The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini: the law of the mountains

A law without writing

For most of its history the Kanun existed only in people's heads. Elders memorised the rules and applied them at village assemblies; disputes were settled by recalling what the Kanun said. It applied to Christian and Muslim Albanians alike and stood beside religion rather than replacing it.

How old it really is, nobody knows. The writer Edith Durham thought some of its rules could go back to the Bronze Age, others see in it remnants of Illyrian tribal law, and linguists have compared parts of it with legal customs of other Indo-European peoples. These are interpretations, not proof. What is certain is that the elders had been passing on the rules for at least five centuries before anyone wrote them down systematically.

There was also not just one Kanun. Alongside the best-known version of Lekë Dukagjini, which applied on the southern side of the Albanian Alps, there were the Kanun of the Mountains in Malësia e Madhe, the Kanun of Mirdita, the Kanun of Skanderbeg between Kruja and Dibra, and the Kanun of Labëria in the south. They shared the same spirit but differed in detail.

Who was Lekë Dukagjini?

Lekë Dukagjini belonged to the Dukagjini, one of the noble families of northern Albania in the fifteenth century. His relationship with Skanderbeg was anything but simple: for years the two were rivals, and Lekë at times opened the mountain passes to the Ottomans. In 1463 they made peace through the mediation of Pal Engjëlli, the archbishop of Durrës.

After Skanderbeg's death in 1468, Lekë became one of the leaders of the resistance and took part in the victory below the walls of Kruja in 1477. When Venice handed Shkodër to the Ottomans in 1479, he went to Italy. He returned in 1481 with his brother, failed to win back the family lands, and after that the sources fall silent.

Tradition says that he gathered the customary law of the highlands and gave it its form. Historians are cautious: the rules are probably older than he was, and there is no document showing that he codified them. It is more likely that the law of the Dukagjini lands simply came to carry the family's name.

From memory to book: Shtjefën Gjeçovi

That the Kanun can be read today is due to a Franciscan friar. Shtjefën Gjeçovi was born in 1874 in Janjevo, in today's Kosovo, and spent years among the highland tribes, collecting tribal law, folklore and songs. Parts of his collection appeared from 1913 in the periodical Hylli i Dritës.

Gjeçovi did not live to see the book. In October 1929 he was shot near Gjakova, where he worked as a priest and teacher. The complete edition appeared in Shkodër in 1933: twelve books with 1,262 articles, from household economy, marriage, work and land to hospitality, honour and crime. An Italian translation followed in 1941, a German one in the 1950s and a bilingual Albanian-English edition by Leonard Fox in 1989.

Honour, the guest and the given word

Four values carry the Kanun: honour (nderi), hospitality (mikpritja), right conduct (sjellja) and loyalty to the clan (fis). A man without honour counted as dead in the eyes of the community. An injury to honour could not be paid off with money; it could only be forgiven or avenged.

The best-known sentence of the Kanun is about the guest. In the eighth book, in the Gheg of Mirdita, it says: "Shpija e Shqyptarit âsht e Zotit e e mikut", the house of the Albanian belongs to God and to the guest. The same book treats hospitality as a matter of honour and sets out how a guest is received: he makes himself heard in the courtyard before entering, his feet are washed, and a breach of hospitality has consequences like any other injury to honour.

Alongside honour stands besa, the given word. It is more than a promise: a besa could guarantee a truce, protect a threatened man for a set time or place, or secure trade and herding. A general besa could suspend all feuds in times of war.

The dark side: blood feud

The Kanun is often reduced to its harshest chapter. The tenth book deals with killing and allows the blood feud, gjakmarrja: whoever killed deliberately exposed himself to revenge by the victim's family. At the same time the Kanun set limits. Only intentional killing justified revenge, accidental deaths were settled with fines, and ambushes were forbidden. In Gjeçovi's text, revenge is limited to the perpetrator himself.

Under Enver Hoxha's communist regime the Kanun was suppressed and the blood feud largely stopped. When state institutions collapsed in the early 1990s, it returned in a form that the mediator Gjin Marku has called a degenerate version of the Kanun. In 1990 more than a million Albanians in Kosovo, North Macedonia and Montenegro took part in reconciliation ceremonies organised by a group around Anton Çetta, at which old feuds were forgiven.

How widespread the feud still is, is disputed. After a mission to Albania in 2010, the UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston wrote that some organisations and media had clearly exaggerated the figures, that the number of cases had fallen, and that the self-isolation of families who fear revenge remained a serious problem. He urged the government to expand reconciliation between feuding families.

What remains

The Kanun is no longer law, but parts of it live on in everyday life, far beyond the mountains. Inviting a guest in, serving him first and not letting him leave hungry is still a matter of honour in many Albanian families, in Prishtina as in Zurich. And a besa, a given word, still counts for more than a signature.

That is the heritage worth carrying: not the feud, but the idea that a house is open, that a word holds and that honour cannot be bought.

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1. Wikipedia: Kanun (Albania)
2. Wikipedia (de): Kanun (Albanien)
3. Wikipedia: Code of Lekë Dukagjini
4. Wikipedia: Lekë Dukagjini
5. Wikipedia: Shtjefën Gjeçovi
6. University of Texas at Austin, Linguistics Research Center: Albanian Online, Lesson 40 (Kanun, hospitality)
7. UN News (2010): UN rights expert sounds alarm over blood feuds and domestic violence in Albania