53 f Gjirokastër Days

Albania’s massive, week-long festival of folk culture happens every five years in this mediæval Ottoman town. Mark Humphrey took notebook and camera along for the party.

A

rgjiro Fest-ON (Festivali Folklorik Kombëtar Gjirokastër) opened and closed with big bangs. Before a note was played at the Sunday evening start, a fast- moving thunderstorm rumbled down from the moun- tains, sending the audience fleeing to shelter under

mediæval battlements. The following Saturday, the festival closed with a booming brilliant burst of fireworks brightening the night sky over Gjirokastër’s castle. The nights between offered a panorama of music, dance, and vividly-costumed spectacle, celebrations of Albanian culture in what may be the world’s only week-long free music festival held outdoors atop an ancient castle.

Hovering high over Gjirokastër and the Drino river valley, framed by mountains and sky, the castle seems to grow out of the hills above the town. It’s been an intrinsic part of its landscape and of Albania’s history since the 14th Century anyway. “The fortress was indeed very old,” Ismail Kadare wrote in Chronicle In Stone. “It had given birth to the city, and our houses resembled it the way children look like their mothers.”

Gjirokastër, his ‘stone city,’ became a character in some of

Kadare’s best works, since Albania’s most famous author grew up there. So, too, did the late dictator Enver Hoxha: his ghost hovers over both the town and the festival.

In 1968, Hoxha turned 60, a milestone fêted by the first big folk festival in Gjirokastër. He had already declared the town a museum city, and not just for it being his birthplace: its steep cobblestoned angles and slate roofs have more recently inspired UNESCO to declare it a World Heritage site.

The town’s quirky mediæval Albanian Ottoman charm endures, though Hoxha died in 1985 and the remnants of his regime crumbled in 1991. The past quarter-century has not been easy for Albanians, and their opinions about the Hoxha era are mixed. Yet there’s widespread enthusiasm not only in Albania but among the world’s Albanian diaspora for a folk festival that’s in part a legacy of Hoxha’s national vision.

Many of the 1200-some performers in the week-long festival

weren’t yet born when Albania’s era as Europe’s Stalinist hermit kingdom ended. Tour guide Elton Çaushi was fourteen then. What, I wonder, does his generation think of Albanian folk music? “In the ’90s,” he said, “we hated it, because the old regime wouldn’t let us hear anything else. But now there’s a new nationalism, and people like it again. Anytime you have a gathering, when the folk music comes on, it really comes to life.”

Things got lively on the streets of Gjirokastër’s old town when musicians playing davul (drum) and zurna turned out to proclaim the long-delayed festival was finally on. “We have a verb in Albanian with ‘on’ meaning ‘to celebrate,’” Zhulieta Harasani of Albania’s Ministry of Culture told me, “so we combined that meaning with your word ‘on’ in naming the event Argjiro Fest-ON.” The festival was ‘off’ during the turbulent years between 1988 and 1995, but has generally been staged every five years since its inception. The last festival was in 2009, so 2015’s was a year past schedule. Originally slated for April, it was postponed ’til May due to inclement weather. Despite chronic delays and rumours it finally got staged only thanks to last-minute corporate sponsorship. Could 2015’s belated festival

Above: Roland Çenko, whose Grupi Argjiro shared songs for hours at an outdoor café. Below: dancers beneath Gjirokastër’s castle, and drums and zurna in the streets.