’The son of three fathers has no hat on his head’.
Life
and social representations in a Macedonian village of
Albania
Gilles de Rapper
To cite this version:
Gilles de Rapper. ’The son of three fathers has no hat on his head’. Life and social representations
in a Macedonian village of Albania. Macedonia, Macedonias, Jun 2001, London, United Kingdom.
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Paper presented at the international conference Macedonia, Macedonias, School of Slavonic
and East-European Studies, University College London, 14-16 June 2001
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
Life and social representations in a Macedonian village of Albania
Gilles de Rapper
The village of Vrbnik/Vërnik (‘willow grove’) is located in South-eastern Albania, a
few hundred metres from the Greek border. When I was conducting field research in that
area, in 1995 and 1996, it had approximately 70 houses and 400 inhabitants. It is the only
Macedonian-speaking village in that district. It does not belong to the group of
Macedonian villages located on the Albanian shore of the Great Prespa Lake, who form
the majority of the Macedonian minority in South-eastern Albania, and its inhabitants are
willing to differentiate themselves from those of the Prespa villages.
When I was there in 1996, I was told that in 1993 the ambassador of the Republic of
Macedonia in Albania came in Vërnik, gathered all the population of the village and told
them that, since they were Macedonians, Macedonia was going to help them. That same
year, Bulgarians also came to the village. They did not gather the population, but made
clear to the people they met at their homes that the village was Bulgarian and that Bulgaria
would do something for them. The same year again, a Greek man from Thessaloniki
arrived and distributed food. He called for two or three old women speaking Greek and
said that the village was Greek. In consequence, all the inhabitants were to receive a visa to
go and work in Greece. In fact, since that time, no assistance has come to the village which,
according to my informant, was in the position of a son who has three fathers, none of
which is willing to offer him a hat.
In this paper, I will briefly describe the relations between Vërnik and local Albanians,
between Vërnik its three potential fathers, and between Vërnik and the Prespa villages. The
argument is that the way people from Vërnik perceive themselves is partly shaped by local
conceptions and representations on Christians as opposed to Muslims, and on South as
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
opposed to North. It must be noted that I do not speak Macedonian and that I interviewed
people in Vërnik in Albanian, all of them being bilingual. Actually, my fieldwork in Vërnik
was only a very small part of a project on the construction of collective identities in the
Devoll district1.
Vërnik and the Albanians
Most border areas in the Balkans have been affected by a process of ‘nationalisation’
after the creation of the nation states, which, in this case, resulted in changes of place
names, destruction of villages, and changes of population and affiliation. The village of
Vërnik has not always been isolated as it is today: its inhabitants used to have close links
with former Macedonian-speaking villages on the other side of the border. Intermarriage,
for instance, was common with the villages of Dhambel/Vambel, Smërdesh/Smerdesh and
Kosinecë/Kosinec. On the Albanian side of the border, some villages registered as
‘Bulgarians’ by the French army in 1920 are today fully albanised: this is the case, for
instance, of Zagradec, Shuec and Rakickë, on the South side of the Prespa Lake. This
albanisation probably happened through islamisation. The Albanian-speaking villages
around Vërnik have also changed: some Christian villages have disappeared (Selcë) or
become Muslim (Kapshticë), others have had their Slavic names changed during the
communist period, as when Zagradec was called Buzëliqen (‘lake shore’), and Bozhigrad,
Miras (‘the good place’).
The Devoll, the Albanian district in which Vërnik is included, is mainly Muslim2.
Christian villages are located in the upper valley of the Devoll River, and do not have
relations with Vërnik. They are all Albanian-speaking Christians, although some old people
have been to Greek village schools by the beginning of the 20th century. They are insisting
on being Albanian and not Greek. Christians can also be found in the town of Bilisht, very
close to Vërnik, and in the village of Tren, two hours from Vërnik (footpath). Those are
either autochthonous, either people who have moved or married in from other Christian
villages of the district (especially from Hoçisht and Ziçisht). There are also a number of
Macedonians from Vërnik settled in Bilisht, especially among people working in public
administrations (school, hospital…), as Bilisht is the centre of the Devoll district.
