He woke up every morning master of his fate. It’s a great thing to keep the gems of your life in a world that had decided for you in the first place without you. In his mountains some chose to become men guided by their need to trample the inevitable.
Burrnesha are one of the most particular examples of how societies shape or even enforce gender.
Burrnesha, the definition
The word burrnesha translates roughly as “man-woman” (Burrë: means man in Albanian and -eshe / -nesha is a productive feminine diminutive ending).
The origin of the tradition is not entirely clear, but historically, when the male heirs of a family died or were killed and the property could no longer pass from man to man, there was an exception: if there was a virgin daughter, she could take on the role of patriarch, swearing in front of twelve village elders that she would remain chaste throughout her life.
With this declaration, burrnesha secured the family fortune — and honor. It was “a choice born of necessity, not of happiness,” a social construct and a selfless act of family protection. They adopt men’s clothing, hairstyle, work roles, mannerisms and speech.
It is difficult to determine with certainty the origin of this practice due to the lack of records. However, it is described in the Kanun, an informal collection of social rules that have been passed down orally for centuries in these communities.
This places the practice at least as early as the 15th century. Under these patriarchal laws, women were considered the property of their husbands and their lives were worth half of their husbands’ lives.
To escape a marriage without dishonoring the family
“They didn’t have the right to decide their own fate or choose their own lives,” says Aferdita Onuzi, an ethnographer who has studied the burrneshat.
“If a girl was to be betrothed – that was decided without ever being asked – she was not asked either about the age at which she would be betrothed, or the person to whom she would be betrothed.”
There were other reasons why a girl in Albania might want to become a boy, or a woman a man. Imagine getting married at 15, 16 or 17, possibly to a spouse in your 40s, 50s or 60s.
On your wedding night, your father might have put a bullet inside your suitcase, for the husband to use in case you weren’t a virgin.
You would stand tall throughout the marriage, looking down like the lowly, submissive animal you had just become, and soon you would be living with your husband’s family, wherever they were, in a state of near servitude, taking all orders from them.
You would never answer. You wouldn’t make any decisions, not even about the children you would bear. You wouldn’t smoke, you wouldn’t drink, you wouldn’t carry a gun. From dawn to dusk, your life would be full of hard work.
According to the Kanun: “The woman is known as a sack made to last as long as she lives in her husband’s house.”
Becoming a burrnesha woman was a way to escape an arranged marriage without dishonoring the groom’s family and ultimately avoid a bloody feud between the two families.
Many, like Duni, took the oath to avoid forced marriages; some to take on traditional male roles — such as managing a farm — in families where all the men had died in blood feuds that plagued the region; and others simply because they felt more like men.
“I always felt like a man”
“I always felt like a man.” For Drande, adopting the practice was a way to enjoy male freedoms such as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, elements deeply rooted in burrnesha tradition.
This included drinking the traditional Albanian spirit, rakia, historically reserved for men. Now, Drande not only drinks it, he also brews his own.
Drande says that choosing to become a burrnesha has given him greater acceptance in society. “Everywhere I went, I received special respect and that was a nice feeling. I was respected as a man and not as a woman. I felt more free that way,” he says.
The only way to survive in a male-dominated society was to become a man
“Albania was a male-dominated world, the only way to survive was to be a man,” says Gjystina Grishaj in the BBC’s feature on Albania’s last “sworn virgins”
When she was still 23 years old and living in the mountains of northern Albania, she made a decision that would change her life. She took a vow of celibacy and promised to live the rest of her life as a man.
Gjystina’s family has lived in the Malësi e Madhe area of Lëpushë for more than a century. A valley deeply nestled between rugged mountains, it remains one of the few areas where the burrnesha tradition still exists
“There are many single people in the world, but they are not burrneshat. A burrnesha is dedicated only to her family, work, life, maintaining her purity,” says Gjystina.
After her father’s death she decided to become a vowed virgin in order to lead the family and be able to take on tasks to support them financially.
“We were extremely poor. My father died and my mother had six children, so to make it easier for her, I decided to become a burrnesha and work hard.”
The case of Haki, spotted in the neighborhood by Michael Paterniti for GQ magazine in 2014, was a little different. It was almost like she was born to be a burrnesha.
His parents had thirteen children, he said, and he was the third in line. When his mother was pregnant with him, an old wandering dervish from Kosovo passed through the village; knowing that some wanted his head because of a blood feud, he asked the family for a piece of land to be buried there.
