La Lega Albanese (Gegëria)
1) The following is from
Albanian literature: social perspectives, by Arshi Pipa, page 66:
“...a correct description of the Arberesh culture would be a string-like sequence of five ethnic attributes modifying the Albanian substance: a Serbo-Bulgaro-Vlacho-Greco-Italo-Albanian culture...”
2) If one carefully studied the history of the Boui / Arvanites, and especially those who fought as soldiers on the side of Venice, they would be surprised and perhaps feel some dislike for their strange war "custom," which today we would rather consider "Barbaric". In particular, the Boui / Arvanites had the following "habit": each time they killed their opponent, they cut his head, brought it to their leader and paid for it. Of course, their "peculiarity" never went unnoticed by their opponents, nor by their 'co-operatives'. In the west who fought the Arvanite soldiers of Venice, this "specialty" caused a rather strong cultural shock and was recorded with particular aversion. It is also certain that this "habit" caused a dislike to the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula.
The culture of "cutting heads" that Boui / Arvanites transported, originally in mainland Greece and later in western Europe, is certainly an old and unique "custom" that they had and when they lived in their ancestral homeland, that is, in the region Bojana in today's northern Albania. But is the original origin of this "custom" Balkan, or from somewhere else? (Italian, Roman...). Let's see the following citation.
The following text is from the book "The Romans" by Andrea Giardina (English translation of the original Italian "L'Homme Romain"), page 4.
“As Jean-Louis Voisin has recently demonstrated, the Romans were particularly fond of cutting off people's heads. Obviously there was no particular concentration of severed heads in any one period, as in historical times closer to our own, but rather a constant and recurrent presence of this practice distributed throughout Roman history. Heads severed with great finesse or lopped off clumsily, from the bodies of the living and the dead, wrapped in bandages and carefully protected with layers of honey, cedarwood oil, wax, or other substances, stuck up on pikes or poles in military camps, exposed at the focal point of civic life, or catapulted at the feet of the enemy; heads of common folk or of the great actors in history (this was the fate of Pompey, Cicero, Nero, and Maxentius); heads of political rivals or enemies in war; heads of criminals or bandits. The definition of Celtic society as the "civilization of the cut-off head" would apply equally well to the Romans. For the Romans the act of cutting someone's head off was by no means to be defined as crudelitas: it was not only an obvious means of intimidation but also a sign of power and a manifestation of efficiency and prowess”.
