10 ms·

In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever

71 points by Thevet 9y ago

pfortuny 9y ago
There is an impressive novel by Albanian Ismail Kadaré dealing with this: Broken April.
cousin_it 9y ago
Obligatory: https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM I grew up in Russia and have met a few people who subscribe to the "honor" philosophy of life, where personal insults must be repaid by personal violence up to killing. Such people can be fun, intelligent, charming. But I will never enter any serious business or personal relationship with anyone like that, and will teach my children the same.
- ronilan 9y ago
  But what about collective honor? Isn't a nation which can prefer disgrace to danger prepared for a master and deserves one?
  - vkou 9y ago
    Collective honor is alive and well in the West. If you have doubts, look at the United States' overreaction to 9/11.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      What extent do you think the reaction to 9/11 was honor, versus 'we can't let this happen again'?
      - vkou 9y ago
        There was a good dose of that, too, but there's also a good dose of that in 'honor' killings. Our reaction was disproportionate, it did not go through proper legal channels (For reasons including them not really existing in the international sphere), the rhetoric used to enlist young men to fight these wars smelled heavily of it...
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        As opposed to attempts to make money, start wars (see “make money”), promulgate an ideology, win political points, gain power over a populace (Patriot Act), and just plain fear?
    - fencepost 9y ago
      I think "the United States' overreaction to 9/11" would need to be broken out into much finer detail. * Referring to Iraq, there's a good argument to be made that it wasn't so much an overreaction as a seizing of opportunity. * For violence against Muslims in the USA there was some of that, but I don't think it was either widespread enough or widely accepted enough to be considered a reaction by "the United States" * For immigration policies, maybe, though again I think it's pretty clear that that's more to do with political parties than a US-wide reaction.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      We responded well enough to 9/11 up to Tora Bora. Attacking Iraq wasn't an overreaction. It was rank stupidity.
      - pc86 9y ago
        There was nothing stupid about it. It was opportunism.
  - cousin_it 9y ago
    You're thinking of a different quality. Willingness to defend oneself is normal and admirable. "Honor" as defined in Dutch's essay is something else entirely. It's about willingness to kill for an insult. That's despicable in both individuals and nations.
    - vkou 9y ago
      Killing for an insult is self-defense in a society where tolerating an insult broadcasts that you can be taken advantage of, with no repercussions. (Typically because the justice system is absent, toothless or corrupt.) "Honor" is not a cultural failing, it is a failing of legal structures. Where such systems don't exist, our rhetoric is not far off from this line of thinking.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        Disagree. Insults are a problem if and only if they cause third parties to have unfairly* diminished regard for you. To give a topical example, there does not appear to be any insult which affects Trump: if you hate him then the insults prove you right, but if you love him then the insults are just fake news. * In some places and some eras, insulting Our Leader was punishable regardless of whether the insult was true. I think this is a bad law, and only falsehood-based defamation should be an offence — but even then there is a problem because humans treat lists of more than seven-ish items as endless and the internet’s perfect memory means you can probably show any given person has said or done more than seven socially unacceptable things.
        vkou 9y ago
        > Disagree. Insults are a problem if and only if they cause third parties to have unfairly* diminished regard for you. To give a topical example, there does not appear to be any insult which affects Trump: if you hate him then the insults prove you right, but if you love him then the insults are just fake news. In societies where 'honor' killings take place, insults do cause third parties to have an unfairly diminished regard for you. Here's an example closer to home - when a drug dealer gets ripped off for $500, he doesn't care about the money. $500 is nothing to him. What he cares about is appearing like an easy mark, which opens the door to everyone and their brother stealing from him. It's why the correct response to that kind of insult, in that kind of industry, is to go to the offender's house, and break their skull open by dropping an ATM machine on it. He isn't killing someone for $500. He's killing someone to make it clear that he will not be taken advantage of. Trump doesn't need to do that, because me insulting him on Twitter will not result in other people ripping him off. He is protected from that by a working legal system. My insults are not damaging, and even if it were, he would be able to sue me. Drug dealers, and people living in the mountains of Albania have no such recourse (Or do not trust it.)
- ggchappell 9y ago
  Fantastic article -- and interesting comment. Thanks for posting.
