The Will to Create: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Albanian Spirit
Author: Valton Vuçitërna
Introduction
Few thinkers have proven as enduringly polarizing as Friedrich Nietzsche. The dynamic late-19th century German philosopher is popularly invoked as a prophet of nihilism – the belief that life holds no ultimate meaning and lacks intrinsic value. Yet this misrepresents and understates Nietzsche’s philosophical contribution. Contrary to broadly held perceptions, Nietzsche presented a sharp diagnosis of nihilism and highlighted its dangers. His infamous pronouncement that “God is dead” was anything but a celebration, but rather a forewarning on what would ensue with the collapse of Christianity’s authority as the metaphysical and moral scaffolding which sustained European civilization.
Nietzsche feared what he described as the Last Man, a figure who trades the pursuit of greatness for comfort and has forgotten that anything valuable is the product of struggle. In the battle against the Last Man, Nietzsche set the discipline of converting one’s hardship into growth, rather than into a nihilistic resentment of life. His philosophy exhorts us to affirm life rather than deny it.
Translating this diagnosis into the Albanian context finds it to be acutely relevant with unsettling precision. Albanians’ long history provides ample evidence on the difficulty of existence. Yet merely surviving threats seems like a poor aspiration for any ethnos. There must be something beyond this. This road, I will argue, runs through memory, language, belonging and creative volition. Failure to embrace and profoundly explore these treasures reduces them to exhibits in an ever-expanding but futile museum. Honoring our cultural inheritance, then, means not to leave it untouched, collecting dust and cobwebs in obscure corners of cultural discourse.
With characteristic perseverance, Albanians must seek to create in the name of civilizational excellence.
Nietzsche and Ethnic Attachment
Let us begin with Nietzsche’s own engagement with ethnic identity. He often wrote against nationalism as a political program, arguing that the state weaponized ethnic identity for its own gain. In “People and Fatherlands,” a section of his Beyond Good and Evil, he generalized about different ethnic groups, treating their inherited temperaments as active forces. This attitude suggests that Nietzsche’s apprehension was not directly aimed at ethnicity itself and its related characteristics but rather the consolidation of an ethnic “herd instinct,” often influenced by state agendas. This indicates that we can defend ethnic identity, apart from one particular misuse Nietzsche opposed.
Naturally, Nietzsche chose to write exclusively in the German language. The intellectual tradition he primarily engaged with was that of the German philosophers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and, above all, his early mentor Arthur Schopenhauer. I argue that Nietzsche could afford to reject attachment related to ethnicity precisely because he was immersed in a solid, world-leading tradition. To understand why Nietzsche went to great lengths to reject his “German-ness,” we must appreciate that he identified an internal crisis in 19th-century Germany – one directly related to the kind of nationalism he observed.
Nietzsche saw German nationalism as having curdled into a decadent force. The mythologically infused genius of composer Richard Wagner, once heralded as an expression of German cultural rebirth, had become increasingly entangled with the newly unified Reich. It is worth noting that Wagner’s own increasingly pronounced ethnic chauvinism and virulent antisemitism became a major factor in Nietzsche’s gradual estrangement from his former idol. The composer’s pieces like the panegyrical Kaisermarsch (1871), composed in celebration of the newly unified Empire, demonstrated the transformation from tangible German cultural inheritances into a self-glorifying tentacle of the apparatus erected by the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The imperial bureaucracy’s attempts to manufacture a mythology capable of justifying its own power became one of Nietzsche’s targets. Thus came his sharp critique:
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), “On the New Idol”
The 19th century saw the Albanians in a very different position. This was a people struggling against erasure by surrounding imperial powers rather than enjoying the cultural surplus needed to develop advanced state-justifying myths. The Albanian National Renaissance (Rilindja) began from a much more basic state and developed the basis for Albanian nationhood. It is important to note that national myths were also prevalent, arguably for much longer, among Albanian neighbors, often carrying problematic implications.
