Celebrating Arbëreshë Identity in Calabria

by Kate Holman

photos courtesy the author

Scanderbeg bust in Civita, Calabria

As the Italian peninsula narrows towards its southern tip, the land rises vertiginously from the coast to the country's mountainous spine. From the village of Civita (Ҫifti), high among the craggy peaks and sheer walls of imposing rock, one can look down to a calm blue sea just a few kilometres away as the crow flies.

It was here, in this deeply inhospitable terrain at the heart of Calabria, that Albanian refugees who fled the Ottoman invasion after the death of their leader Gjerg Kastrioti in 1468, laid down their roots. And here their descendants have stayed ever since - and are known as Arbëreshë. Civita’s museo etnico celebrates their story.

Coming from a country of mountains, it was perhaps natural for the followers of Albania’s national hero, better known as Scanderbeg, to look for a landscape that, however harsh, reminded them of home. Furthermore, the coastal plains were subject to frequent Saracen raids, so even the Calabresi built their settlements in the hills. Today there are some fifty Arbëreshë communities in southern Italy, scattered across Calabria, Sicily, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, Abruzzo and Molise.

Over the last century, these communities have shared the fate of most others in the impoverished south of Italy. Many people - especially the young - have emigrated in search of work. Isolated villages have been depopulated. Still today - except in the summer when families return to their roots - one finds mainly elderly residents: men playing cards in bars and women seated chatting outside their front doors.

The Arbëreshë, while preserving their culture and language, integrated successfully into Italian society over hundreds of years, to the extent that many Italians are unaware of the Albanian roots of famous figures like Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italian communism, or former prime minister Francesco Crispi. In the nineteenth century, the poet Girolamo De Rada, born in Calabria, was one of the first to reawaken a sense of Albanian identity among the Arbëreshë.

museo etnico, Civita

And yet, Arbëreshë families in these near-impenetrable locations have clung to their social structures, their language and their customs. In recent years, as legal and moral recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities has grown, these communities have started to reaffirm and celebrate their identity. San Basile (Shën Vasili) is a village of some 1200 souls, on the edge of the ruggedly beautiful Parco Nazionale del Pollino in the north of Calabria. In May 2024, it became home to the largest equestrian statue of Scanderbeg in Italy, unveiled in the presence of Albanian President Bajram Begaj.

In 2010, to mark San Basile’s 500-year anniversary, the Arbëreshë villagers launched a remarkable project to recover their origins and put them on record. One outcome was a book: Le Capitolazioni del 1510, which faithfully reproduces, in Latin and medieval and modern Italian, the original documents establishing the community in 1510.

It recounts how, on 1 January 1510, the Bishop of Cassano and Abbot of San Basile conceded “to the Albanians who live on the territories of the Abbey, at present and in the future”, the right “to cultivate the land of the Abbey and to build farms”, paying in return a tithe of their incomes to the church. The text set out where and under what conditions livestock could be grazed and detailed the punishments for recalcitrant tenants who failed to pay their dues. The surrounding woodlands were to be shared by the Abbott and the Albanians, as long as they collected 100 sacks of acorns every autumn for their landlord. On St. Basil’s Day, the reverend Bishop expected to receive five chickens and a goat kid. The careful cultivation of its lands suited the church very well.

In 1514, the Catholic Pope Leo X recognised the Albanians’ right to follow their Greco-Byzantine religious rites. Still today, in the splendid Santuario di Santa Maria Odigitria of the Monastero Basiliano on the outskirts of the village, the parishioners chant their traditional Greek liturgy.

“It’s not easy to find the words to express the emotion I feel, holding in my hands the Capitolazioni, which sanctions the official existence of the community of San Basile,” wrote the Mayor Vincenzo Tamburi. “We know little of the story of this town, and I am pleased that in recent months a widespread spirit of inquiry has reawakened.” He urged the villagers to preserve this record of the past, “because we cannot fully understand the present and the future, without knowing where we come from”.

Monastero Basiliano

But the Capitolazioni was not the only outcome of the resurgence of interest in San Basile’s history and culture. K’shtu a fjasmi na (“That’s how we say it”) is a meticulous work of research and scholarship, cataloguing local songs, poems, expressions and proverbs, many of them translated into six languages: Albanian, Italian, English, German, French and Spanish. It includes a dictionary of Arbërisht words, grammar and pronunciation, and evocative photographs of the village’s past.

