ALBANIAN BLOOD FEUDS

Evening Star, Issue 23699, 5 October 1940, Page 3

ALBANIAN BLOOD FEUDS

Among the wild tribes of Albania, the little country between Greece and Yugoslavia, which was so.zed by Mussolini eighteen months ago. blood relationship is reckoned only on the father’s side. A maternal aunt’s daughter is not regarded as kin by her cousins, but blood* relationship on the parental side is a bar to inter-marriage of descendants for centuries. A woman’s blood is useless for wiping out a blood feud, and therefore women are seldom victims in these feuds. But if public opinion decides that a family has “ bad blood ” and must be wiped out, the marriageable women may be shot with the men and boys and male babies, for fear that they might later on give birth to a boy of the unpopular stock, to make trouble in the future. In her book ‘ Some Tribal Origins, Laws, and Customs of the Balkans,’ Miss Mary E. Durham gave full details of the starting, the cherishing, and ending of a blood feud. _ If the relatives of the original victim can shoot the original slayer before the sun sets on the day of the victim’s death, there mav be no fend. But if they delay there may be endless trouble with wergelds, compurgations, rights of sanctuary and shelter, ami almost inevitable further bloodshed which may go on for years. It is for this reason that the raising up of sons to avenge their male relatives on the father’s side is so important in the eyes of Albanians that in many cases anxious men have contracted experimental unions with young women, and only married them when they became the mothers of boys.