The anti-statist reading, however, does not cover the breadth of Nietzsche’s position. Aphorism 256, which closes “People and Fatherlands,” describes Europe’s nationalist fragmentation as a “craze” obscuring a deeper truth: that the continent secretly willed itself toward greater unity. Nietzsche lists Napoleon Bonaparte among a handful of figures, including Schopenhauer, whose work prepared this coming synthesis. We should note that Schopenhauer also attacked national attachment strongly, writing: “The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud.” Nietzsche’s work rejected national belonging as such and urged that the free spirits (freie Geister) he addressed himself to also outgrow it.
Elsewhere, he was even more direct on the subject. In Human, All Too Human, on the pages of which Nietzsche began to reject his past mentors, Schopenhauer and Wagner, he predicted and welcomed the future abolition of the nation through intermarriage. He foresaw a mixed race stronger than any of its national components in isolation. This was a cosmopolitanism altogether distinct from that of the Last Man; instead of the latter’s weakness, it was to be founded on the strength of overcoming national feeling.
Additionally, in The Joyful Wisdom (1882/1887), he named those who held this position: “the homeless ones” (die Heimatlosen). In his view, they had chosen to deliberately shed ethnic and class belonging to become “good Europeans … “the rich, oversupplied … heirs of thousands of years of European spirit.” Yet this choice emerges from a clear place of strength. It is undertaken by descendants of consolidated peoples choosing synthesis with their equals: say, Germans and Frenchmen integrating as victors rather than as subjugated populations.
Nietzsche’s diagnosis is powerful and thought-provoking, no doubt. However, for our purposes, it is demonstrably inadequate in the Albanian case. Nietzsche identified a legitimate development in the intellectual history of societies which enjoyed the aforementioned ‘imperial surplus’ and could come together as powerful, dignified constituents. Thus far, an argument in good standing. He then – erroneously, in my view – failed to sufficiently distinguish between peoples whose existence was already secure and those for whom the consolidation of an inherited identity remained a necessary struggle.
Nietzsche, then, closed the gate of ethnic belonging long ago. It is my task to reopen it. I suggest that we view ethnic attachment, properly understood, as the cultural medium which makes Nietzsche’s self-overcoming possible. The philosopher’s own approach provides some initial evidence in this direction. His genealogical methodology, most fully developed in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), treats every moral instinct as both historically and culturally constituted. If this is true of morality, then Nietzsche’s method can aid in demonstrating that it is just as true of the individual who inherits a particular tongue and history of struggle. Through Nietzsche’s method, we can so far only establish the historical origin of a moral instinct or, in our case, ethnic position in the world. Yet such identities are not maintained through passive laws of nature. The choice to cultivate this inheritance is itself a major act of self-overcoming.
One cannot overcome oneself from nowhere. What we inherit at birth makes up the raw material for the self-overcoming Nietzsche so dearly prized. This labor of consolidation – that is, a people’s deliberate effort to preserve and organize what they inherit into an enduring, healthy civilization – is not, then, a mere prelude for some future set of conditions under which self-overcoming can begin. On the contrary, it is, the very form self-overcoming takes for a people fighting to secure a stable and dignified existence. I must emphasize that culture precedes the political machinery that claims to represent it. Our refinement of the civil project – utilizing inheritance as a productive tool – allows the ethnos’ cultural spirit to resist either calcifying into oppressive state structures or dissolving into nihilism, which Nietzsche strongly warned against.
What Is Ethnicity?
Modern scholarship has often framed ethnicity and the nation as inventions. According to this view, these forces emerged from the Industrial Age alongside the centralization of political authority during the 18th and 19th centuries. This interpretation shares a skepticism similar to Nietzsche’s contra nationem. I have treated this subject at length in a previous article for the Magazine. For brevity’s sake, I will provide only a concise definition of ethnicity, as we must first understand the concept before considering how it can enable self-overcoming.
Ethnicity comes from the Greek ethnos. It is a semantic parallel of the Latin natio, from which the English word “nation” derives. The term encompasses both a biological and cultural inheritance. The Hellenic historian Herodotus provided a remarkably early relevant description in the 5th century BCE. He spoke of a people united by homóaimon, homoglōsson, and homótropon – the same blood, language and culture. In Book 8, Chapter 144 of Histories, Herodotus recounts an Athenian representative addressing a Spartan (Lacedaemonian) envoy. The former, after citing a fear of Persians destroying sacred sites, explains that the invading empire cannot bribe the Athenians to disavow “the bond of Hellenic race” nor aid in the Persian effort to “enslave Hellas.” We see a shared heritage, language and sacred symbols serve as a strong force against geopolitically motivated maneuvers, even against the Spartans, common rivals.