- gooseus 9y ago
  That was great, I'd love to see a full blown HN discussion on it rather than just a subthread... this part jumped out at me: > I see this as a real danger even if - especially if - we eventually succeed in meeting everyone's needs. In a society where everyone is continually satisfied, the growth of an egocentric world-view is all but guaranteed. Just look at how easily things that were wild utopian fantasies or fabulous luxuries a few decades ago have become "rights" in contemporary American society. In a society where instant gratification is the norm, any obstruction of the will, however trivial, will be seen as a direct personal assault. The more routine gratification becomes, the less able to cope with interruptions people will become... I agree and feel like this can at least partially explain the rise of PC, identity politics and the culture war.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    To me, that just sounds like the "moral decay by luxuries" trope that has been repeated since at least Ancient Greece. I feel like every trait in society perceived as negative by someone has been blamed on that at some point.
SonOfLilit 9y ago
> Conflict is an especially fertile ground for cultural innovation. Friedman stresses how many legal systems, including advanced ones with lawyers and codes and everything, show signs of originating from feud systems, which might be the most basic form of law. They work like this: “If you offend me in some way, I will try to kill you”. A slightly more advanced version that takes account of possibly power differentials between offender and victim: “If you offend me in some way, everybody in my family will try to kill everybody in your family”. This originally sounds unpromising, but it turns out that people really don’t want their family members murdered. So we end up with an even more advanced version: “If you offend me in some way, we had better find some way to arbitrate our dispute, or else everybody in my family will try to kill everybody in your family”. Scott Alexander, Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-syste...
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
As a frequent visitor to Albania, I find this article appalling. The author goes out of her way to make Albania seem a weird, Borat-like country. Sadly, while it is common for Western journalists to visit Albania in order to write an article about blood feuds as an easy sale to magazines, they rarely put blood feuds in context – they are limited to a distinct region of the country, their real heyday was the 1990s, and the absolute number of people affected is very small even by the standards of Albania’s population. Furthermore, the country has made enormous strides in development, and much of Albania is now little different from any other Eastern European country. Writing an article about Albania and pointing to road quality is mainly an anachronism, and complaining about the difficulty of finding a ferry just makes her look like a bellend incapable of doing normal things that travelers do in most countries on earth. And then the complaint about the Albanian language is ridiculous. The orthography is pretty straightforward and Albanian phonology heavily overlaps with English (one reason that Albanians can often have good accents in English even if the don’t actually know the language as well as it would seem). And when she writes this: > Ukuˆgaan iˆxamnakuˆx or “Nice to see you.” I speak fairly good Albanian now, but I have no clue what this is supposed to be. It is not Albanian, at least not in any standard orthography.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > Writing an article about Albania and pointing to road quality is mainly an anachronism, As an Eastern-ish European living in San Francisco ... I miss the high quality roads I used to take for granted.
  - SonOfLilit 9y ago
    Are you Hungarian? The hitchhiking wiki spoke wonderful praise about Hungarian roads, but I was still pleasantly surprised when I crossed the border.
- pdabbadabba 9y ago
  I don't blame you for defending a nation that, in my experience, is the victim of a lot of ugly stereotypes in the United States (and probably much of western Europe) in the face of an unflattering article. But I think you're being a little harsh--to me the author seemed to be going out of her way to make clear she was describing only a limited part of the country. For example, the article makes crystal clear that, that, as you say, the feuds are limited to a small portion of Albania: > The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. Similarly, the author's comments about the road, etc., are specifically about "northern Albania." I'm in no position to determine whether or not this addresses the substance of your comment but, at the very least, it is clear that this description is not about the country as a whole. And finally, about the language: I'm again in no position to judge (though it does seem likely that written Albanian would be challenging for an English speaker simply due to the much larger number alphabet), but I'll just note that the quote you reproduce is, I suspect, intended to be written phonetically, not using standard Albanian orthography.
tousperdugen 9y ago
