Officials working to put epic songs under UNSECO protection

TIRANA, March 1 – Albanian culture officials says they are working 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.
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, 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, traditional dances by the Dropulli (Gjirokastra) young women.