THE BORDER guard at the new Albanian customs buildings told us it was impossible to insure our rented car against theft, writes KILLIAN FORDE
In a country of chronic carjacking, and facing a trip into the most isolated part of Europe, the choice was sobering. Back to Montenegro and spend another few days dipping in and out of its cute coastal towns or recklessly plough on, driving into a mountainous region with no maps or signposts, where English speakers were rare, in a new car, full of four lost-looking Paddies.
Having weighed up the options we went for the reckless one.
More out of curiosity than anything else I had returned to Albania after a 10-year gap. As an aid worker in the Balkans in the 1990s, I had been temporarily posted to the northern Albanian city of Shkodra. Despite being the only non-conflict zone I worked in, it was conversely my most dangerous posting. Armed gangs owned the streets and even the traffic police were obliged to wear ski masks to avoid recognition. A local schoolteacher was shot dead by one of her teenage pupils for “insulting his honour”. The city was without electricity, water supply was erratic, the buildings were on the point of collapse, the roads and pavements were like jigsaw and dust, sewage and dirt was omnipresent.
But only 70km away were the impenetrable Cursed Mountains. The mountains were a place of myths and mystery without a published guidebook or dedicated web presence. The area was ruled by the Code of Leke Dukagjini – The Kanun, a 15th-century text written by a local noble as a constitution for the highlanders.
Included in The Kanunwere detailed rules on conflict between clans that led to the institutionalisation of blood feuds. Families "in blood" found themselves in intergenerational wars. The blood feud came to dominate and define the lives of men in the highlands. A man and his clan were judged on their honour, valour and hospitality. The geographical isolation stewed and protected a culture that resisted attempts by various invaders, credos and ideologies to "tame". A culture which to this day includes the custom of Sworn Virgins, whereby a woman will choose, or be obliged by tradition, to live as a man, adopting men's clothes, mannerisms, gender privileges, hairstyle, work and even voice pitch.
In 1998 I made six highland visits, negotiating with village councils, clans at war and steely patriarchs in forgotten villages to establish community development projects. We travelled by four-wheel drive, indolent horses and our own legs to reach isolated settlements. Our hosts, routinely dismissed as suspicious violent eejits, were gregarious, generous, wily and surprisingly world wise.
Ten years on and the old dirt road to the Shala Valley had been surfaced as far as Boge, the gate lodge of the Albanian Alps. There the village wide-boy took charge of us and arranged a driver and jeep to bring us the last 25km, over the 2,000m high dirt track mountain pass and to Theth, the largest settlement in the Cursed Mountains.
The village, lying in a steep valley ringed by 2,500m peaks, consists of 150 stone-built houses roofed with traditional wooden tiles.
There are no dedicated shops, restaurants or roads.
The centre of Theth is dominated by the sole new building, a Catholic church, built only with local traditional materials, and one of the oldest, the 30-metre high Kulla. A defensive stone-built tower, the Kulla is collectively owned and it is a place where villagers involved in blood feuds can hide. With most of the feuds in hibernation, it’s open to the curious. It makes for grim visiting when you learn that some men would imprison themselves in these dank towers for years waiting for their own tribal feud to be resolved.
Newly marked trails nudge visitors to nearby valleys, peaks and villages all amid breathtaking scenery, with deep blue ice-melt fed rivers and waterfalls, hand-made wooden bridges and dry-stone walls.
Our base in the mountains was the Terthorja guesthouse. The building was a magnificent stone farmhouse run by two venerable brothers and their wives. What you saw hiking around the valleys was what you got for dinner: lamb or chicken, peppers, corn bread, unpasteurised milk, honey, nuts and pears. Our body-clocks quickly adapted to this old way of life, and we would feel sleepy at dusk and wake at first light to a raucous rooster.
Albanian travel is tourism as its rawest, but hiking through the Albanian highlands is, for now, unique. Over the decade the area hadn’t changed. German sustainable tourism specialists have helped the highlanders draw up a blueprint that aims to preserve their centuries-old traditions, use tourism to their own benefits and keep this most inaccessible part of Europe also one of the most naturally beautiful.
Back in Boge there was something dispiriting about pulling on to the newly-paved road and returning to that homogenous urban European culture. I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that the Cursed Mountains are only some inevitable regional transport policy away from being destroyed with inappropriate development. Planners in Tirana could do no better than to view the scarification of the Irish west. The inevitable result of myopic planning and improved access to remote regions.