Burrnesha

The word is built on burrë, man, with the feminine ending -eshë. In ordinary Albanian it is also the compliment paid to a forceful woman, and that second life of the word has been contested. At the International Women's Day march in Tirana in 2019 the activist Rea Nepravishta carried a placard with burrnesha struck through in red and strong women written beneath it, on the argument that a language should not reach for the word man in order to praise a woman.

Which names the role carries across the Balkans

The practice is commonest in northern Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, and it exists, or has existed, to a lesser extent in Bosnia, Dalmatia, Serbia and North Macedonia. Each language named it for a different part of what it does, and the English rendering picked the narrowest part of all.

Albanian also has a set of words cognate with virgin, virgjineshë and virgjëreshë among them, while vajzë e betuar is used where the parents decided while the person was still a baby or a child, a distinction the single English phrase cannot carry. Grammar shifted too: in Slavic languages with three grammatical genders, a sworn virgin is never spoken about in the neuter, and Marina Warner writes that the sworn virgin's true sex will never again, on pain of death, be alluded to in his presence or out of it.

How the Kanun made the vow possible

The framework is the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, the customary code developed by Lekë Dukagjini and used across northern Albania and Kosovo from the Ottoman era into the twentieth century, followed by Albanian Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims alike, since it is not religious. Under the Kanun a household is patrilineal and patrilocal: wealth descends through men, a bride moves into her husband's family, and women are treated as the family's property. A woman could not smoke, wear a watch or vote in local elections, could not buy land, was shut out of many jobs, and could not enter certain establishments.

Sworn virgins are documented in the western Balkans as early as the fifteenth century, and the BBC dates the Kanun itself to that century. Blood feuding, gjakmarrja, kept producing the situation the code had no other answer for. Feuds killed male heirs, and a daughter who swore the oath could inherit, head the house and carry a weapon in the family's name. Warner's phrase for the result is a warrior in disguise defending his family like a man. In the reckoning of blood money a burrnesha killed in a feud counted as a full life, where a woman counted as half.

The anthropologist Jeffrey Dickemann has argued that the inheritance explanation is too neat, since a person who bears no children leaves no heirs in turn, several daughters in a single family sometimes swore, and the later birth of a brother did not end the role. His own suggestion moves the decision a generation back, to the mothers: a widow without sons could return to her birth family, serve in her dead husband's household or remarry, while a son or a surrogate one let her stay in the home of her adulthood. In testimony recorded by René Gremaux a mother tells her daughter that marriage would leave her alone and staying would give her a son, and the daughter, Djurdja, throws down her embroidery and becomes a man.

Why the reasons for swearing differed

Ethnographers separate the vow imposed from the vow accepted: the role settled on a child by a family that needed a head of household, and the role sought out. Antonia Young's Women Who Become Men, published in 2000 and followed by work with Twigg in 2008, is the standard English-language ethnography, and it records refusal of an arranged marriage, the wish to stay with a father or a sister, and plain preference among the motives. Young's own summary is that it was a choice of a better life, often actively made, and it was the only way a family could break off a betrothal without dishonouring the groom's people and starting a feud.

Aferdita Onuzi, the Albanian ethnographer interviewed by the BBC in 2022, draws the same line between the classic burrneshat of the ethnographic record and present-day ones, for whom, she says, the decision is completely personal and has nothing to do with sexuality. Her summary of the older form is a kind of protest converted into sacrifice.

Gjystina Grishaj swore at twenty-three after her father died, and was fifty-seven when the BBC filmed her in Lëpushë in the Malësi e Madhe region. The household was extremely poor and her mother had six children. Her account of the country is one sentence, that Albania was a man's world and the only way to survive was to become one. Drande, who lives in Shëngjin and is referred to in the masculine, gives a different reason: he told the BBC he has never associated with women but always with men, and that he has always felt like a man.

The record holds cases that fit neither column: sworn virgins who took on only part of the men's role, some who still preferred the company of women, and some who held the role by day and not at night. Research into their sexual lives is thin.

Why burrnesha resists a Western label

English-language writing files the burrneshat under Third gender and, more recently, under Transgender, and both mappings lose the mechanism. The category has no moment of self-declaration as its entry condition; it has an oath, named witnesses and a set of obligations, and the code that supplies it treats the change as a matter of household law. Braedyn Ezra Simon, in a 2020 sociology paper at the Freie Universität Berlin, calls it the only socially defined transmasculine role in Europe and states the difficulty in the same breath: the change is dictated by the social setting rather than by an intrinsic feeling, and no body is modified. His conclusion runs the other way from most sympathetic accounts. Because the change of status is welcome only where the patriarchal household finds it useful, the burrneshat hold that structure in place.

The third-gender reading has its own evidence. Dickemann quotes the Scandinavianist Carol Clover's 1986 proposal that the Balkan roles survive from cross-gendered female roles once widespread in pre-Christian Europe, with epic folksongs recording their former presence in Dalmatia and Bosnia. Set against that is the observation that where the status protected a person from blood feuds it made them not quite a man but a category of their own, and the classification has never been settled.

What outsiders made of the burrnesha

Jeta Luboteni, writing in the East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies in November 2019, opens with her own case: she learned that burrnesha existed from an English-language website about Albanian culture rather than from anyone in her family. Popular reporting, she argues, characterises them as mysterious, hard to find, products of the patriarchy, old, backward and dying out. Albanian media then repeat the foreign account: she points at an Albanian news item from 2013 that covered the story only because the Daily Mail had, used the translated phrase virgjëreshat e betuara instead of the native word, and illustrated it with National Geographic footage.

Her counter-argument is that the burrneshat interviewed describe happiness with their lives, a wide range of circumstances that led to the vow, and in several cases masculine characteristics that preceded it. Prend, quoted in the same paper, explains the position as being oriented towards God rather than towards any person, which is a reading of celibacy that neither the victim narrative nor the identity narrative has room for. Luboteni names the imbalance that keeps the literature running: no burrnesha sits in a Western university able to answer the works written about them.

Why the burrneshat are counted as dying out

National Geographic's Taboo estimated fewer than 102 in 2002. A 2008 estimate ran from forty to several hundred, most of them over fifty. By 2022 the BBC and Wikipedia both give about twelve remaining across northern Albania and Kosovo, with no exact figures available, and Gjystina Grishaj told the BBC there will be no more burrneshat and that she will be the last.

The explanation offered from inside is that the alternative arrived. Valerjana Grishaj, Gjystina's niece, left the village at sixteen to study theatre directing and photography in Tirana, having watched a schoolfriend get engaged at fourteen; her position is that girls today do not have to fight to become men, only to fight for equal rights. The equality is partial. UN Women figures cited by the BBC record that eight per cent of Albanian women own land and that almost sixty per cent of women between fifteen and forty-nine have experienced domestic violence, against twenty-three per cent of parliamentary seats and thirty-five per cent of local council seats held by women by 2017.

The decline is not certain either. The burrneshat were assumed to have all but disappeared after fifty years of communism, and the rise in feuding after the regime fell has been read as a condition under which the vow could still be sworn. The fiction has meanwhile kept coming, from Alice Munro's 1994 story The Albanian Virgin to Rene Karabash's She Who Remains, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026.