Unfortunately, the article is not well-researched. There is no effort to explain the social-economic roots of the problem at hand. No historic background or recognition that the problem spans across borders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krvna_osveta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krvna_osveta) . I find the title bombastic and inappropriate; it is simply using the catchword “vendetta” as clickbait. If you visited Corsica or Sicily and observed/learned of a local custom or phenomenon, would you extrapolate that phenomenon to the rest of the country (respectively France/Italy)? And what a coincidence that the author is of Serbian / Slavic origin.
- pdabbadabba 9y ago
  Fair enough on the lack of historical/socioeconomic background. That would have been interesting--though it's not clear to me why such a discussion is actually necessary here, as you suggest. (And it strikes me as a bit odd to describe this sort of article, based on apparently extensive first-person reportage, as "not well researched".) But note that the author does not extrapolate to the rest of the country. > The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. To me, it is significantly more problematic to suggest that the article is the product of some sort of bias against Albanians merely because the author--who is a professional author/journalist and Guggenheim fellow--has Croatian grandparents
- Parcissons 9y ago
  Agreed. Societys stuck in cyclic behaviour can be found anywhere, where nature generates no surplus, does not enforce longterm storage and no external ressources can break the cycle.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
Nonsense and very outdated. We all agree that "justice" needs to be done. Before there was traditional law and order by the "state": you kill my kin, I killed yours. It kept things in order and fear of revenge made you think twice. In Albania like in many transitional countries you could escape traditional justice by paying judges. Or the police never did their job as they should. Now, what's one to do when you see the killer walking freely ? It happened in Sicily, Corsica, it happens in Pashtun areas etc etc. It's really simple: No law, revenge takes over. By the way, this only affects families involved, and in most cases even others inside the family are ruled out: "I only have problems with the person that killed my son, others are free."
ardit33 9y ago
Albanian here (living in NYC), and this is a grossly over-exagerated article, and she has no citations whatsoever on her numbers, just a attention seeking/sensationalist article. The region is very remote. It takes hours to get in a main city, and usually the region is blocked during the winter. Historically this place is Catholic as the Turks/Ottoman empire couldn't influence the region at some of the traditions had carried on. I was in the region this summer and it is beautiful place to visit. Some of the scenery looks like like strait out of a Lord Of the Rings movie. https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19961488_10103884798269921_5787494737571968257_n.jpg?oh=25e7f90a4a270f6db5638fd6c6120950&oe=5AA5DD4F https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19961488_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19958917_10103884797830801_2850711056259788533_n.jpg?oh=1828c60fc1463ac1319befe6d47627b4&oe=5A96D81E https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19958917_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19989538_10103884797556351_9162254379261742652_n.jpg?oh=081353f59af62166321ac2b9ec91bf4b&oe=5AAD4EAA https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19989538_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19959110_10103884797601261_2948421281904755704_n.jpg?oh=cf06b4a6e0971046d0fd28ec53cb76d5&oe=5A9B2935 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19959110_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20032008_10103884797212041_1684120578030684002_n.jpg?oh=bb05e5a920e3734cd40dc280a9b2c776&oe=5A90AEC4 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20032008_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20031807_10103884796937591_8280708970147583766_n.jpg?oh=0d2d1b9f58ee48df4dfe1f7e383a9a61&oe=5AA747E5 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20031807_10103... "if the person who has offered it is simultaneously recounting how, a few years back, he got angry and shot a man. Such is the custom here: You honor your host’s hospitality." -- That just doesn't happen. Trash article. Please don't get discouraged by this. If you visit the Thethi region, I'd highly recommend during the summer and a 4x4 / SUV. If you love hiking and the occasional 4x4 off-roading, this is a great place to visit. Bujtina Polia, https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/bujtina-polia.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/bujtina-polia.html Thethi Paradise https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/thethi-paradise.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/thethi-paradise.html
- nether 9y ago
  Wow, that looks stunning. Is there decent ethnic food?
z3t4 9y ago
If there's 1/10000 chance that something you do will offend someone, and you do it on the Internet, there will be people that want's to kill you. Hopefully you are not using your real name ;)
dinedal 9y ago
I think the article is exaggerating a lot, I was in Shkodër for a month in 2004 and while it was filled with culture shock, I never felt unsafe as a tourist. That said, I also didn't decline the Raki or Saleep... ... I miss the Saleep.

