family, the cultivation of art, a familial love extended to everyone as brothers and sisters. Asked by a foreign journalist whether he regretted the oath, the burrneshë Bedri cut him off:

Oh man! I am happy, and I chose this life with the greatest will and greatest pleasure of my soul, and I will live it to the end!

The institution proves that gender is malleable, that even one of the most patriarchal societies in the world could let the boundary of biological sex be crossed and then absorb the crossing without difficulty. It remains, all the same, a conservative bargain. The burrneshë could claim a man's rights only by performing masculinity, and in doing so she confirmed the system rather than challenging it. The position of every other woman in the village was left exactly as it was.

The conditions that sustained the custom for six hundred years have now gone. Roads, cities and the rule of law have reached the remotest valleys, and the burrnesha are dying out. A dozen or so elderly individuals remain.

The forerunners

While the mountains produced the burrneshë as a structural workaround, the towns of Albania and the wider Balkan diaspora produced something else: women intellectuals, writers and political dissidents who wanted the patriarchal order dismantled rather than circumvented. They did not escape womanhood by performing masculinity. They claimed a voice as women, and in doing so started some of the earliest feminist and democratic struggles in Eastern Europe.

The first was Elena Gjika (1828–1888), who wrote under the pen name Dora d'Istria. She was born in Bucharest into the Ghica family, of Albanian origin, and was the niece of Grigore IV Ghica, the reigning Prince of Wallachia. Her education ran through Dresden, Vienna, Venice and Berlin, and she read ancient Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Russian and Romanian. Alexander von Humboldt was among those who recognised what she was.

She published in Paris, Brussels and Florence, on social, religious and feminist questions. La vie monastique dans l'Église orientale (1855) is a liberal critique of the Eastern Orthodox Church that calls for the abolition of monastic orders. In 1866 came Les Albanais des deux côtés de l'Adriatique et la nationalité albanaise d'après les chants populaires, a study of Albanian nationality drawn from folk song, translated into Albanian and Italian by the patriot Demetrio Camarda. Through it she became the principal Western advocate of the Albanian National Awakening, and the reason a good part of Europe heard about the Balkan struggle for independence from Ottoman rule at all.

She was also a cosmopolitan feminist who worked steadily for the social and educational emancipation of women, kept close relations with Albanian patriots including Jeronim de Rada, and was called by nationalist circles in Italy and the Balkans the "uncrowned queen of Albania."

If Dora d'Istria is the nineteenth century awakening, Musine Kokalari (1917–1983) is what the twentieth century did to it.

She was born in Turkey to an educated Gjirokastrian family and returned to Albania as a child, growing up in Gjirokastër and Tirana among books, traditional music and progressive ideas. In 1938 she went to Rome to read literature at La Sapienza, graduating with high honours on a doctoral thesis about the national poet Naim Frashëri.

In 1941, still a student, she published Siç me thotë nënua plakë (As my old mother tells me), a collection of prose tales written in her native Gjirokastrian dialect and drawn from Tosk folklore. It is recognised as the first literary book written and published by a woman in Albania. She described it as "the mirror of a world gone by... the transition from girlhood to the world of the grown woman, once again bound by the heavy chains of slavery to patriarchal fanaticism." Two more volumes of prose followed in 1944, Rreth vatrës (Around the Hearth) and Sa u tund jeta... (How life swayed).

She did not stay on the page. In the middle of the war she co-founded the Social-Democratic Party of Albania in 1943 and launched its press organ Zëri i lirisë (The Voice of Freedom) to argue for democratic pluralism and human rights. Enver Hoxha's communist takeover in 1944 ended that life. On 12 November 1944 communist partisans executed her two older brothers, Mumtaz and Vesim, without trial. She was arrested on 17 January 1946.

At her military trial in Tirana, labelled a "saboteur and enemy of the people" in front of a mob screaming for her execution, she declined to apologise or to trim her convictions:

I don't need to be a communist to love my country. I love my country even though I am not a communist. I love its progress... You are punishing me for my ideals!

She was sentenced to twenty years and served eighteen of them in Burrel prison, isolated and watched. On release in 1964 she was interned in the northern town of Rrëshen, put to work sweeping streets, kept in poverty, cut off from society and forbidden to write again. She died of cancer in 1983. Shortly before her death she wrote: "I do not appeal to anyone for my health, least of all to those who had the power to alleviate my sentence." In 1993 she was posthumously declared a Martyr of Democracy.

State feminism, and the double burden

The communist regime installed under Enver Hoxha after the war (1944 to 1991) set about transforming Albanian society from the top down and at speed. It abolished the customary codes, closed the religious organisations, and launched a centralised campaign of state-enforced emancipation.

The motive was partly economic. A Stalinist development model needed labour, and the largest untapped reserve of it was female. In 1967 Hoxha issued his directive "For the complete emancipation of women," framing the fight against patriarchal tradition as part of the socialist revolution.

