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be the last? Arben Bytyqi won’t hear of it. He shook his head disdain- fully at the suggestion. “This is my third festival here,” said the singer and çifteli (Albania’s two-string lute) player. “Each one has been better than the one before. This one’s by far the best.”
Arben hails from Kosovo. This year he performed with Shota, an ensemble of Kosovar expats settled in Switzerland. The Albanian diaspora was well represented at the festival, underscoring the fact that there are more ethnic Albanians living outside Albania’s borders than within them. Kosovo was the ‘outer’ region most robustly rep- resented in Gjirokastër, but there were also groups from Macedonia, Montenegro, Italy, and America.
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lbanians who fled the Ottoman Turks to southern Italy as early as the 15th Century are today called the Arbëreshë. They were represented at Gjirokastër by the group Vjesh, which sang in a unique old Albanian dialect and played various wind, string, and percussion instruments: a sheep-sized bagpipe that might have stepped out of a Bruegel painting was especially noteworthy. Vjesh had been at the festival before, leader Nicola Scaldaferri told me, but it was the first time in Gjirokastër for young New York çifteli player Liridon Ulaj, who came from America with the group Bashkimi Kombëtar. Being at the festival, he said, “is definitely a big deal for us.”
And a long commute. It was a brief border hop for the Greek polyphonic group Inoro, seven vocalists backed by laouto, fiddle, tambourine, and the exemplary clarinet of Kostas Verdis. They brought home the close kinship of the musical culture of Epirus in northern Greece with that of southern Albania. Inoro closed with a song in Albanian, a crowd favourite: everyone appeared to know it; some in the audience sang along on the chorus.
While showcasing kindred cross-border sounds and those of Albanians scattered about the globe bespeaks a warm inclusiveness, the festival is also a keen competition among regional groups. They travel long distances to Gjirokastër, intent on winning. Earnest stu- dents and fetching models circulated through the audience, passing out brightly printed cards praising the ensemble from Elbasan or another region.
“The group from Kukës is best,” a young lady named Marsela Maloj informed me. “See the girl in the purple scarf and the yellow apron?” she said, pointing towards the stage. “My sister!” Middle schooler Marsela, her sister onstage and her brother and mother proudly watching alongside her had all made a wearying seven-hour bus ride down to Gjirokastër from Kukës in northern Albania. A lot of time and treasure is invested in participating in the festival, she told me. Her sister and her home team had been rehearsing for months. Economic hardship can skew the results: Marsela named a coastal region and groused, “Many in that group are rich!” Her team has it tougher, she said, but proudly pointed out its star players onstage, including a terrific piper named Zog Theta: “He wins all prizes,” she said. When the group from Kukës exited to thunderous applause from part of the audience, Marsela and her family got up to go back- stage: They’d seen all they’d come for. I never saw them again, but they left me with a button to show my support for their group.
he festival opened (per tradition, I’m told) with a perfor- mance by the winner of the 2009 competition, the Shko- dra District groups. Titled luminaries (professors of anthropology and the like) were introduced as the 2015 judges. What exactly were they judging? Folkloric spec- tacle: flamboyant dance, brilliant costumes, crack musicianship and singing, ritual theatre. Before the nightly performances, big screens on either side of the stage unreeled historic footage of folkloric spectacle from the Hoxha era: “The people’s government has made great efforts to preserve and record the traditional music, dance and costumes of the Albanian people,” intones a piece of vintage agit- prop I found online. Hoxha’s regime was still young when a 1949 folk festival was filmed. (It’s on YouTube.) It and later ‘ethnographic’ films show templates for today’s folkloric spectacle.
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For a non-Albanian it can just be confusing theatre, large groups of people performing dimly-explicable actions. Braziers appear onstage, and brides, weeping and otherwise. There’s ritual haircutting; there’s wool spinning. The Montenegrans trot out a pis- tol-packin’ Pasha (a plump, sash-belted and turbaned Disney carica- ture brandishing an antique revolver overhead). Vestigial remains of village life and rites are codified into official choreography. Move-
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