Herodotus evidently did not possess the modern civic conception of national belonging. The passage indicates that the understanding of nations as possessing inherited characteristics predates the modern nation-state by millennia. The older conception of ethnicity is an inherited consciousness which preceded the state and survives independently of it. If ethnicity is understood along these lines, as a multi-faceted condition rather than a political ideology, Nietzsche’s objections to nationalism lose considerable validity. The individual also receives the material for self-overcoming through the peculiarities of ethno-cultural transmission – rather than primarily, let alone exclusively, through state-driven agendas. On this basis, we can develop a vision of self-overcoming not via the annihilation of this heritage but rather its transformation.
A great craftsman who develops his mastery within the contours of a deeply ethnic cultural tradition, drawing on native aesthetics, practices, understanding of honor and more, is engaged in a process of self-overcoming no less than one who has shed himself of nation. One who loves his culture, remains honest about its failures and works for its elevation is in my view doing something more interesting than either blind ethnic chauvinism or rootless cosmopolitanism. Embracing cultural particularity, then, does not impede self-overcoming but can give it form and meaning.
Ethnic identity becomes destructive only when the individual is commanded to serve the collective at the expense of dignity, be that his own, his compatriots’ or others’. Nietzsche’s understandable fear of ethnic identity being channeled toward base, blind service is avoided through its thoughtful direction toward higher ends. To become what we ought to be does not require denying what we are bestowed with. Mastery is the only necessary condition here. The Albanians, then, will not become more capable of greatness by becoming less Albanian. They are to grow into it, molding and shaping the material of their ethnic being into a higher form.
There is a pertinent native treatment of this theme. Mit’hat Frashëri was an heir to the leading family of the Albanian Renaissance (Rilindja) and himself considered the intellectual father of modern Albanian nationalism. In his 1924 Our Wounds (Plagët Tona), Frashëri includes an excerpt on what should guide the Albanians in the 20th century, which our Magazine has made available in English for the first time. After presenting several historical examples of peoples mustering unique strength through maintaining “faith in their stars”, he asks: “What ought to be our ideal?” His answer possesses a distinct Nietzschean quality: “It ought to be the greatness and the honor of the Albanian, the oneness and unity of the nation, its general prosperity and progress … [through] the desire to claim our place in history, to create an honorable land with our own civilization, literature, art and our own material prosperity.” Frashëri’s thought remains valuable precisely because he recognized the central role of collective effort toward high, self-selected ends in both individual and national flourishing.
The Last Man Speaks Albanian
Nietzsche did not anticipate just how directly his own diagnosis would end up serving the case for ethnic particularity. Capitalism and liberal universalism can be convincingly read as one contemporary expression of the reality that gives birth to Nietzsche’s Last Man. An important aspect of this is the homogenization of culture and the flattening of genuine difference. A people’s particular language, customs, ancestry and aesthetics are forms of expression that risk being permanently lost. When a language declines, whether by assimilation or another force, a particular way of being human dies with it. On this reading, preserving ethnic identity should not be looked at as mere preference, but rather as a form of resistance to the very mediocrity Nietzsche stood against. Preservation, in short, serves as a necessary foundation for further cultural creation.
The Last Man arrives precisely with modern comfort. Securing survival, as the Albanians have done for centuries, does not inherently mean a culture is safe from the civilizational risk of the Last Man phenomenon. Blinking like a fool and with his base needs fulfilled, the Last Man concludes that there is nothing left to strive for. We could understandably perceive this as cowardice, but this would be a misreading. He is not cowardly in the classic dramatic sense; the Last Man is merely satisfied. And therein lies the quiet danger of nihilism.
Our Last Man manifests in the replacement of worthwhile and vigorous ambition. He appears in performative patriotism before others rather than constructive work. The figure relishes in waving flags, brandishing jewelry and participating in sing-alongs which belie the need for capable institutions and the thoughtful cultivation of generations to come. He is satisfied with a role in the diaspora limited to sending remittances. Yet a monthly check cannot amount to civilizational development – a collective goal worth pursuing.
