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.

How the Kanun made the vow possible

The framework is the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, the customary code used across northern Albania and Kosovo from the Ottoman period into the twentieth century and followed by Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim Albanians alike, since it is not a religious document. Under the Kanun a household is patrilineal and patrilocal: property descends through men, a bride moves into her husband's family, and women are barred from buying land, from voting in local elections and from most kinds of work. A household with no man in it has no standing.

Blood feuding, gjakmarrja, kept producing that situation. 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. The clearest measure of what the role conferred is the arithmetic of the feud itself: a burrnesha killed in one counted as a full life in the reckoning of blood money, where a woman counted as half. The anthropologist Jeffrey Dickemann has argued that the inheritance explanation is too neat, since a celibate heir 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.

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. Becoming a burrnesha was also 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 choice is entirely personal. Some accounts are not about the household at all. Drande, who lives in the coastal town of Shëngjin and is referred to in the masculine, told the BBC "I have never associated with women but always with men" and "I have always felt like a man". Gjystina Grishaj, who swore at twenty-three after her father died and was fifty-seven when the BBC filmed her in 2022, describes a decision made so that a widowed mother with six children could manage.

Why the word 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 dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin, calls it the only socially defined transmasculine role in Europe, which describes the social effect rather than what any burrnesha says about himself. Simon's own conclusion runs the other way from most sympathetic accounts: because the change of status is granted only where the patriarchal household needs it, the role holds that structure in place rather than unsettling it.

What outsiders made of the practice

Jeta Luboteni, writing in the East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies in November 2019, sets out what the foreign literature did to the subject. Popular reporting characterises burrnesha as mysterious, hard to find, backward and dying out, and Albanian media then repeat the foreign framing rather than their own. Luboteni 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.

Luboteni's counter-argument is that the burrneshat interviewed describe satisfaction with their lives, a wide range of reasons for swearing, and in several cases a sense of themselves that preceded the vow. 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.

Why the burrneshat are counted as dying out

National Geographic's Taboo put the figure below 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 count available, and Gjystina Grishaj told the BBC she expects to be the last.

The explanation offered from inside is not that the role failed but that the alternative arrived. Valerjana Grishaj, her niece, who left the village at sixteen to study in Tirana, puts it as a matter of what is now available: nobody has to become a man in order to work, travel and be listened to. UN Women figures cited alongside her by the BBC record that eight per cent of Albanian women own land and that close to sixty per cent of women between fifteen and forty-nine have experienced domestic violence. The decline is not certain either. The burrneshat were assumed to have disappeared under 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.