Lezha hosts rhapsody festival

TIRANA, April 18 – For the eighth year in a row, the northern town of Lezha hosted the special rhapsody festival bringing together 20 folklore groups and instrumentalists from Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. The two-day festival which closed on April 14 was held at the Memorial Skanderbeg Tomb in Lezha.
Lezha Mayor Viktor Tushaj described the Albanian folklore as a source of irreplaceable value of the national culture and identity. He said the holding of this festival in historic Lezha highlighted the century-old town boasting cultural heritage and tourism.
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 flavour 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.