It is particularly sad to note that this Last Man, no matter the distance, proves incapable of unshackling himself from political tribalism. In this old, predictable way, energy which could be channeled toward intellectual and material prosperity only serves narrow interests. This is a reality at least as old as the Albanian state; yet who would have thought that it would persist this strongly even amidst such financial security and physical separation?
There is, in honesty, something to be pitied in this Last Man figure, examples of whom I am sure we can all easily conjure up. Yet the point is not to hold them in contempt just for the sake of it. Rather, I want to highlight that the Albanians are capable of more. We cannot sit on the meager laurels of our survival; that is, we ought not flatter ourselves as if our continued historical existence equals the prosperity we should strive for.
The Albanian world, in their original territories as elsewhere, is experiencing several simultaneous crises. A mind like Nietzsche’s would not only ask what happened to get here – which material and political forces led to these contingencies. He would point to the depths of the wound: what has happened to the Albanian soul? Why has a people able to survive unthinkable odds seemed to settle for so much less than it is capable of building?
Apolline Spirit of Albania
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872/1886), was a groundbreaking account of the origins of Hellenic art and tragedy – and its eventual decline. Throughout the work, he presents several arguments aiming to demonstrate the effect of rationalism – as championed by philosophers of antiquity like Socrates – on Hellenic tragic art. Nietzsche critiqued them on the basis that they overemphasized rationality’s role in human life, at the expense of confronting the deep truths of painful existence. More importantly, the work introduced some of Nietzsche’s most influential concepts, among them the Apolline and Dionysiac forces. These derived from the ancient Hellenic gods Apollo and Dionysus, which played a prominent role in the theater of the Hellenes. It is worth noting that European writers had invoked Apollo and Dionysus for some centuries prior, but not with the depth or lasting influence of Nietzsche’s work.
These forces are not the original divine beings ancient Hellenes zealously venerated. Instead, Nietzsche adapted them much later to describe the artistic energies that distinguished the Hellenic civilization. Erupting from nature itself, the force of Apollo is prominently manifests in dreaming. The dream world is one of clear, often illusory, visual boundaries, presenting beautiful forms of existence. Nietzsche understood Apollo to represent structure and restraint in the name of maintaining harmony.
In this sense, Apollo is the principium individuationis – the individuating principle, a term Nietzsche borrowed from Schopenhauer. This force and its boundaries bring about the self, separate and distinct from the surrounding chaos. In Nietzsche’s worldview, Apollo also represents a beautiful semblance of veracity which blunts a truth the ancient Hellenes found unbearable. Consider Silenus, a satyr captured by King Midas, who is forced to reveal what is best for man. The satyr responds: “What is best for all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.” Pressed further about the best alternative, he adds: “...the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.”
Homeric poetry on the Olympian deities represented the Hellenic reply to the satyr’s fundamental pessimism. Apollo became the basis of the Hellenes’ illusion. But this god of dreams and boundaries is not gentle by nature. Apollo, as originally revered, is also dubbed hekēbólos, the “far-darter,” and the symbolic archer who opens the beautiful prose of the Iliad by wreaking plague on the Achaean camp. The deity’s temple at Delphi upheld two commands cut into stone: to “know thyself” and to hold “nothing in excess.” Those who failed to follow this logic of order should expect to be punished.
One particularly graphic story recounts when the satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest. Predictably, despite a strong performance Marsyas eventually lost to the deity of the lyre. Divine retribution came swiftly against Marsyas’ hubris, as the shining god flayed him alive. Thus the god of boundaries brutally struck down a creature who, by temperament, belonged to the retinue of Dionysus, as they formed the wild core of the god’s celebratory processions.
The logic of the story transcends what may first seem like wanton cruelty. Apollo emerges as the god of measure, acting against those who would unwisely seek the wisdom of Delphi. The Kanun, the customary Albanian code of law, belongs to this register. It not only prescribed conduct in painstaking detail but was also passed down intergenerationally, setting up clear boundaries within which its laws remained intelligible.