71 points by Thevet 9y ago

There is an impressive novel by Albanian Ismail Kadaré dealing with this: Broken April.

Obligatory: https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM I grew up in Russia and have met a few people who subscribe to the "honor" philosophy of life, where personal insults must be repaid by personal violence up to killing. Such people can be fun, intelligent, charming. But I will never enter any serious business or personal relationship with anyone like that, and will teach my children the same.

ronilan 9y ago
But what about collective honor? Isn't a nation which can prefer disgrace to danger prepared for a master and deserves one?
- vkou 9y ago
  Collective honor is alive and well in the West. If you have doubts, look at the United States' overreaction to 9/11.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    What extent do you think the reaction to 9/11 was honor, versus 'we can't let this happen again'?
    - vkou 9y ago
      There was a good dose of that, too, but there's also a good dose of that in 'honor' killings. Our reaction was disproportionate, it did not go through proper legal channels (For reasons including them not really existing in the international sphere), the rhetoric used to enlist young men to fight these wars smelled heavily of it...
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      As opposed to attempts to make money, start wars (see “make money”), promulgate an ideology, win political points, gain power over a populace (Patriot Act), and just plain fear?
  - fencepost 9y ago
    I think "the United States' overreaction to 9/11" would need to be broken out into much finer detail. * Referring to Iraq, there's a good argument to be made that it wasn't so much an overreaction as a seizing of opportunity. * For violence against Muslims in the USA there was some of that, but I don't think it was either widespread enough or widely accepted enough to be considered a reaction by "the United States" * For immigration policies, maybe, though again I think it's pretty clear that that's more to do with political parties than a US-wide reaction.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    We responded well enough to 9/11 up to Tora Bora. Attacking Iraq wasn't an overreaction. It was rank stupidity.
    - pc86 9y ago
      There was nothing stupid about it. It was opportunism.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  You're thinking of a different quality. Willingness to defend oneself is normal and admirable. "Honor" as defined in Dutch's essay is something else entirely. It's about willingness to kill for an insult. That's despicable in both individuals and nations.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Killing for an insult is self-defense in a society where tolerating an insult broadcasts that you can be taken advantage of, with no repercussions. (Typically because the justice system is absent, toothless or corrupt.) "Honor" is not a cultural failing, it is a failing of legal structures. Where such systems don't exist, our rhetoric is not far off from this line of thinking.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Disagree. Insults are a problem if and only if they cause third parties to have unfairly* diminished regard for you. To give a topical example, there does not appear to be any insult which affects Trump: if you hate him then the insults prove you right, but if you love him then the insults are just fake news. * In some places and some eras, insulting Our Leader was punishable regardless of whether the insult was true. I think this is a bad law, and only falsehood-based defamation should be an offence — but even then there is a problem because humans treat lists of more than seven-ish items as endless and the internet’s perfect memory means you can probably show any given person has said or done more than seven socially unacceptable things.
      - vkou 9y ago
        > Disagree. Insults are a problem if and only if they cause third parties to have unfairly* diminished regard for you. To give a topical example, there does not appear to be any insult which affects Trump: if you hate him then the insults prove you right, but if you love him then the insults are just fake news. In societies where 'honor' killings take place, insults do cause third parties to have an unfairly diminished regard for you. Here's an example closer to home - when a drug dealer gets ripped off for $500, he doesn't care about the money. $500 is nothing to him. What he cares about is appearing like an easy mark, which opens the door to everyone and their brother stealing from him. It's why the correct response to that kind of insult, in that kind of industry, is to go to the offender's house, and break their skull open by dropping an ATM machine on it. He isn't killing someone for $500. He's killing someone to make it clear that he will not be taken advantage of. Trump doesn't need to do that, because me insulting him on Twitter will not result in other people ripping him off. He is protected from that by a working legal system. My insults are not damaging, and even if it were, he would be able to sue me. Drug dealers, and people living in the mountains of Albania have no such recourse (Or do not trust it.)
ggchappell 9y ago
Fantastic article -- and interesting comment. Thanks for posting.
gooseus 9y ago
That was great, I'd love to see a full blown HN discussion on it rather than just a subthread... this part jumped out at me: > I see this as a real danger even if - especially if - we eventually succeed in meeting everyone's needs. In a society where everyone is continually satisfied, the growth of an egocentric world-view is all but guaranteed. Just look at how easily things that were wild utopian fantasies or fabulous luxuries a few decades ago have become "rights" in contemporary American society. In a society where instant gratification is the norm, any obstruction of the will, however trivial, will be seen as a direct personal assault. The more routine gratification becomes, the less able to cope with interruptions people will become... I agree and feel like this can at least partially explain the rise of PC, identity politics and the culture war.
- icebraining 9y ago
  To me, that just sounds like the "moral decay by luxuries" trope that has been repeated since at least Ancient Greece. I feel like every trait in society perceived as negative by someone has been blamed on that at some point.