On the other side of the border, in Greece, Albanian-speaking Muslims left some of
the Kastoria villages in 1924 and were replaced by Christians from Anatolia: this was for
instance the case of Ieropigi (former Shag) and Dipotamia (former Revan). Inhabitants of
those villages all speak Greek today, but a part of them were Turkish-speakers on their
1 I am indebted to Galia Valtchinova, who made valuable comments during the discussion, and to Victor
Friedman, who read and commented the first draft of this paper.
2 In 1913, Vërnik (and a few other villages of the area, like Kapshticë) was first attributed to Greece. The
border was changed in 1924 and the village became a part of Albania. See Arben Puto, Qeveria demokratike e
1924-s për zgidhjen e problemeve të mbetura pezull në caktimin e kufijve të Shqipërisë. Çështje të lëvizjes
demokratike dhe revolucionare shqiptare në vitet 1921-1924. Tiranë, 1977, p. 173-99.
2
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
arrival3. Macedonians villages were abandoned in 1949. Some of them have disappeared
(Dhambel and Llabanicë, both on the border), others are today inhabited by Vlachs who
moved in from Ioannina and Thesprotia4 in 1956. They speak Greek, Vlach and çamërisht,
the Albanian dialect spoken in Thesprotia. Being very close to the border, those villages are
also inhabited by soldiers and policemen coming from other parts of Greece.
Today, if the inhabitants of Vërnik claim that they are Aegean Macedonians, the way
they are perceived by the others is not as clear as that: if the name Maqedonas is used by the
Albanians living in the neighbouring villages, they usually prefer to call people from Vërnik
using Bullgar, Shulink or Shule, or even kaur. The first one, bullgar, is the general ethnic name
for any Slav-speaking population in the area. It is also used when explaining the many Slav
toponyms of the area: local people usually explain those place names as a consequence of a
Bulgarian invasion. It is interesting to note that the Macedonians of Vërnik are not as eager
as Albanians to give a Slavic etymology to the local place names, as if they did not want to
contest the current Albanian occupation of the area, or to acknowledge the Slavic origin of
those names. It must be said however that Muslim Albanians are oversensitive on this
matter, as they search for any evidence of their Christian (meaning autochthonous and
European) origin, and as all Slavic place names are said to be Christians. In this respect,
Macedonians from Vërnik seem to be more careful. It can be noted in comparison that
Albanians in Macedonian attribute an Albanian etymology to most toponyms of western
Macedonia which, as in Albania, are of Slavic origin. In this way, they justify the anteriority
of Albanian occupation of those lands5. The use of bullgar by the Albanians not only
reflects a general usage before the First World War, but is also revealing of the very
common tendency in the area to deny the other’s identification.
The second denomination, shule or shulink, is said by Albanians to come from the
name of one of the Prespa villages, Shulin, whose name was changed to Dielas during the
communist period. It originally applies to the Slav-speaking inhabitants of South-eastern
Albania. It is often used with the general meaning of ‘non Albanian inhabitants of Albania’
and is then applied also to Vlachs. It is derogatory. The use of both names bullgar and shule
is contested by the inhabitants of Vërnik themselves, who insist on the use of the name
maqedonas.
The third name, kaur, is different. It is the very common and derogatory word
Muslims use to designate Christians as ‘infidels’. Local people use it very commonly and are
not always aware of its depreciative meaning. It is also used by Christians, both
Macedonian and Albanian, to refer to themselves. Moreover, from an original religious
meaning, it sometimes takes a more general meaning, aiming at the substantialisation of
3 It is also said – by Albanians – that some Albanian-speakers remained, having turned to Christians to avoid
the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey. On this little known aspect of the Treaty of
Lausanne, see Gilles de Rapper, Ta choria tis Kastorias i i fantasiaki meionotita. Synchrona Themata (Athens),
n° 63, April-June 1997, p. 108-11.