Haki’s father agreed. Before the dervish was killed, eleven days later, he predicted that Haki, though born a woman, would live as a man. And that’s exactly what happened.
It was a mild November afternoon and Haki was standing in the bright light of his garden. Other journalists had visited Haki in the past, sometimes asking him questions he found offensive. Some wanted to know if she was just a lesbian in disguise — and that had hurt him deeply.
“It breaks my heart when they ask questions like that,” he said, rolling a tobacco leaf from his tongue. “I hate being used. God gave me who I am and I accepted it. Being a lesbian — that has nothing to do with what it means to be burrnesha. Don’t confuse what I am with being a lesbian,” she said, “or I’ll kick you in the shins.”
Autonomy, magic word
Lume (for that was how she defined herself, not insisting on ‘he’, but accepting both equally) was the fifth child among four brothers and two sisters.
For her the transition from girl to boy was never an issue, at least in her own mind. She would never be held by a man anyway. “I don’t know what a dress is and I never will,” she said.
“When I was about twelve, I said, ‘God, help me. I pray that I will be burrnesha until the end.'” Then she spoke to her baba — her father — and he understood.
He gathered Lume’s four brothers and, according to her, told them: “From now on, this girl is a sworn virgin and will live like a man. These will be her jobs. You should only look at your own.” The brothers were enraged and asked why since no male in the family had died, they needed a fifth brother?
They kept shouting: Lume had to get married, they insisted. It would make them all look ridiculous—the era of sworn virgins was over.
“Who will take care of you?” they asked Lume. She was adamant. It was like she was marrying the man inside her. A powerful idea that gave her strength and autonomy.
In time, after her father died and every brother left home, she was left alone with her mother. She was riding her horse, cutting wood. He could walk to Tropojë and back, eight hours round trip.
The film “BURRNESHA” by Lukas Tielke
In the award-winning film “BURRNESHA” by Lukas Tielke, the different stories of three burrneshas are presented, all of whom have experienced very difficult situations in their lives.
“I hope the film also shows that, today, those decisions could perhaps be different. We live in a more open world, where everyone can freely decide how they want to live their lives.
This is also reflected in the fact that there are only twelve burrnesha left. Because there is simply no need to make such a decision anymore.
If you talk to the three women we filmed, they each have different reasons that ultimately led them to become burrnesha. But what they have in common is that they did it to support their families.
They became sworn virgins so that they could take on all the responsibilities that a man would have. To move in the world as men, with almost the same rights.
Mainly this happened because, otherwise, there was no man in the family. There’s a personal story behind each one, but that seems to be the general raison d’être of the burrnesha,” Tielke told the Hometown Journal.
This is the Balkans
Dr. Ellen Robertson reports that the practice of sworn virgins has been recorded in various Balkan countries. The largest number of them have been reported in the Albanian communities of northern Albania and Kosovo. However, there have also been reports of Slavic-speaking sworn virgins in Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia
The original term used in the Kanun is virgjineshe, meaning “virgin”. Today the word burrneshe (plural: burrnesha) is more commonly used. There are other, less common terms, such as sokoleshe.
The words burrneshe and sokoleshe are titles that command great respect and admiration. They denote courage, wisdom and strength of character.
Apart from northern Albanian communities of sworn virgins, in the rest of the Albanian-speaking world these titles are commonly used for women who live as typical women but have earned the speaker’s respect.
For example, a woman who has faced significant difficulties in a responsible and honest way can be described as burrneshe.
A harsh social invention is left to oblivion
Today these “sworn virgins” still exist, but their numbers have dwindled dramatically. Most Albanians have either never heard of them, or thought they were completely mythical, something like elves.
The remaining burrnesha are mostly women in their seventies and eighties, living in small villages in areas such as Tropojë, the highlands of Shkodër and the valleys of Dukagjin.
The best-known public figure, Stana Cerović from Montenegro, died in 2016 after living her entire life as a man on her family’s land near Šavnik.
The latter in Albania itself prefer to stay away from the public. Estimates by anthropologists in recent years place their number below a dozen, probably in constant decline.
When the latter die, there will be no replacements. No young woman in Albania today needs to vow abstinence from marriage and sexual relations in front of village elders to inherit her father’s land or refuse a son-in-law she doesn’t even know exists.
What gets lost along with tradition is something harder to name: a particular solution that a particular society devised for a particular set of problems — and that worked, in its own cruel way, for hundreds of years.
With information from GQ, BBC, Global Informality Project, Hometown Journal, Guide to Albania.
