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Aeschylus
Aeschylus ( ; , Aiskhulos; c. 524/525 BC – c. 455/456 BC) was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often recognized as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos (αισχος), meaning "shame". According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in plays to allow for conflict among them; previously, characters interacted only with the chorus. Only seven of an estimated seventy to ninety plays by Aeschylus have survived into modern times; there is an ongoing debate about the authorship of one of these plays, Prometheus Bound.
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Edith Durham
Mary Edith Durham (December 8, 1863 – November 15, 1944) was a British traveller, artist and writer who became famous for her anthropological accounts of life in Albania in the early 20th century.
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Enver Hoxha
(pronounced , 16 October 1908 11 April 1985) was the leader of Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania. He also served as Prime Minister of Albania from 1944 to 1954, Minister of Defense from 1944 to 1953, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1946 to 1953, Chairman of the Democratic Front from 1945 to his death, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Albanian armed forces from 1944 to his death.
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Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare (Ismail Kadaré in French) (born 1936) is an Albanian writer. He is known for his novels, although he was first noticed for his poetry collections. In the 1960s he focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize and in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been a Nobel Prize in Literature candidate several times. He began writing very young, in the mid 1950s. His works have been published in about thirty languages.
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Lekë Dukagjini
Lekë Dukagjini (1410–1481) was an Albanian prince who fought against the Ottoman Empire. A contemporary of Skanderbeg, Dukagjini is known for the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, a code of law instituted in northern Albania.
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Shtjefën Gjeçovi
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Skanderbeg
George Castriot Skanderbeg (6 May 1405 — 17 January 1468; widely known as Skanderbeg , ,, , meaning Lord Alexander or Leader Alexander) was a prominent historical figure in the history of Albania and of the Albanian people. Also known as the Dragon of Albania, he is the national hero of the Albanians and initially through the work of his main biographer, Marin Barleti, is remembered for his struggle against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies he successfully ousted from his native land for more than two decades.
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Albania ( , , Gheg Albanian: Shqipnia/Shqypnia), officially known as the Republic of Albania (, pronounced ), is a country in South Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the west, and on the Ionian Sea to the southwest. It is less than from Italy, across the Strait of Otranto which links the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea.
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Kosovo (; ) is a disputed territory in the Balkans. The partially-recognised Republic of Kosovo (Albanian: Republika e Kosovës; Serbian: Република Косово, Republika Kosovo), a self-declared independent state, has de facto control over most of the territory, with North Kosovo being the largest Kosovo Serb enclave. Serbia does not recognise the unilateral secession of Kosovo and considers it a United Nations-governed entity within its sovereign territory, the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija (Serbian: Аутономна Покрајина Косово и Метохија, Autonomna Pokrajina Kosovo i Metohija), according to the 2006 Constitution of Serbia.
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Labëria is a region in southern Albania roughly reaching from Vlorë south to the Greek border near Sarandë, incorporating Gjirokastër and extending east to the city of Tepelenë. The people of Labëria are known as Labs, who have their own tradition of songs, dances and costumes.
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Çermenikë is an upland in central Albania.
http://wn.com/Çermenikë
- Albania
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- Hylli i Drites
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Iran files complaint over purported US drone
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- Aeschylus
- Albania
- Albanian language
- anthropologist
- blood feud
- Blood Law
- Blood money (term)
- Broken April
- Bronze Age
- communist Albania
- Dharmaśāstra
- Edith Durham
- Enver Hoxha
- feud
- Gjakmarrja
- Greek language
- Hinduism
- History of Albania
- History of Kosovo
- Honour killing
- Hylli i Drites
- Ismail Kadare
- Kosovo
- Labëria
- Lekë Dukagjini
- Literary criticism
- Love
- Manusmṛti
- Mortimer Sellers
- Shtjefën Gjeçovi
- Skanderbeg
- Çermenikë
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The Kanun of Skanderbeg is the closest in version to the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, and the latter is usually the most known and is also regarded as a synonym of the word kanun. The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini was developed by Lekë Dukagjini, who codified the existing customary laws. It has been used mostly in northern Albania and Kosovo. It was first codified in the 15th century but the use of it has been outspread much earlier in time. It used under that form until the 20th century, and revived recently after the fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s.
Etymology
The term kanun comes from the Greek "κανών" ("canon"), meaning amongst others "pole" or "rule" and was transported from Greek to Arabic and then into early Turkish.