The Kanun is Apolline in the full Nietzschean sense. Its arrow-like precision imposed perimeters against the gales of chaos brought, notably, by vengeance, the defense of one’s honor or foreign threats. In the “Second Essay” of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes “the morality of custom,” a necessary precondition for a “sovereign individual” to emerge as capable of self-overcoming. Albanian society was long held together by this ancient warrior-ethos, requiring that violence of any kind be given form, developing into a clear morality of custom. In a crucial difference, Nietzsche insisted that such a figure must ultimately transcend customary morality.
Apollo, however, can neither abolish the suffering of all mankind nor extinguish dangerous forces, including the violent justice that could be enacted under the Kanun’s. The Apolline can only establish the frontiers which make it possible to endure such misfortunes. In parallel, neither did the Kanun eliminate death and conflict; it only subjected them to distinctions. The code laid out what belonged to this or that household, what could and could not be demanded. If one failed to uphold their honor under its framework, they risked making their demands unintelligible to the community’s moral order.
This Apolline impulse also appears elsewhere in Albanian history, beyond the grammar of customary law. In November 1908, an academic and political conference was held in the city of Manastir – then in the Ottoman vilayet (administrative division) of the same name, today Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia. It included fifty delegates from throughout the Albanian-speaking territories, including notables like At’ Gjergj Fishta, Mit’hat Frashëri and Luigj Gurakuqi. Their goal was to provide a standard alphabet for the Albanian language, paving the way toward creating a literary tradition. Several scripts were considered, prominently including an Arabic-based one and original scripts developed for Albanian independently, yet Latin ultimately prevailed. We can understand this historic choice as the concept of principium individuationis applied onto a language. These founding fathers of modern Albanian erected a boundary of sorts against the profound ambiguities that weighed on the Albanians’ position in their time. Overlapping literary and cultural influences were bound into one coherent form that could be shared, reproduced and developed.
Fan Noli, a renowned Albanian bishop, statesman and writer to whom this Magazine has dedicated a special tribute, performed a meaningfully similar act in founding of the Autocephalous Albanian Orthodox Church in 1922. Through this step and the translation of Orthodox Christian liturgy from Greek to Albanian, Noli provided Orthodox Albanians an institution able to worship and sustain community life through its own clergy and language. It is worth noting, as we detail in our work on Noli’s historical impact, that Orthodox Albanians seeking to maintain a bond with their religious identity faced a hostile foreign hierarchy with its own imperial designs. Assuring the dignity of Orthodox Albanians’ faith required an independent structure. Noli’s crucial contribution lay in securing this identity an Apolline form through which it could exist as distinctly Albanian.
The recurring Albanian weakness, though, lies at a more fundamental level than these acts of creation. What can keep these institutions alive once their builders are gone? The initial Apolline force does not ensure its continuation. Beneath lies something older and much more volatile in nature: the Dionysiac.
Dionysiac Spirit of Albania
Conversely, we find the spirit of Dionysus. Nietzsche called this Rausch in German, best translated as intoxication. For Nietzsche, Rausch’s function is to tear the principium individuationis apart. Through the Dionysiac element, individuality gives way to kinship; to blood – to celebration and grief alike, though Nietzsche’s interpretation does not recognize an individual’s dissolution into ethnic collective but into a broader, chaotic current of the universe.
Through the force of Rausch, the distinction between self and nature ceases to exist. In being reconciled with the wild, man is dissolved in many ways – but not gently. We find this theme in the Dionysian tradition itself. An Orphic cult, developed later than the original belief in the god, held that Dionysus was torn apart and cannibalized by the Titans, later to be reassembled and reborn. This dissolution is characterized at once by ecstasy and terror.
This vital Dionysiac force, with its untamed primordial fire, is evident in the Songs of the Frontier Warriors - the Kȃngë Kreshnikësh. Bards of the old Gheg epic poetry tradition inhabit the text as they sing. In conveying one tale, the rhapsode’s voice embodies the grief of Ajkuna as she laments over her dead son, Omer. Elsewhere, he recounts the swiftness of Halil in his journeys to the Kingdom of the Slavs and the power of Muja after he suckles from the breasts of the three Zanas (powerful nymph-like feminine figures). The boundary between the individuated lives of the listeners and that of the reciter, rooted in a time-honored communal experience, gives way for the length of the performance. The listener is not spared from feeling Ajkuna’s grief, or reliving Halil and Muja’s deeds. Thus is the enduring strength of the Dionysiac.
