Tirana Times
TIRANA, Sept. 20 – A working group has been set up to put the country’s northern epic songs under UNESCO protection as an endangered cultural heritage currently sung and played by only a dozen of elderly men in northern Albania.
Olsi Lafe, the heritage director at the Culture Ministry, says a file with data on the epic songs known as the “Eposi i Kreshnikeve” is being prepared to be submitted for UNSECO protection by March 2012.
Musicologist Vaso Tole who is the head of the working group preparing the application file to be submitted to UNESCO says institutions dealing with the application have already been determined and the first results will be ready by next November.
The Centre for Albanological Studies will deal with the draft and required information while the National Film Archive will be responsible for preparing a 10-minute documentary on epic songs.
“The file can be described as multimedia, combining the science on the phenomenon to audio and video material,” Tole told reporters.
The Songs of the Frontier Warriors (K쯧롋reshnik촨) are the best-known cycle of northern Albanian epic verse. Still sung by elderly men playing the one stringed “lahuta,” these epic rhapsodies are the literary reflections of legends portraying and glorifying the heroic feats of warriors of the past. The main cycle, that of “Mujo and Halili,” preserves much of the flavor of other heroic cultures such as those mirrored in Homer’s Iliad in Greek, Beowulf in English, El Cid in Spanish, the Chanson de Roland in French, the Nibelungenlied in German and the Russian Byliny, says Albanian studies specialist Robert Elsie.
Last year, the Culture Ministry announced it had compiled an intangible heritage list which will be followed by concrete measures for their preservation and protection.
Apart from Albanian Folk Iso-polyphony, inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the ministry’s list also includes epic poems, linguistic dialects, central Albanian folklore music, traditional Shkodra music, the manufacturing of musical instruments, and traditional dances by the Dropulli (Gjirokastra) young women.
