Besa

Besa Veronica Esposito (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by ink drop / Stock.adobe.com Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in a world that sometimes seems to be tearing itself apart, it may be the small word that meets our current challenges. Learning a language, therefore, is not only learning the alphabet, the letter sounds and the shapes, the meaning, the grammar rules, and the structure or arrangement of words, but it is also learning the behavior of the society and its cultural customs. —Kadri Krasniqi Can a word be the glue that holds a cultural community together? Can two simple syllables extend tendrils throughout a diverse state and connect at levels from empire all the way down to the everyday? And if so, would it then be possible to uproot that word and plant it into another language? The Albanian word besa goes back to the medieval period, and its origins as a social concept may go back much further. It has played a central role in some of Albania's most significant literature and mythic narratives. It has even been a part of world-historical events that have played out on Albanian soil. All in all, it is a concept that touches the lives of many daily. Besa—literally "to keep the promise"—means, in the words of scholar Kadri Krasniqi, "taking care of those in need, protecting them, and being hospitable to every single human being you have given your promise." The word is interwoven into the very meaning of Albanian community, as seen through scholar Besmir Shishko, who writes that "besa contains mores toward obligations to the family and a friend, the demand to have internal commitment, loyalty, and solidarity when conducting oneself with others." [End Page 17] Sources tend to agree that besa came about in part because of the frequent incursions of invaders into Albania's territory throughout history—when anyone could be turned into a refugee at a moment's notice, community norms toward hospitality, protection, and solidarity would make a lot of sense. As a legal doctrine, besa goes back perhaps to the fourteenth century, when the Statutes of Scutari, a legal code for the region (which was then known as Scutari), documented the concept of an oath as a part of the social order. Since that time, besa has been passed down for generations as part of Albania's Kanun, a set of common laws that has governed the lands since the fifteenth century. Beyond the legal sphere, some see the very idea of besa as possibly originating in the Christian Bible, while others, such as leading Albanian author Ismail Kadare, consider it as predating Christianity. With the opening of Albanian society and overall modernization throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept has begun to lose much of the cultural currency it once had. A notable act of besa that reappears again and again in the literature surrounding the word occurred when the Albanian population protected thousands of Jewish individuals during the Holocaust, taking them into their very own homes and treating them like family. This act is perhaps even more remarkable when one learns that, at the time, Albania was the only nation in Europe where the majority of the population was Muslim. This diverse country considered it its besa to protect Jews by granting them false identity papers and hiding them within their homes. It is a point of cultural pride that, according to many accounts, the refusal to aid and abet the Nazis was so thorough that not a single Jewish person was turned over to Nazis by Albanians during World War II, despite intense pressure by the occupying forces to give up lists of Jewish people. Decades later, during the wars of separation that occurred as the former Yugoslavia splintered into individual nations after the fall of communism, Albanians again showed care and hospitality to those caught up in horrific, genocidal acts. Writer Hamza Karčić recalled his experience of besa as he fled Slobodan Milošević's siege of...