SonOfLilit 9y ago

> Conflict is an especially fertile ground for cultural innovation. Friedman stresses how many legal systems, including advanced ones with lawyers and codes and everything, show signs of originating from feud systems, which might be the most basic form of law. They work like this: “If you offend me in some way, I will try to kill you”. A slightly more advanced version that takes account of possibly power differentials between offender and victim: “If you offend me in some way, everybody in my family will try to kill everybody in your family”. This originally sounds unpromising, but it turns out that people really don’t want their family members murdered. So we end up with an even more advanced version: “If you offend me in some way, we had better find some way to arbitrate our dispute, or else everybody in my family will try to kill everybody in your family”. Scott Alexander, Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-syste...

Mediterraneo10 9y ago

As a frequent visitor to Albania, I find this article appalling. The author goes out of her way to make Albania seem a weird, Borat-like country. Sadly, while it is common for Western journalists to visit Albania in order to write an article about blood feuds as an easy sale to magazines, they rarely put blood feuds in context – they are limited to a distinct region of the country, their real heyday was the 1990s, and the absolute number of people affected is very small even by the standards of Albania’s population. Furthermore, the country has made enormous strides in development, and much of Albania is now little different from any other Eastern European country. Writing an article about Albania and pointing to road quality is mainly an anachronism, and complaining about the difficulty of finding a ferry just makes her look like a bellend incapable of doing normal things that travelers do in most countries on earth. And then the complaint about the Albanian language is ridiculous. The orthography is pretty straightforward and Albanian phonology heavily overlaps with English (one reason that Albanians can often have good accents in English even if the don’t actually know the language as well as it would seem). And when she writes this: > Ukuˆgaan iˆxamnakuˆx or “Nice to see you.” I speak fairly good Albanian now, but I have no clue what this is supposed to be. It is not Albanian, at least not in any standard orthography.

Swizec 9y ago
> Writing an article about Albania and pointing to road quality is mainly an anachronism, As an Eastern-ish European living in San Francisco ... I miss the high quality roads I used to take for granted.
- SonOfLilit 9y ago
  Are you Hungarian? The hitchhiking wiki spoke wonderful praise about Hungarian roads, but I was still pleasantly surprised when I crossed the border.
pdabbadabba 9y ago
I don't blame you for defending a nation that, in my experience, is the victim of a lot of ugly stereotypes in the United States (and probably much of western Europe) in the face of an unflattering article. But I think you're being a little harsh--to me the author seemed to be going out of her way to make clear she was describing only a limited part of the country. For example, the article makes crystal clear that, that, as you say, the feuds are limited to a small portion of Albania: > The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. Similarly, the author's comments about the road, etc., are specifically about "northern Albania." I'm in no position to determine whether or not this addresses the substance of your comment but, at the very least, it is clear that this description is not about the country as a whole. And finally, about the language: I'm again in no position to judge (though it does seem likely that written Albanian would be challenging for an English speaker simply due to the much larger number alphabet), but I'll just note that the quote you reproduce is, I suspect, intended to be written phonetically, not using standard Albanian orthography.

