Gjakova, capital for a month

Alfred Lela

We Albanians, on this side of the border, don’t really know Gjakova; we know it vaguely, as a stop on the way to Valbona. It is, in fact, ironic how we pass through another state only to re-enter the “homeland,” simply because the road is shorter that way-what a herbarium of Albanian coincidences!).

My first image of Gjakova was shaped in childhood, through a poem by Kadare, where the poet played with the word “blood” hidden inside the city’s name — a town with a name cut in half, half word, half wound, half cry. At the same time, the song about the Gjakovar partisan girl, Ganimete Tërbeshi (Ganimet, moj krenaria jonë), echoed in my ears. Bajram Curri, more than a man or a hero, I knew as the name of a town, accompanied by that bewildering phrase I never understood — “karaduzë bajramcurri” — named after a mustachioed patriarch who, according to communist historiography, had been killed in a cave in Dragobia by Zog, the satrap, the worst of the wicked.

Later, I learned that Gjakova and Tropoja are, in fact, the same region, violently divided, and known as the Highlands of Gjakova. And even that President Berisha, in the early post-communist years, had once floated the idea of replacing the name Bajram Curri with Malësia e Gjakovës (which wouldn’t have been a bad idea).

What I learned about Gjakova in these last few days is quietly fascinating. For example, that Albanians from our side of the border are treated for free in the hospitals there; that Gjakova has an arts high school with more students than the one in Tirana; that it even has a university (which to me seems a bit excessive); and that for several years now, the November Days have been held there, organized by the Foundation for Gjakova, which includes my colleague Ermal Hasimja, a Gjakovar who has become Tirana-ized.

I write about this year’s November Days because I attended two of its stops: the concert of Ermonela Jaho and that of the former “Jericho” soloist, Petrit Çarkaxhia. Two different genres, but — without exaggeration — both cultural events that surpass the borders of Gjakova, and in Jaho’s case, even those of Kosovo or Albania.

More than the concerts themselves, it was the conception, the inner spirit moving the strings that would become material — that struck me. All this becomes an enterprise, private yet public, which speaks so clearly of the individual’s initiative in freedom, the desire to create things that go beyond oneself and belong to the community. Something that, here in Albania, we have forgotten in favor of quick profit, pride in the material, and a relentless erosion of what is immaterial (the “unreal estate,” as Octavio Paz calls it).

I have attended, for example, an event in a small northern town called “The Sofra,” but what sadness when you realized that the gathering, rather than being an expression of shared public life, of community values, of tradition’s veins, was a banquet of meat and raki for local officials or businessmen who had paid for the songs, for the meat, the raki, and the table itself.

Gjakova, with its November Days, was something else entirely: a sophistication without rhapsody, a city without pettiness, a good intention carried through to the end as such. So much so that, jokingly, I told Hasimja that in an eventual redrawing of borders, we should take Gjakova — to ruin it, of course, because on this side of the border, we fix nothing.

I write these lines with the humility of someone who bows before what is good and beautiful, who recognizes and accepts it when others create it. I would have liked very much to have had the time to attend, for example, the Arbëresh ensemble’s concert last weekend, or the Book Fair, organized in an entirely original way. Every publisher in the Fair hosts themselves in a bar or café in the Gjakova Bazaar, and there they present their books, readers, and authors — in that blend that has always accompanied them: coffee, tea, spirits, and books.

Imagine these dozens of literary islets glowing throughout Gjakova, called a Book Fair, compared to the Hani i Bishtanakës, which the annual fair in Tirana has become — a cramped holding pen, an auction of writers as horses and readers as clientele.

So, dear rediscovered city of Gjakova, from the Bazaar of Tirana — where right now a song in Arabic rises toward the sky while a drill sinks into my stomach — cheers, and God bless!