KRUJE, Albania
— Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a
man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s
baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake
marriage, children and sex.
For
centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern
Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with
a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male
heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived
as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male
authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.
She says she
would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to
Albania, with Internet dating and MTV
invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys
anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is
dying off.
“Back then,
it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered
the same thing,” said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with
her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki. “Now,
Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think
today it would be fun to be a woman.”
The
tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a
code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more
than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of a woman is severely circumscribed:
take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half
that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same: 12 oxen.
The sworn
virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and
death. If the family patriarch died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the
family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of
virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a
weapon, own property and move freely.
They dressed
like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most
kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public
life, even adulated. For some the choice was a way for a woman to assert her
autonomy or to avoid an arranged marriage.
“Stripping
off their sexuality by pledging to remain virgins was a way for these women in
a male-dominated, segregated society to engage in public life,” said Linda
Gusia, a professor of gender studies at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo.
“It was about surviving in a world where men rule.”
Taking an
oath to become a sworn virgin should not, sociologists say, be equated with
homosexuality, long taboo in rural Albania. Nor do the women have sex-change
operations.
Known in her
household as the “pasha,” Ms. Keqi said she decided to become the man of the
house at age 20 when her father was murdered. Her four brothers opposed the
Communist government of Enver Hoxha, the ruler for 40 years until his death in
1985, and they were either imprisoned or killed. Becoming a man, she said, was
the only way to support her mother, her four sisters-in-law and their five
children.
Ms. Keqi
lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces
served her brandy while she barked out orders. She said living as a man had
allowed her freedom denied other women. She worked construction jobs and prayed
at the mosque with men. Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not
dare marry without their “uncle’s” permission.
When she
stepped outside the village, she enjoyed being taken for a man. “I was totally
free as a man because no one knew I was a woman,” Ms. Keqi said. “I could go
wherever I wanted to and no one would dare swear at me because I could beat
them up. I was only with men. I don’t know how to do women’s talk. I am never
scared.”
When she was
recently hospitalized for surgery, the other woman in her room was horrified to
be sharing close quarters with someone she assumed was male.
Being the
man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her father’s death, she
said. When her father’s killer, by then 80, was released from prison five years
ago, Ms. Keqi said, her 15-year-old nephew shot him dead. Then the man’s family
took revenge and killed her nephew. “I always dreamed of avenging my father’s
death,” she said. “Of course, I have regrets; my nephew was killed. But if you
kill me, I have to kill you.”
In Albania,
a majority Muslim country in the western Balkans, the Kanun is adhered to by
Muslims and Christians. Albanian cultural historians said the adherence to
medieval customs long discarded elsewhere was a byproduct of the country’s
previous isolation. But they stressed that the traditional role of the Albanian
woman was changing.
“The
Albanian woman today is a sort of minister of economics, a minister of
affection and a minister of interior who controls who does what,” said Ilir
Yzeiri, who writes about Albanian folklore. “Today, women in Albania are behind
everything.”
Some sworn
virgins bemoan the changes. Diana Rakipi, 54, a security guard in the seaside
city of Durres, in west Albania, who became a sworn virgin to take care of her
nine sisters, said she looked back with nostalgia on the Hoxha era. During
Communist times, she was a senior army officer, training women as combat
soldiers. Now, she lamented, women do not know their place.
“Today women
go out half naked to the disco,” said Ms. Rakipi, who wears a military beret.
“I was always treated my whole life as a man, always with respect. I can’t
clean, I can’t iron, I can’t cook. That is a woman’s work.”
But even in
the remote mountains of Kruje, about 30 miles north of Tirana, residents say
the Kanun’s influence on gender roles is disappearing. They said erosion of the
traditional family, in which everyone once lived under the same roof, had
altered women’s position in society.
“Women and
men are now almost the same,” said Caca Fiqiri, whose aunt Qamile Stema, 88, is
his village’s last sworn virgin. “We respect sworn virgins very much and
consider them as men because of their great sacrifice. But there is no longer a
stigma not to have a man of the house.”
Yet there is
no doubt who wears the trousers in Ms. Stema’s one-room stone house in
Barganesh, the family’s ancestral village. There, on a recent day, “Uncle”
Qamile was surrounded by her clan, dressed in a qeleshe, the traditional white
cap of an Albanian man. Pink flip-flops were her only concession to femininity.
After
becoming a man at the age of 20, Ms. Stema said, she carried a gun. At wedding
parties, she sat with the men. When she talked to women, she recalled, they
recoiled in shyness.
She said
becoming a sworn virgin was a necessity and a sacrifice. “I feel lonely
sometime, all my sisters have died, and I live alone,” she said. “But I never
wanted to marry. Some in my family tried to get me to change my clothes and
wear dresses, but when they saw I had become a man, they left me alone.”
Ms. Stema
said she would die a virgin. Had she married, she joked, it would have been to
a traditional Albanian woman. “I guess you could say I was partly a woman and partly
a man,” she said. “I liked my life as a man. I have no regrets.”