On paper the results were extraordinary. Female illiteracy stood at 92% in 1945 and had fallen below 8% by

Girls entered education at every level, making up 43% of secondary school students by 1966. Women

went into paid work in numbers with no precedent in Balkan history, as engineers, agricultural workers and industrial labourers. A quota system reserved them roughly 30% of the seats in parliament.

The contradictions were structural. The public sphere was modernised aggressively while the domestic sphere was left alone. The state turned women into productive economic units and did nothing whatever about the division of labour at home. Hoxha himself noticed the limit, calling woman "the proletarian of man" in a 1955 speech to the Fourth Congress of the Women's Union of Albania, while state propaganda went on celebrating the self-sacrificing mother and homemaker.

What resulted was the double burden. Women were required to do full-time manual and industrial work for the state, to join "voluntary" civic projects, and to attend military drills, while remaining solely and unassisted responsible for cooking, cleaning, childrearing and every other unpaid chore in households still run on entirely conservative lines. The legal equality of the public sphere worked as a facade over a private reality of exhaustion and subjection.

After 1991

The regime collapsed in 1991 and the country fell into economic and cultural shock. The transition from state socialism to an unregulated market economy took away the formal protections and the guaranteed employment that had underwritten women's position, more or less overnight. It bottomed out in 1997, when the collapse of the pyramid schemes wiped out the savings of most of the population and the country dissolved into nationwide anarchy.

What happened next is better described as a mutation than as gradual change. With public services dismantled, unemployment climbing and no security of any kind, many families responded by pushing women back into the home. Political representation collapsed with everything else: the share of women in parliament fell from 30% to 6% at the first democratic elections.

At the same time a wave of retraditionalisation moved across the Western Balkans. Conservative political, cultural and religious figures, back in public life after decades of suppression, began promoting traditional gender roles as sacred parts of national identity and heritage. The home was reclaimed as the proper place for women, men re-established themselves as breadwinners and public leaders, and in remote districts where state institutions had simply stopped functioning, older customary law came back, blood feud included.

The other consequence was trafficking. Open borders, a coastline on the Adriatic and ports at Vlorë and Durrës made Albania a route for organised crime networks, which lured or abducted tens of thousands of young women and girls into the sex trade in Western Europe. They made ideal victims precisely because they sat on a fault line: a state too weak to protect them, and honour and shame codes (nder and marre) that made returning home afterwards almost impossible.

Careers and cadastres

Which brings the story to the arrangement it started with. Driven partly by the wish to present a modern, European face and secure EU accession, the Albanian state has made real formal advances. It now ranks among the world's leaders in political gender parity: after the re-election of Prime Minister Edi Rama it confirmed a women-dominated cabinet holding 12 of 17 ministerial positions, with five of parliament's eight specialised committees chaired by women. Gender-responsive budgeting has been applied across 10% of the national budget, and domestic violence legislation has been aligned with EU standards.

Underneath sits a different set of facts. Urban professional women in Tirana build careers and live independent lives, and are still circumscribed at home. Institutional data puts the double burden at up to 25 years of a woman's life spent on childcare and unpaid domestic work.

The sharpest clash is over land. Article 41 of the Constitution and the Civil and Family Codes guarantee absolute equality in inheritance. Custom, which is not written anywhere, denies it. The assumption that a girl does not really belong to the house she is born in, because she will marry and join her husband's clan, makes her a guest, and a guest does not expect a share of the property. The mechanism is family expectation and social pressure rather than law, and it works: most Albanian women, willingly or under duress, formally sign their inheritance over to their brothers to keep the peace and avoid being cut off.

The result is that 8% of land in Albania is registered to a woman. Without property there is no collateral, and without collateral there is no credit, no independent business, and nothing to fall back on if a marriage turns dangerous. It is economic violence, and it was reinforced for decades by a cadastre system that registered property in the name of the male head of the family (kryefamiljari) and nobody else.

The same pressure shows up on the body. Hymenoplasty, virginity surgery, is still quietly performed, because the expectation that a bride be pure on her wedding night to protect her family's honour has outlived almost everything else that surrounded it.

The guest in her own home

None of this is a story of steady progress interrupted. It is a divided terrain, and Albanian women live on both sides of it at once: a constitutional sphere that promises liberal equality, human rights and political representation, and a domestic sphere still shaped by customary law, honour and shame, and the retraditionalisation that followed 1991.

Closing that gap needs more than legislation, because the legislation already exists and is being ignored. It needs enforcement where the decisions actually happen: joint matrimonial property law applied strictly at the notary's desk, the head-of-the-family legacy stripped out of land registration, independent social security extended to rural women, and sustained work against the stereotypes carried in public and digital life.

The point of all of it is to change one assumption. As long as a daughter is a guest in her own home, none of the rest holds. When she is a permanent stakeholder in her family's property and her country's future, the unwritten code has finally been answered.

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