4 If I understand correctly the ethnic name ‘Çam’ used by my Macedonian informant together with ‘Çoban’.
5 See Gilles de Rapper, 1998. Crisis in Kosovo: Reactions in Albania and in Macedonia at the Local Level. Rome,
CSS/CEMES (Ethnobarometer Working Paper Series, n° 3), p. 19.
3
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
religious communities. As I was travelling one day on the road between Bilisht and Vërnik
with two young Albanian Muslims from Bilisht, a group of Macedonians from Vërnik came
towards us on their way to the market, speaking Macedonian among themselves. Once they
were away, one of the boys whispered to me: ‘Infidels (kaurë)! Did you hear the way they
were speaking?’ In this particular case, language is a way to define a religious community:
from a Muslim point of view, all Christians are not speakers of another language, but some
of them, like Greeks or Macedonians, are. In fact, generally speaking, the way Muslims are
talking about the Other as kaur has very little to do with religion itself, but rather with a
wide range of markers (food, dress, housing, occupation, public behaviour,…) tending at
the ethnicisation of ‘infidels’.
On the other hand, inhabitants of Vërnik usually define themselves on the basis of
language, as Macedonians, or on the basis of religion, as Christians (sometimes using the
word kaur). As we shall see, they do not call their non-Macedonian neighbours ‘Albanians’,
as they tend to have a civic conception of the state, in which all inhabitants of Albania are,
in a way, ‘Albanians’. As is usual in this area of mixed population, the Other is defined on
the basis of religious communities, and people from Vërnik talk about their Albanian-
speaking neighbours as Muslims, using the words turk and muhamedan. The first one is used
by the Muslims themselves, who insist however on its strictly religious meaning whenever it
may cause ambiguity on their national affiliation: they are not Turks in a national meaning,
but only in a religious meaning, as Muslims. The second word is only used by Christians to
talk about Muslims. It is considered derogatory by the Muslims who insist on being called
myslyman by non-Muslims.
The fact that there is no Albanian-speaking Christian village in the vicinity of Vërnik
makes it easy to talk about the Albanian-speakers as Muslims rather than as Albanians.
From the Muslim point of view, Albanian-speaking and Macedonian-speaking Christians
are all kaur, ‘infidels’, and, on that basis, share common features, either positive or negative.
Language and religion are one way to define the group. Another way is marriage. It is
acknowledged on both sides that Macedonians did not intermarry with non-Macedonians.
This was not a problem as long as the village could maintain links with other Macedonian
villages in the area. It changed after the Greek civil war in 1949, when Vërnik became
isolated on the Albanian side of the border. Instead of marrying Muslims, people from
Vërnik turned to the other Macedonian Christian villages of Albania, those of Prespa, and
also to the Albanian-speaking Christians of the area. Apparently, those marriages involve
Macedonian men and Albanian women. I have hardly heard of Macedonian women
married in an Albanian village. The same pattern is found between Albanian-speaking
Muslims and Christians. Muslim women marry Christian men, but Christians do not give
their daughters to Muslims. Intermarriage does not mean equality nor reciprocity. There are
also a great number of people originating from Vërnik who are settled in towns; they are
sought by people from the village for marriage. Altogether however, marrying inside is still
a characteristic of Vërnik, and a way to maintain the boundary between Vërnik and the
Albanian-speaking villages.
4
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
What are the relations between Vërnik and its three fathers?
The metaphor of ‘father’ and ‘son’ is interesting, as it underlines the importance of
kinship and primordial conceptions in the construction of collective identity, and also
because it is used by the Albanians of Macedonia in relation with Albania, the ‘mother
state’: in 1998, when the crisis broke out in Kosovo, one could here in western Macedonia
villagers stating that whatever was to happen in Kosovo, the ties between Albanians of
Albania and Albanians from abroad would never be broken, ‘because a mother never
abandons her children’.