tousperdugen 9y ago

Unfortunately, the article is not well-researched. There is no effort to explain the social-economic roots of the problem at hand. No historic background or recognition that the problem spans across borders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krvna_osveta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krvna_osveta) . I find the title bombastic and inappropriate; it is simply using the catchword “vendetta” as clickbait. If you visited Corsica or Sicily and observed/learned of a local custom or phenomenon, would you extrapolate that phenomenon to the rest of the country (respectively France/Italy)? And what a coincidence that the author is of Serbian / Slavic origin.

pdabbadabba 9y ago
Fair enough on the lack of historical/socioeconomic background. That would have been interesting--though it's not clear to me why such a discussion is actually necessary here, as you suggest. (And it strikes me as a bit odd to describe this sort of article, based on apparently extensive first-person reportage, as "not well researched".) But note that the author does not extrapolate to the rest of the country. > The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. To me, it is significantly more problematic to suggest that the article is the product of some sort of bias against Albanians merely because the author--who is a professional author/journalist and Guggenheim fellow--has Croatian grandparents
Parcissons 9y ago
Agreed. Societys stuck in cyclic behaviour can be found anywhere, where nature generates no surplus, does not enforce longterm storage and no external ressources can break the cycle.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

Nonsense and very outdated. We all agree that "justice" needs to be done. Before there was traditional law and order by the "state": you kill my kin, I killed yours. It kept things in order and fear of revenge made you think twice. In Albania like in many transitional countries you could escape traditional justice by paying judges. Or the police never did their job as they should. Now, what's one to do when you see the killer walking freely ? It happened in Sicily, Corsica, it happens in Pashtun areas etc etc. It's really simple: No law, revenge takes over. By the way, this only affects families involved, and in most cases even others inside the family are ruled out: "I only have problems with the person that killed my son, others are free."

ardit33 9y ago

Albanian here (living in NYC), and this is a grossly over-exagerated article, and she has no citations whatsoever on her numbers, just a attention seeking/sensationalist article. The region is very remote. It takes hours to get in a main city, and usually the region is blocked during the winter. Historically this place is Catholic as the Turks/Ottoman empire couldn't influence the region at some of the traditions had carried on. I was in the region this summer and it is beautiful place to visit. Some of the scenery looks like like strait out of a Lord Of the Rings movie. https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19961488_10103884798269921_5787494737571968257_n.jpg?oh=25e7f90a4a270f6db5638fd6c6120950&oe=5AA5DD4F https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19961488_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19958917_10103884797830801_2850711056259788533_n.jpg?oh=1828c60fc1463ac1319befe6d47627b4&oe=5A96D81E https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19958917_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19989538_10103884797556351_9162254379261742652_n.jpg?oh=081353f59af62166321ac2b9ec91bf4b&oe=5AAD4EAA https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19989538_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19959110_10103884797601261_2948421281904755704_n.jpg?oh=cf06b4a6e0971046d0fd28ec53cb76d5&oe=5A9B2935 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19959110_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20032008_10103884797212041_1684120578030684002_n.jpg?oh=bb05e5a920e3734cd40dc280a9b2c776&oe=5A90AEC4 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20032008_10103... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20031807_10103884796937591_8280708970147583766_n.jpg?oh=0d2d1b9f58ee48df4dfe1f7e383a9a61&oe=5AA747E5 https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20031807_10103... "if the person who has offered it is simultaneously recounting how, a few years back, he got angry and shot a man. Such is the custom here: You honor your host’s hospitality." -- That just doesn't happen. Trash article. Please don't get discouraged by this. If you visit the Thethi region, I'd highly recommend during the summer and a 4x4 / SUV. If you love hiking and the occasional 4x4 off-roading, this is a great place to visit. Bujtina Polia, https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/bujtina-polia.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/bujtina-polia.html Thethi Paradise https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/thethi-paradise.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/al/thethi-paradise.html

nether 9y ago
Wow, that looks stunning. Is there decent ethnic food?

z3t4 9y ago

If there's 1/10000 chance that something you do will offend someone, and you do it on the Internet, there will be people that want's to kill you. Hopefully you are not using your real name ;)

dinedal 9y ago

I think the article is exaggerating a lot, I was in Shkodër for a month in 2004 and while it was filled with culture shock, I never felt unsafe as a tourist. That said, I also didn't decline the Raki or Saleep... ... I miss the Saleep.