Asworn virgin is a traditionalgender variant orthird gender social role in certain Balkan cultures,[1] consisting of people who areassigned female at birth but take avow of chastity and live the rest of their lives socially recognized as men. The practice is most common in patriarchal northernAlbania,Kosovo andMontenegro, whereburrnesha are recognized under the tribalKanun law, but also exists, or has existed, to a lesser extent in other parts of the western Balkans, includingBosnia,Dalmatia (Croatia),Serbia andNorth Macedonia.[2]
In times when women had a prescribed role,burrnesha gave up their preexisting sexual, reproductive and social identities to acquire the same freedoms as men. They could dress as men, be head of the household, move freely in social situations, and take work traditionally open only to men.[3]National Geographic'sTaboo estimated in 2002 that there were fewer than 102 Albanian sworn virgins left.[4] As of 2022[update], while there were no exact figures, twelveburrnesha were estimated to remain in Northern Albania and Kosovo.[3]
Other terms for asworn virgin include, in English,Albanian virgin oravowed virgin; inAlbanian:burrnesha,vajzë e betuar (most common today, and used in situations in which the parents make the decision when the person is a baby or child), and various wordscognate with "virgin" –virgjineshë,virgjereshë,verginesa,virgjin,vergjinesha;[5] inBosnian:tobelija (bound by a vow);[6] inSerbo-Croatian:virdžina; inSerbian:ostajnica (she who stays); inTurkish:sadik, meaning "loyal, devoted".[5]
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Sworn virgins have been documented in the area as early as the 15th century.[7] The tradition of sworn virgins inAlbania likely developed out of theKanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (English:The Code of Lekë Dukagjini, or simply theKanun),[8] a set of codes and laws developed byLekë Dukagjini and used mostly in northernAlbania andKosovo from the Ottoman era until the 20th century. TheKanun is not a religious document; many groups follow it, includingAlbanian Orthodox,Catholics andMuslims.[9]
TheKanun dictates that families must be patrilineal (meaning wealth is inherited through a family's men) and patrilocal (upon marriage, a woman moves into the household of her husband's family).[10] Women are treated like property of the family. Under theKanun, women are stripped of many rights. They cannot smoke, wear a watch, or vote in local elections. They cannot buy land, and there are many jobs they are not permitted to hold. There are also establishments that they cannot enter.[9][11]
The practice of sworn virginhood was first reported by missionaries, travelers, geographers and anthropologists, who visited the mountains of northern Albania in the 19th and early 20th centuries.[12] One of them wasEdith Durham, who took the accompanying photograph.
A person can become a sworn virgin at any age. Motivations for doing so include personal desire, to avoid forced marriage, or to satisfy familial obligations.[13] One becomes a sworn virgin by swearing an irrevocable oath, in front of twelve village or tribal elders, to adopt the role and practicecelibacy. After this, sworn virgins live as men and others relate to them as such, usually though not always[14] using masculine pronouns to address them or speak about them to other people.[15] InSlavic languages with threegrammatical genders, they are never spoken about in the third gender.[16] Sworn virgins may dress in male clothing, use a male name, carry a gun, smoke, drink alcohol, take on male work, act as the head of a household (for example, living with a sister or mother), play music, sing, and sit and talk socially with men.[11][12][14] Sworn virgins occupy a formal, socially defined masculine role.[17]The New York Times referred to the practice as "a centuries-old tradition in which women declared themselves men so they could enjoy male privilege".[18]
According toMarina Warner, the sworn virgin's "true sex will never again, on pain of death, be alluded to either in [his] presence or out of it."[19] Similar practices occurred in some societies ofindigenous peoples of the Americas.[12]
Breaking the vow was once punishable by death, but it is doubtful that this punishment is still carried out.[11] Many sworn virgins today still refuse to go back on their oath because their community would reject them for breaking the vows. However, it is sometimes possible to take back the vows if the reasons or motivations or obligations to family which led to taking the vow no longer exist.[citation needed]
There are many reasons why someone might take this vow, and observers recorded a variety of motivations. One person spoke of becoming a sworn virgin in order to not be separated from his father, and another in order to live and work with a sister. Some hoped to avoid a specific unwanted marriage, and others hoped to avoid marriage in general; becoming a sworn virgin was also the only way for families who had committed children to anarranged marriage to refuse to fulfil it, without dishonouring the groom's family and risking ablood feud.
It was the only way a woman could inherit her family's wealth, which was particularly important in a society in which blood feuds (gjakmarrja) resulted in the deaths of many male Albanians, leaving many families without male heirs. (However,anthropologist Jeffrey Dickemann suggests this motive may be "over-pat", pointing out that a non-child-bearing woman would have no heirs to inherit after her, and also that in some families not one but several daughters became sworn virgins, and in others the later birth of a brother did not end the sworn virgin's masculine role.[14]) Moreover, a child may have been desired to "carry on" an existing feud, according to Marina Warner. The sworn virgin became "a warrior in disguise to defend [his] family like a man."[19] If a sworn virgin was killed in a blood feud, the death counted as a full life for the purposes of calculatingblood money, rather than the half-life a woman was counted as.[20]
It is also likely that many people chose to become sworn virgins simply because it afforded them much more freedom than would otherwise have been available in a patrilineal culture in which women were secluded, sex-segregated, required to be virgins before marriage and faithful afterwards, betrothed as children and married by sale without their consent, continually bearing and raising children, constantly physically labouring, and always required to defer to men, particularly their husbands and fathers, and submit to being beaten.[9][12][14][21]
Dickemann suggests mothers may have played an important role in persuading children to become sworn virgins. A widow without sons traditionally had few options in Albania: she could return to her birth family, stay on as a servant in the family of her deceased husband, or remarry. With a son or surrogate son, she could live out her life in the home of her adulthood, in the company of her child. Murray quotes testimony recorded by René Gremaux: "Because if you get married I'll be left alone, but if you stay with me, I'll have a son." On hearing those words the daughter Djurdja "threw down her embroidery" and became a man.[14]
The practice has died out in Dalmatia and Bosnia, but is still carried out in northern Albania and to a lesser extent in North Macedonia.[12]
TheSocialist People's Republic of Albania did not encourage people to become sworn virgins. Women started gaining legal rights and came closer to having equal social status, especially in the central and southern regions. It is only in the northern region that many families are still traditionally patriarchal.[22] In 2008, there were between forty and several hundred sworn virgins left in Albania, and a few in neighboring countries, most over fifty years old,[9] with an estimated twelve left in 2022.[3] It used to be believed that the sworn virgins had all but died out after 50 years of communism in Albania, but recent research suggests that may not be the case;[12] instead, the increase in feuding followingthe collapse of the communist regime could encourage a resurgence of the practice.[14]
Traditional European female-to-male transgender. The Balkan sworn virgin is a traditional status, role, and identity by which genetic females become social men, the only such socially recognized transgendered status in modern Europe. Clover (1986) proposed that this may be a survival of a more widespread pre-Christian European status.
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