Origin
The practice of the oral laws that Dukagjini codified in the Kanun may date back to the Bronze Age. Some authors have conjectured that the Kanun may derive from Illyrian tribal laws. Other authors have suggested that the Kanun has retained elements from Indo-European prehistoric eras. Edith Durham, a British anthropologist suggested that the Kanun possibly dates back to the Bronze Age culture. Some other authors have suggested that there are many similarities between the Kanun and the Manusmṛti, the earliest work of the Dharmaśāstra textual tradition of Hinduism, which indicate a common origin.However several stratifications can be easily observed in the code, beginning with pre-Indoeuropean, Indoeuropean, Ancient Greek, Roman, general Balkan and Osmanli.
Development
This Kanun existed only in oral form, and was first codified by Lekë Dukagjini in the 15th century. The code was written down only in the 19th century by Shtjefën Gjeçovi and partially published in the Hylli i Drites periodical in 1913. The full version appeared only in 1933 after Gjeçovi's death in 1926. In 1989 a dual English-Albanian version was published. and then replicated in a 1992 version.Although Kanuni is attributed to the Albanian prince Lekë Dukagjini, the rules evolved over time as a way to bring laws and rule to these lands. The code was divided into the following 12 books (or sections): Church, Family, Marriage, House, Livestock and Property, Work, Transfer of Property, Spoken Word, Honor, Damages, Law Regarding Crimes, Judicial Law, Exemptions and Exceptions.
The Kanun has 1,262 articles which regulate all aspects of the mountainous life: economic organization of the household, hospitality, brotherhood, clan, boundaries, work, marriage, land, and so on. The Besa (honour) is of prime importance throughout the code as the cornerstone of personal and social conduct. The Kanun applies to both Catholic and Muslim Albanians.
Some of the most controversial rules of the Kanun (in particular book 10 section 3) specify how murder is supposed to be handled, which often in the past and sometimes still now lead to blood feuds that last until all the men of the two involved families are killed. In some parts of the country, the Kanun resembles the Italian vendetta. These rules have resurfaced during the 1990s in Northern Albania, since people had no faith in the powerless local government and police. There are organizations that try to mediate between feuding families and try to get them to "pardon the blood" (), but often the only resort is for men of age to stay in their homes, which are considered a safe refuge by the Kanuni, or flee the country. The Albanian name for blood feud is Gjakmarrja.
Former communist Albania leader Enver Hoxha effectively stopped the practice of Kanun with hard repression and a very strong state police. However, after the fall of communism, some communities have tried to rediscover the old traditions, but some of their parts have been lost, leading to fears of misinterpretation.
Notably, the current Albanian Penal Code does not contain any provisions from the Kanun that deal with blood feuds, and no acknowledgment of this code is made in the contemporary Albanian legal system.
Pillars of the Kanun
The Kanun is based on four pillars: Honour () Hospitality () Right Conduct () Kin Loyalty ()
Content
The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini is composed of 12 books and 1,262 articles. The books and their subdivisions are the following: #Church; ##The Church ##Cemeteries ##Property of the Church ##The Priest ##Church workers #Family; ##The family make-up #Marriage; ##Engagement ##Wedding ##The Kanun of the groom ##In-laws ##Separation ##Inheritance #House, Livestock and Property; ##The house and its surroundings ##Livestock ##Property ##The boundary #Work; ##Work ##Hunting ##Commerce #Transfer of Property; ##Borrowing ##Gifts #Spoken Word; #Honor; ##Individual honor ##Social honor ##'Blood' and gender; brotherhood and godparents #Damages; #Law Regarding Crimes ##Criminals ##Stealing ##Murder (discussion of sanctioning of blood feuds) #The kanun of the elderly #Exemptions and Exceptions ##Types of exceptions ##Death
Kanun in Literature
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare evokes the Kanun several times in his books and has it as its main theme in his novel Broken April. He also evoques the kanun in his novel Komisioni i festës (), where Kadare literally describes the Monastir massacre of 1830 as the struggle between two empires: the Albanian Kanun with its code of besa and the Ottoman Empire itself.According to Kadare in his literary critique book Eskili, ky humbës i madh (), where loser refers to the big number of tragedies that were lost from Aeschylus, there are evident similarities between the kanun and the vendetta laws in all the Mediterranean countries.
See also
References
Sources
Category:Albanian culture Category:History of Albania Category:Legal codes Category:Albanian law
bg:Канун на Лека Дукагини da:Kanun de:Kanun (Albanien) es:Kanun fr:Kanun (droit) it:Kanun no:Kanun sq:Kanuni i Lekë DukagjinitThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.