The most distant of the three fathers, Bulgaria, is not recognised as a father. People
insist on the fact that they are Macedonians and not Bulgarians. ‘When the Bulgarians
occupied the area in 1877, says one of them, it was hard to understand them’. On the
Albanian side, people never forget to tell the Macedonians that their language is Bulgarian
and that everyone used to call them bullgar before the name Macedonian came into use.
Some informants remember that Bulgarians came to the village to study their dialect and
‘concluded’ it was Bulgarian rather than Macedonian, but Bulgaria looks to far away anyway
for people to feel any closeness.
It thus seems that Vërnik is much closer to Macedonia: people from Vërnik claim
that Macedonians exist as a nation, presently divided in three parts, Vardar, Aegean and
Pirin Macedonia. They themselves belong to the Aegean Macedonia and are aware that
they speak a dialect close to the one spoken in Kastoria. Due to the intermarriage relations
between Vërnik and other villages on the Greek side of the border, some people from
Vërnik have relatives who, after leaving their villages during the Greek civil war, settled in
Macedonia. Already by the end of the eighties, they could obtain a visa to go and visit their
relatives. When the Albanian border opened, some of them used this opportunity to leave
Albania, and used Macedonia as a bridge to more distant countries. They were surprised to
realise that very few people in Macedonia knew about their village. Actually, at the same
time, their Albanian neighbours were not aware of the existence of an Albanian minority in
Macedonia. Still in 1996, Devoll Albanians knew very little about Macedonian Albanians,
who seem to have been more or less included in the broader category of ‘Kosovar’. Most
public attention in Albania was then focused on Kosovo, just like it is more focused in
Macedonia on Macedonians of Prespa and Gollobordë/Golo Brdo.
However, there was no massive migration towards Macedonia. The first crossings of
the border led people into the Greek villages just on the other side. As in the Albanian-
speaking villages of the area, the only assistance comes from Greece, not directly but
through the work of the ones who are called ‘refugees’. The way people from Vërnik
perceive Greece and the emigration towards Greece does not differ very much from what
Albanian-speaking migrants say. The latter insist on the fact that they have to hide their
religion and pretend to be Christians; the Macedonians say that they have to hide their
nationality (kombësi) and pretend to be Greek. When refugees from Vërnik tell stories about
their experience in Greece, they usually identify themselves with the Albanians and
5
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
complain about the way Albanians are treated by the Greeks, in the same manner as the
Albanian-speaking Muslims do. And, as Albanians often tell stories about Albanian-
speakers still living in villages of Northern Greece by whom they were helped in hard
times, people from Vërnik oppose the behaviour of the Greeks to the one of the
Macedonian-speakers they meet in Northern Greece. Altogether, there is no trust in the
Greek state and Greek population, and common religion does not seem to bring any
feeling of closeness even though, at the local level, attempts were made to celebrate Easter
together with Greek villages on the other side of the border. In this matter however, the
fact that those villages are ex-Macedonian villages now inhabited by newcomers (mostly
Vlachs in Smërdesh and Kosinecë) might not help in developing good relations between
the two sides of the border.
The sense of identity of the people from Vërnik does not rely on any identification
with a specific population outside Albania. More precisely, their Macedonianness is mainly
based on their identification with a part of Aegean Macedonians (Kastoria), which was
exiled or destroyed. It seems that their sense of identity has very much to do with the
memory of the times prior to the Greek civil war and to the creation of the border, thus
with local society and history. In order to understand how people from Vërnik talk about
themselves, we have to look at another level, inside local society.
Minority inside the minority
First of all, there are also lines of division inside the Macedonian community in
Albania, and these seem as important as the others in the construction of an image of the
self in Vërnik. It is generally said that there are three groups of Macedonians in Albania.