The tradition is most meaningfully experienced through performance. A recording, even less a transcription, cannot do justice to the invigorating raw emotion of listening in viva voce to the feats carried out by the powerful warriors of old. The Albanian South’s equivalent, the iso-polyphony of the Labs and Tosks, invokes a quieter form of the Dionysiac with its lead voice, drones and counter-voices. As the unyielding drone sustains, the lead steps forward only to dissolve back into the harmonic chorus. The process reminds the ear that the individual voice is nothing but a powerful echo of the community. As the boundaries of the ego collapse into the pervasive drone, it grows ever more difficult to distinguish between singer and choir. This is the intimacy of the Dionysiac at play.
Apart from the Albanians’ artistic expression, we can find one of the clearest manifestations of the Dionysian in the gjȃma e burrave, a masculine lamentation that has survived in Albania’s Northern Highlands and the mountains surrounding Western Kosova. The male counterpart to the practice of women’s wailing (vaji i grave), this is thought to be a tradition inherited from the Albanians’ Paleo-Balkanic ancestors. It requires at least ten men, typically related to the deceased man being lamented. They stand over the deceased, clad in plis and tirqe, prominent items of traditional clothing. The men uniformly cry out a rhythmic wail, all the while striking their chests and calling the deceased man by name as per his relation to each singer. The gjȃmë similarly discards the principium individuationis outright, wedding the wailers’ voices into one.
Through the tradition, each man expresses his own grief, according to his relation to the deceased. Yet the private grief does not remain for the duration of the practice. Through its communal, Dionysiac nature, the gjȃmë obliterates the Apolline boundaries between the men’s sorrows. In essence, what forms is one grieving entity crying out in multiple voices.
Once they complete the gjȃmë, the men must resume their ordinary lives. The individual, then, previously dissolved, must return to himself as himself. This tension is central to understanding Nietzsche’s account of tragedy: the Dionysiac practice breaks the confinement in which the individual understands their existence, while the Apolline gives this unruly experience form as a concrete image or encounter.
Nietzsche therefore describes the relationship between the two forces as a recurring struggle reconciled through artistic creation. Crucially, neither one enjoys an ultimate victory. In the first section of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche likens this struggle to the duality of the sexes. Through their interaction, and in the intervals between their fleeting dominance, the art of tragedy emerges. Fortunately, Albanian history is also governed by this stalemate of sorts. When neither force can vanquish the other, we see the creation of what neither Dionysiac dissolution nor Apolline customary law can do alone.
Synthesizing the Duality
Nietzsche conceived the successful fusion of the Apolline and the Dionysiac as culminating in ancient Attic tragedy. The self-dissolving ground of the Dionysiac choral performance gives rise to the Apolline image on the stage. Tragedy provides the audience with the individuated hero, whose act makes the underlying Dionysiac “truth” of life – that is, its pessimistic view of existence as suffering – much more bearable. However, for Nietzsche, this method of conveying the Hellenic worldview began to hollow when the noted playwright Euripides brought Socratic rationalism Socrates to the stage. Thus, the chorus became argument and dialogue, and the Dionysiac exited the Hellenic artform.
This melange standard of the Apolline and Dionysiac becomes apparent in one relatively recent development: the Reconciliation Movement of the early 1990s in Kosova. The movement came at a difficult time for Kosova’s Albanians, with their autonomy stripped and Yugoslav state violence on the rise. As this threat grew, Anton Çeta presented a historic initiative. The renowned folklorist, hailing from the city of Gjakova, helped organize fellow scholars, students and workers’ unions to end the practice of blood feuds (gjakmarrje) between Albanian families in the region.