K’shtu a fjasmi na was inspired by a young local man, Basilio Pugliese, who fell ill and died in his 20s. The project was picked up and carried to fruition by his family and friends, and the book is permeated by his memory, from the introductory poem onwards:

A mendi t’mbami me shum piaxhir,

Gjith Shin Vasili, t’qan moj bir

We remember you with much pleasure,

All San Basile mourns you, son

Pugliese’s cousin, Vincenzina Napoletano, is one of the women who keeps alive the songs, dances and costumes of the Arbëreshë community in San Basile’s festivals. “You could say that Arbëreshë culture is intrinsically oral. Storytelling, the spoken word, has for centuries characterised the development of the Albanian-speaking community, and in this sense, San Basile is no exception,” says one of the contributors, Giovanni Rizzo. “It is only a matter of decades ago that what used to be recounted and traditionally passed on from father to son, from generation to generation, has started to take written form on the page.”

In view of this, preparation of such a book might seem not only difficult, but paradoxical. The storytellers, the singers, the poets and the peasants, the “illiterates” who once sat before the fire and told tales to enchant their listeners with words and music, are no more. Yet “the book seeks, through the written word, to recreate lost atmospheres, to recover personalities and, as far as possible, their dialect, their words, and their songs”.

Carmine Abate is an Arbëreshë writer who was born in the village of Carfizzi in Calabria. He won the 50th Prix Campiello, one of Italy’s most prestigious literary awards, for his novel La Collina del Vento (publ. Mondadori). It was the not the first such recognition of his work, which has already been translated into several languages, including English. His stories, set in the fictional Calabrian village of Hora, (“homeland” in mediaeval Albanian) bring vividly to life the day-to-day rituals and customs of the community. At the same time he explores the dilemmas of being torn, for half a millennium, between two cultures.

Abate’s Il Mosiaco del Tempo Grande (Moti i Madh in Albanian) includes a dramatic account of the original Albanian refugees’ retreat from their burning homes and the Ottoman invaders, their eyes fixed on the western horizon, and on an uncertain future in a foreign land. A hazardous sea crossing the younger ones treat as an adventure, because “They don’t yet realise that their flight is definitive.” “One day we will return to our country as free citizens, with our heads held high,” declares a pregnant woman defiantly. “But she knows it is not true.”

Disembarking in Calabria, “They look around and see the same bushes, the same flowers as in their homeland, the same olive and oak trees, the same precipices and riverbeds. And yet, the air is different.” They walk for three and a half days - men, women and children - until at last they find a sympathetic landowner. “Qëndromi këtu” announces the Orthodox priest. “Here we will build our houses, work the soil and make it fertile. We will live in peace among ourselves and with our neighbours.”

Thus, says the story’s narrator, one October day towards the end of the fifteenth century, Hora was reborn, remaining in the minds of the villagers forever linked to its Albanian namesake, “like a person to his shadow”.

So it can come as a surprise - and a disappointment - to modern-day Albanian visitors to find that Arbërisht is nigh incomprehensible. Derived from the Tosk tongue of southern Albania, over the centuries it has drawn in elements of Italian, Greek, French, and the local dialects of Sicily, Calabria and other regions. It remained exclusively a spoken tongue, except in church liturgy, until the end of the 20th century, its use unauthorised in schools and public life. But since 1999, following state recognition as a minority ethno-linguistic language, it appears in books, classrooms and on local radio stations. Early this year, the regional service of Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI, pledged to promote Arbëreshë language and culture through its programming. The annual Arbëreshë Song Festival takes place in August, in San Demetrio Corone, near Cosenza.

As Albania itself grows closer to Europe and the Albanian diasporas in different countries grow increasingly confident, more people are interested in exploring the lands of the Arbëreshë. It was partly to rescue San Basile's traditions from the encroachments not only of the Italian language, but also the impact of global culture, that the local council published K’shtu a fjasmi na as “a gift to the village’s younger generation”, inviting them to preserve their unique identity.