High Albania
Edith Durham · 1985 · Virago Press
In 1908 the English traveler Edith Durham rode on horseback through the northern Albanian mountains and wrote down what she saw: the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, blood feuds and the besa, the sworn virgins, the dress and folklore of clans the wider world had never bothered to record. Albanians called her the Queen of the Highlanders. More than a century on, it's still one of the first real ethnographies of the region — an outsider who refused to let a people go undocumented.
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