Arm in arm with elders and volunteers, Çeta journeyed through Kosova’s villages aiming to persuade men bound by generational cycles of vengeance to make the difficult choice of forgiving blood. Importantly, he was following the procedure of forgiveness and reconciliation (pajtim) laid out in the Kanun. Not long after the movement was launched on January 29, 1990 in the oda (traditional guest room) of Adem Grabovci, then-chairman of the People’s Movement of Kosova, the results were striking. By 1992, Çeta’s efforts reconciled approximately 1,169 inter-familial feuds. It is estimated that a third of Kosova’s population took part in the conferences seeking restorative justice. The largest and best-remembered gathering took place at Verrat e Llukës, a field of oak trees near the Lluka village, sitting on the peripheries of Deçan. There, it is broadly estimated that between 100,000 to 500,000 joined Çeta.
Under the Kanun, pajtim follows fixed protocols and routines which vary regionally. In Mirdita and other Catholic-majority zones, the Kanun incorporates some clerical regulation and Christian symbolism. In the Western Kosova’s Muslim-majority Field of Dukagjin region, we do not see such Christian procedures.
Other factors were much more universal. For one, nowhere was the settlement of blood feuds left to the impulses of the feuding households. Typically, guarantors (dorezanë) were appointed to prevent enmities from being renewed by fresh bloodshed. Reconciliation was made tangible by practices like “the meal of blood,” (buka e gjakut), where former enemies signaled a publicly recognized state of peace. This provided form and, most of all, a defined ending to the blood feud.
The Dionysiac impulse toward communal bloodlust remains, and has proven difficult to extinguish. Yet Kanunic regulation offers a tangible, if less than infallible, Apolline path toward reconciliation. Pajtim, based on communal authority, is able to arrest feuds from metastasizing into eternal, lethal liabilities. Ending a feud requires tearing down the brutal boundary gjakmarrje erected around one’s blood relations, in order to rejoin an ethnic collective – which includes former enemies. He who reconciles the blood feud surrenders his old identity, cementing the Dionysiac nature of the pajtim.
If the Apolline structure is stripped from this procedure, the feud remains untethered to public force and recognition. In this vacuum, one of the feuding families can revert to bloodshed the moment the truce is questioned. Yet a Dionysiac force must also animate this belief; without it, there is only a synthetic peace underlaid with hatred.
Çeta’s campaign was crucial in securing the unity necessary to overcome Yugoslav state subjugation. Albanians should be glad they will never know how their resistance, and ultimately, the Kosova War would have turned out without Çeta’s efforts.
Yet, as I argued at the head of the article: surviving threats can only take you so far. Creation is what ultimately matters. Let us now analyze what happens when national creative energies are misdirected.
Creation and the Necessity of Beauty
In 1967, Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha launched an anti-religion campaign modeled on Mao Zedong’s Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Hoxhaist regime promptly closed or destroyed 2,169 religious institutions. Amongst them were 740 mosques, 608 Orthodox and 157 Roman Catholic churches, along with 530 Sufi tekkes (teqes) and mausoleums. Clergy of all faiths faced imprisonment, and some execution. Albania earned the dubious title of the world’s first de facto atheist state, later enshrined in the 1976 constitution.
This attempted annihilation of religious life was accompanied by an intense state-driven effort to build railways, drain swamps and marshlands, and more. The campaign was only possible through the labor of tens of thousands of mostly young Albanians sent as volunteers. Many of them, we can imagine, believed in their state’s project to some extent. By several metrics, this drive did lead to some development. Revealingly, precious little of these accomplishments would survive the collapse of communism in the early 1990s – save, of course, the distinct legacy of a cynical political system and well over a hundred thousand concrete bunkers – monuments to a uniquely futile paranoia.
It is entirely possible that the early Albanian Marxist cohort of the 1920s and 1930s were driven by a genuine wish for progress. We cannot in good faith expect them to have had a full understanding of the leviathan that the party-state would become, though thinkers like Mit’hat Frashëri raised increasingly insistent warnings along these lines. In Southern Albania in particular, where the communist movement gained a notable hold, the old semi-feudal Ottoman system remained prominent. This offers one explanation for widespread participation in the communist-led National Liberation Movement’s (LANÇ). The bitter reality many Partisans and other believers in the movement came to face is that the Hoxhaist state’s principal aim was its own preservation – seemingly, by any means.
