Albania – Film on Historical Custom of Sworn Virgin Oath for Male Rights – Kanun Patriarchal Code
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: December 25, 2007
WUNRN
ALBANIA: Elvira Dones’ Documentary Sworn
Virgins Examines A Centuries-Old Custom In Albania
Five centuries ago, when the women of northern
Albania could not own property or decide who they were to marry, the oath of
the sworn virgin was established. Under this oath, a female would permanently
exchange her sexuality for the acceptance by her peers as a man.
This phenomenon, which persists in the mountains of northern Albania, is
documented in Elvira Dones’ movie Sworn Virgins, which screens as part
of the debut Baltimore Women’s Film Festival. Dones is a novelist, journalist,
and filmmaker who defected from Albania’s communist regime in 1988 and now
lives and works in Rockville.
“The reason that it all exists, it doesn’t come from a gender
problem,” Dones explains by phone. “It doesn’t come from a freedom or
nonfreedom of living the sexuality how they want to live it. It comes from a
five-century-old tradition of the Albanian mountains. It is this very old code
of law [called the Kanun] that puts the women at the very bottom of the social
rank.
“As a woman you don’t have any right at all to decide on the property,
on the family, on the marriages of the other women in the house,” she
continues. “But as a man, you can do all this kind of stuff. So in a
family where, for example, five daughters live but no male heir–let’s say the
father is very ill, or very old, and he’s going to die, and he doesn’t have a
male to leave the reins of his house–the Kanun says if one of these five girls
is designated the role of the man, she dresses like a man. She takes the oath
of eternal virginity, and from that moment on she is considered socially a
man.”
Dones has long been fascinated by the sworn virgins. Already a popular
novelist in her home country and Italy, she published a deeply researched novel
earlier this year about a sworn virgin who comes to regret her decision. But
Dones had never met sworn virgins until she returned to Albania to interview
them last year.
“I was quite fascinated by them, but . . . we didn’t have the right to
travel,” she says of her earlier times in Albania. “It was a
communist dictatorship, so things were more rumored than told. I was fascinated
with everything about my country that was not told to us by the regime. I knew
about them, but I couldn’t go and touch them. I couldn’t go talk with them and
know how they lived.”
Most of the sworn virgins Dones interviews on camera are clearly proud of
their lives, and only one, Sanie, expresses regret for her decision.
“She’s 50, and it is 30 years now she is regretting it because she wanted
to be a woman,” Dones says. “She is the only one I’m trying to take
out of Albania and bring her to the States, because she has a sister here. She
cannot do it there. It’s not a joke. You can’t take your oath back. She will
have dishonored all her family and she doesn’t want to do that.”
The tide seems to be turning for the sworn-virgin phenomenon. Dones
interviewed only one person in her 20s who claimed to be a sworn virgin, though
she eventually declined to be included in the documentary.
“Of course it is going to fade away,” Dones says. “With the
change of the regime in Albania and everything of the modern world entering,
the women are free to choose now. They don’t have any reason to find this kind
of escape. I think that, bit by bit, it’s going to fade. I asked them all the
same question: `What if one of your nieces did the same thing now?’ They said,
`Well, there is no need for them to do that because now they are freer. They
can do whatever they like with their life.’ Things are changing.”
______________________________________________________________
ALBANIA:
KANUN TRADITIONAL CODE
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78797.htm
US State
Department Human Rights Report 2006 – ALBANIA
“Many communities, particularly those from the northeastern part of the
country, still followed the traditional code–the kanun–under which, according
to some interpretations, women are considered to be, and were treated as,
chattel. Some interpretations of the kanun dictate that a woman’s duty
is to serve her husband and to be subordinate to him in all matters.”
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