Early one morning, soon after sunrise, I was walking with Lûk and Palok when a young woman passed us.
“That is Mrika Kol Marashut,” Lûk remarked.
“And who is she?” I asked.
“Mrika—the woman who carried on the blood-feud,” was his answer. “Two years ago she was the most beautiful girl of our tribe, and had a dozen men ready to marry her. She married Lez, a smart young man from the Pulati side, and one of the Baryaktar’s bodyguard, like myself. A month after their marriage Lez was treacherously killed by his brother, who lived down by the White Drin, and was violently in love with her. When she received the news she became half demented by grief. But, by slow degrees, she formed her plans for the blood-feud, and having no male relatives, resolved to take it on herself. She therefore left us and was absent nearly a year, during which time she persistently followed her brother-in-law first to Ochrida, in Macedonia, then to Skopia, Prisrend, and many other places, always awaiting her opportunity to strike the blow. This came one afternoon when her husband’s assassin was walking in the main street in Skodra, and she took Lez’s pistol from her belt and blew his face away. It was valiant of a woman—was it not? But not only that,” he went on. “Having killed the murderer, she went straight to his parents’ house, three days’ journey, and shot them both dead. Since then she has been back with us, for poor Lez’s death has been avenged. I was sorry he died,” he added regretfully, “for he was one of my dearest friends.”
Murder is hardly a crime in Albania, for life is cheap—very cheap. An enemy or a stranger is shot like a dog, and left at the roadside.
Palok told me of an incident which truly illustrates the utter disregard the Albanian has for other people’s lives. He was once with a man of the Hoti—on the Montenegrin frontier—who had just obtained a new rifle, probably from a murdered Turkish soldier. While he was inspecting it a man passed close by, a stranger, whereupon the man with the new gun raised it to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. The stranger fell dead. Palok remonstrated, but his companion merely said that he was testing his gun’s accuracy. Was it not better, he asked, to test it that way, instead of waiting till face to face with an enemy?
The assassin is never punished, except by those who take up the blood-feud. If the murder takes place in a town the guilty one escapes to the mountains, or gets away into Macedonia, or into Servia, where he earns his living by sawing firewood. Every few years the Sultan issues an irade “for the pacification of the blood,” as it is put, and the murderer then returns. He pays a small tax to the Turkish Government, after which he cannot be arrested; and if he pays about three hundred crowns to the relatives of his victim, the blood-feud is at an end.
This, of course, does not apply to the mountain tribes. They care not a jot for the Sultan or for his irades. There is no law—save that of the blood-feud, the vendetta falling upon the murderer and upon his next male relative. Many were the curious facts regarding the blood-feud and the Albanian laws of hospitality told to me.
A case in point was that of a young man named Kol, a friend of Lûk’s, a tall, wiry youth, of somewhat sinister expression—a typical bandit out of a book-illustration.
I was talking to Lûk about the hospitality extended by the various tribes to each other when Kol passed, and he beckoned him, saying—