The Party’s value system lacked a crucial human quality. In his Symposium, Plato tells of a Socratic dialogue where the prophetess Diotima describes ”the love of generation and of birth in beauty.” The statement reveals an enduring truth: the soul wishes to possess beauty; through the act of creation, it hopes to secure a kind of immortality. Yet, unable to directly possess beauty itself, the human seeks to manifest it tangibly, be it through a child, art or civilization.
The Marxist-Leninist state seems to lack this desire. This may be in part due to Marxism’s ideological rejection of metaphysics in favor of a strict materialism. One needs only look at the architecture from the period prevalent throughout the Eastern Bloc, largely a depressing mass of concrete and unforgiving perpendicular angles, built only to serve the population’s needs en masse.
It may be valuable to compare the National Renaissance (Rilindja) period with the People’s Socialist Republic. The former offered a full, aspirational view of what Albanian intellectual and political life could become. The latter certainly had a vision, yet one seemingly inseparable from the material roots of the state’s driving ideology. A distinctly Albanian character is, in certain aspects, hard to find.
The Albanian landscape offers compelling alternatives. Near the Northern city of Shkodra stands Ura e Mesit, a thirteen-arch stone bridge built by Ottoman Albanian governor Mahmut Pasha Bushati over the river Kir around 1770. The bridge was constructed to facilitate the transport of goods and soldiers across the flooding-prone Kir, and through Bushati’s pashalik. This functional end did not require the bridge to curve the way that it does, elegantly above the azure water and dressed in carved stone.
Some architects and engineers under Bushati’s administration, their names unknown to history, working with no expectation of glory – enjoyed only by the governor – made an aesthetic decision that has aced the test of time and contributed to Albanian architectural heritage. This is reminiscent of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s mid-19th century campaign to build London a sewage system following the Great Stink of 1858 – as tangible a need as any. Yet the architectural marvel that is the pumping station in Crossness could trick you into thinking it is an inheritance of the Renaissance. The intricate designs of the lamp standards Bazalgette installed along the Thames Embankment are similarly revealing. Projects of practical utility, it turns out, can also aim for the highest standards of beauty.
That very surplus, reaching beyond what the task requires, shows an effort toward beauty. This aesthetic quality – particularly when compared to the aforementioned soul-impoverishing concrete blocks or bunkers of Hoxha’s Albania – makes the creation worthy of inheritance. It imbues a certain desire for immortality. Bushati’s bridge is but one manifestation of this principle. Thoughtfully channeling the Apolline and Dionysiac forces, Albanians can work to create and maintain worthy projects that meaningfully further a communal civil project.
Becoming Ancestors
Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati, as developed in Ecce Homo (1888), demands that one accepts their history completely, without wishing it otherwise. This, he argues, provides the substance for creation. This reverence of fate, then, points one to bringing their values into being.
I permit myself to make one important extension: the same can be asked of a people. What would it look like for the Albanians to leave their cultural standing meaningfully higher than they found it? The path begins with the value of what we leave our progeny: what we produce, and how. The Albanian cultural force, a survivor of the unbearable weight of history, must direct itself toward transcendent creation. Our greatest energies must not be wasted on mere nostalgia or a fruitless defense of what already exists. He who masters this reception of heritage and continuous contribution of value in the process, begins to occupy the position of the ancestor.
Ensure, then, that you have gifted your people an estate, intellectual or material, that would have never come into being had you not lived. I cannot decide for Albanians what this estate should be. Perhaps it could be recording a region’s antique songs and stories before its final bearers leave this world. Or establishing a literary institution in place of complaining about how little Albanians care for literature. Maybe collecting one’s family history for future generations to cherish, or building an economic force that gives skilled Albanians a reason to remain with dignity in the land of their own ancestors. Or composing novel music while embracing the framework of tradition. Each act provides merit to the legacy we have inherited. What remains paramount is for the Albanian, forever more, to create.
Valton Vuçitërna is a fourth-year student of Finance at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business, serving as the Deputy Chief Editor of Arbanon Magazine. Valton was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan to parents from Kosova. He is the founder of The Anadrini Project, a database designed to record the histories and genetics of families in Kosova's region of Anadrini, as well as the history of the town of Rahovec. He is interested in European history and the cultural heritage of the Albanian people.
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