The first one are the Gollobordas, who are Macedonian-speaking Muslims living in East-
Central Albania ; the second one include the villages of Prespa, who are said to be Vardar
Macedonians ; the third one is made of the village of Vërnik alone, and is felt to belong to
Aegean Macedonia. As Muslims, Gollobordas are usually considered as Albanians rather
than Macedonians (also they are not recognized by the Albanian state as belonging to the
Macedonian minority of Albania), and they intermarry with Albanian Muslims rather than
with Macedonian-speaking Christians.
It is interesting to look at the way people from Vërnik talk about themselves as
opposed to the Macedonian villages of Prespa. As said before, Vërnik is felt by its
inhabitants to belong to Aegean Macedonia, while the villages of Prespa belong to Vardar
Macedonia. From Vërnik’s point of view, this has consequences for the characteristics of
the inhabitants. As one of my informant states: ‘People from Vërnik have bright faces and
bright eyes, while those from Prespa are darker and thicker; they look more like Bulgarians.
Compared to Prespa, Vërnik also has more culture: clothes, cooking, marriages, have been
influenced by Europe, especially through Greece, who has been active in that field, and
also directly through people from the village who emigrated. Prespa villages are more
primitive.’ Generally speaking, Vërnik has more ‘culture’, kulturë: its inhabitants are quiet
6
‘THE SON OF THREE FATHERS HAS NO HAT ON HIS HEAD’
and honest, they have been to school, they have contacts with the outside world, etc. Those
from Prespa are presented as backward peasants, smuggling all the time with Macedonia.
In fact, those images of the self and the other lead us beyond the opposition between
Prespa villages and Vërnik. They are in fact very close to the way local society perceives the
differences between Orthodox Christians and Muslims, as well as the differences between
North and South. For instance, Christians claim to have more culture than their Muslim
neighbours – and this is acknowledged by the Muslims – owing to the fact that they
travelled abroad and went to school. In the same way, people from the South picture
people from the North as backward and violent highlanders, looking for easy money
through smuggling and crime, while those from the South quietly work in Greece. The
construction of the self and the other from Vërnik’s point of view clearly uses a stock of
images and oppositions which are also used in the broader local society when people want
to define themselves in terms of religious or regional identity. Macedonians and Albanians
share the same representations of the self and of social life.
This fact supports, in a sense, the Albanians who say that the Macedonians of Vërnik
are closer to Albanians than to other Macedonians, as they are ‘albanised’. In fact, even the
inhabitants of Vërnik recognize that their language is full of Albanian borrowings,
especially to express features of modern life. The collapse of the communist regime also
meant a better circulation for people, and many people from Vërnik moved to Bilisht and
other Albanian towns, where their children will not have the possibility to learn
Macedonian at school. Notwithstanding the efforts to have education in Macedonian
during the first four years of schooling, Albanian alphabet seems to be more easily used by
people from Vërnik than the Macedonian. It is worth mentioning that when I asked a 14
year-old boy from Vërnik to teach me the Macedonian alphabet, he was unable to
remember all the letters without the help of his young brother of 10, who was still going to
the village primary school. As Christina Kramer shows, people in Vërnik use Albanian
orthography in their correspondence with their relatives who live in Canada where they did
not learn Cyrillic and are more used to English orthography6.
The conclusion we might draw from this is that at the very same time it is claiming
its specificity, a minority might use categories and representations that show its assimilation
to the broader society. People from Vërnik might be Macedonian rather than Albanian, the
way they define themselves is the same as the one used by Albanians to define themselves
in the context of local society. It is also interesting to note that, as a minority group,
Macedonians of Vërnik use different levels of identification, which are not necessarily in
conflict: they are Aegean Macedonians, they belong to the Albanian state, and acknowledge
the importance of Greece as a vehicle of culture. On the other hand, they reject the
possibility of using also the Bulgarian level of identity – probably because they see no
interest in it. The third father might in fact be Albania rather than distant Bulgaria.
6 Christina Kramer, The Reshaping of Identity in Vrbnik, a Macedonian Village in Albania, manuscript, 2001.