page_title: Kângë Kreshnikësh
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Kângë Kreshnikësh / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: A fight between an Albanian and a Montenegrin on the frontier by R. C. Woodville for The Illustrated London News
context_page_description: The Kângë Kreshnikësh are the traditional songs of the heroic non-historical cycle of Albanian epic poetry. They are the product of Albanian culture and folklore orally transmitted down the generations by the Albanian rhapsodes who perform them singing to the accompaniment of the lahutë. The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survival of its kind in modern Europe. The poems of the cycle belong to the heroic genre, reflecting the legends that portray and glorify the heroic deeds of the warriors of indefinable old times. The epic poetry about past warriors is an Indo-European tradition shared with South Slavs, but also with other heroic cultures such as those of early Greece, classical India, early medieval England and medieval Germany.
  The songs were first time collected in written form in the first decades of the 20th centuries by the Franciscan priests Shtjefën Gjeçovi, Bernardin Palaj and Donat Kurti. Palaj and Kurti were eventually the first to publish a collection of the cycle in 1937, consisting of 34 epic songs containing 8,199 verses in Albanian.
context_section_description: The epic songs evolved incorporating legendary Balkan motifs form times predating the arrival of the Slavs to about the 17th and 18th centuries, when the songs crystallized to the current form. The names of the Albanian heroes date mainly from the Ottoman period, but the matrix of the epic songs is likely much older.
  The main theme of the cycle is the warfare between the Albanian heroes (Albanian: kreshnikë or trima, and aga) who have supernatural strength and an extremely large body, holding ordinary family lives, but at the same time fighting bravely with opposing Slavic warriors (Albanian: shkje and krajla), who are also powerful and brave, but without besë. The songs are the product of a mountain tribal society in which blood kinship (Albanian: fis) is the foundation, and the Kanun, a code of Albanian oral customary laws, direct all the aspects of the social organization. In the songs emerges a truly heroic concept of life. The hero is admired, and heroism transcends enmity, so the characters are ready to recognise the valor of their opponents. The disputes between heroes are generally solved by duels, in which characters take part sometimes in order to show who is the greater warrior, but mainly in order to defend their honor or that of their kins (Albanian culture considers honor as the highest ideal of the society, thus heroes uphold honor disdaining life without it). The duels are sometimes engaged on horseback, other times hand-to-hand (Albanian: fytafyt, fytas), and the weapons often used are medieval, like swords (shpata), clubs (topuza), spears (shtiza). 
  Nature has a strong hold in the songs, so much that it receive life, so the moon, sun, stars, clouds, earth and mountains participate in the world of humans influencing their events. People also address oaths or long curses to the animated elements of nature. In battles, the heroes can be assisted by the zana and ora, supernatural female mythological figures. The zana and ora symbolize the vital energy and existential time of human beings respectively. The zana idealizes feminine energy, wild beauty, eternal youth and the joy of nature. They appear as three warlike nymphs capable of offering simple mortals a part of their own psychophysical and divine power, giving humans strength comparable to that of the drangue. The ora represent the "moment of the day" (Albanian: koha e ditës) and the flowing of human destiny. As masters of time and place, they take care of humans (also of the zana and of some particular animals) watching over their life, their house and their hidden treasures before sealing their destiny.
caption: Settling a Frontier Dispute by Richard Caton Woodville, 1880.
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