Ben Fuery & Lucy Pinnell / Accursed Mountains, Albania
Our boots crunched over a loose, rocky scree which lined the zigzagging track we found ourselves on; the near-vertical incline threatened to topple us over at any moment, and each step we took slid us half a step back as the pathway offered little in the way of grip. The track we were following was unlike anything we’d ever hiked before; less a path and more a trail carved out by necessity of the area’s residents. This was no hike in the French Alps, carefully signposted on a well-maintained trail frequented by hobbyist hikers; no, this here was a lifeline.
“This otherwise ordinary house suddenly looked quite impossible, conventional in itself yet extraordinary in its location. There was no easy way to do things here, only the way the mountains would allow.”
We had journeyed to the Northernmost corner of Albania, deep into the Albanian Alps, until the road could take us no further. It was here in the village of Selcë that we met our guide, Anton, who would take us to meet the villagers living in one of Albania’s most remote regions.
It was late at night when we arrived, darkness shrouding the mountains from view until dawn, but Anton’s parents greeted us at the door to their home and his mother, clad in a plain black dress and headscarf, immediately set about preparing us Turkish coffee on a small gas stove and pouring shots of homemade rakia into small glasses. The same ritual was repeated the next morning, as most of the Balkan people began their day with a coffee and a serving of rakia, an alcohol made from plums so strong it could warm your bones and give you strength for the entire day ahead.
As dawn broke we pulled our boots and rucksacks on at their door, and Anton’s parents both saw us out to the gate; he explained this was custom for the members of the household to see their guests out, as was the Albanians’ unwavering hospitality toward complete strangers. The mountain way of life had a timelessness about it; despite now having good road access they rarely made a trip to the city of Shkodër, and were still without internet or mobile phone signal. The beautifully paved road we had driven here on we learned had not been built until around five years ago, and our guide recalled taking the minibus to school on a Monday morning and staying with his grandmother for the duration of the school week as the journey, taking around half a day to complete, was not feasible to make every day.
Up until the mid-20th century, when the rule of communism began in Albania, there were no roads connecting the Kelmend region to the rest of Albania. Under the leadership of dictator Enver Hoxha a road was constructed connecting the region to the nearby city of Shkodër, however this was not completely paved until as recently as 2016. A lack of infrastructure has historically been this region’s biggest asset and its biggest obstacle, as we would learn later that day.
Our hike began in the grounds of Selcë’s Catholic Church, an abnormality in a largely Muslim-majority county, at the very bottom of the deep Cemi Canyon, where our guide pointed up to an unassuming mountain ledge looming over us.
“That is where we’re going.”
From down below it looked like any other mountain peak; beautiful, sinister, but totally uninhabitable. Roughly 2km in length, a 600m climb in altitude, we were buoyed by our guide’s confidence in telling us he could complete the hike in about forty minutes.
We followed the path arduously, legs screaming in protest and gasping for breath while our guide, who’d been traversing these mountains since he learned to walk, sailed ahead of us. But as the path ascended, unrelenting in its steepness, we were beginning to wonder how this could possibly be the only route to access a village.
Being from England, we tended to have quite a romantic idea of living somewhere high up in the mountains away from civilisation, but the brutal reality of it was an entirely different concept. The path was unforgiving, visible only to those whose muscle memory encompassed it, and one wrong foot could’ve easily sent us tumbling back into the valley below.
At this altitude there was no vegetation, nothing to suggest that this area could support life; the closest thing to trees were the makeshift poles supporting a thin electricity wire which ran from the bottom of the valley to the peak above us. Men twice our age passed us with ease, taking their mules to the villages above to fetch hay. Mules are an essential part of daily life for the inhabitants of the Albanian Alps, used for transporting supplies to and from the most inaccessible villages, and their owners, hardened mountain men, made light work of this most challenging of paths.
We were beginning to doubt whether we’d ever make it to the end of this near-vertical climb but then, mercifully, the ground began to level out, and a luscious green pasture spread out before us, covering the plateau we now found ourselves on. The swathe of pale green grass was interrupted only by the snaking lines of rock that separated it into fields. This was the last place on earth you could expect to see people living, yet a dozen or so houses were spread out across the landscape with sheep and horses grazing around them.
It took another hour or so to reach a homestead which looked like it might be inhabited; many of the rest were crumbling ruins, repurposed into barns or lying long abandoned as their owners packed up and headed for the city. As we approached the door flew open, and we were greeted by a middle-aged woman wearing a white headscarf and modest clothing; she was clearly surprised and excited to have visitors. She immediately invited us inside for coffee, and set about pouring glasses of rakia from a glass bottle shaped like a crucifix.
We learned her name was Age (pronounced Aga), and that she was living alone while her husband was away working in Tirana, Albania’s capital, and her daughter was away studying. We sat in quiet awe of her home, furnished with beautiful polished wood fixtures and an ornate wood burning stove in the centre. We had expected her home to be bare, furnished with only the basic necessities, yet a tall decorative cabinet occupied one corner of the room, a long sofa the other, and in the background we could hear the rhythmic turning of a washing machine.
We asked her how she had managed to get the woodburner up here, and she explained the process of strapping it to two wooden poles which she and her husband placed on their shoulders and carried up the mountainside, one in front, one behind. Her response was as obvious as it was surprising; it had taken them four hours to carry the stove up, the same amount of time it had taken us to hike that treacherous path. The same would’ve been true for every item of furniture in their home, their washing machine, the tin sheets on their roof and each pane of glass in their windows. This otherwise ordinary house suddenly looked quite impossible, conventional in itself yet extraordinary in its location. There was no easy way to do things here, only the way the mountains would allow.
The harsh and inhospitable conditions of the Albanian Alps earned them the nickname Bjeshkët e Nemuna or the Accursed Mountains. They are one of the few mountain ranges in Europe yet to be fully explored. They possess a deep sense of mystery about them, a vibrant history and unique way of life woven amongst craggy limestone peaks. This impenetrability made them an ideal location for the settlers of the Kelmendi tribe, who inhabited this region as early as the 15th century. They were a feared tribe, who resisted Ottoman invasion on multiple occasions, owing partly to the challenging and inaccessible landscape.
“The Albanians spoke of ‘the old people in the mountains’ with as casual a demeanour as we English spoke of our grandparents in nursing homes; it was simply where they lived.”
It was this fear of invasion that drove the Kelmendi to settle on ever-higher lands, and inspired a belief in generations of Albanians that living on a hill was better. The village of Mregu however, sitting on a plateau rising 600m above the Cem valley, has only been inhabited over the past hundred years or so; villagers would have settled here close by to a spring, relocating from larger villages like Selcë in the valley bellow, and being one of the few areas in the otherwise barren Kelmend region to have pastureland was a notable advantage.
While the Accursed Mountains may ward off visitors with their inhospitality however, the people will surely not, and we were struck by Age’s immediate trust and openness as we spoke to her inside her home. We asked her what life was like here, both now and under communism, and what changes she had seen here during her lifetime.
“Look around,” she replied, “it’s only me left.”
This lifestyle was at one time all the people of Kelmend knew; that is, until the introduction of smartphones and mobile internet. A story we’d heard from the Alps to across the Balkans, younger people were being lured away from tradition by the promise of an easy life in the city, and social media was only perpetuating this idea further.
The Albanians spoke of ‘the old people in the mountains’ with as casual a demeanour as we English spoke of our grandparents in nursing homes; it was simply where they lived. It came as no surprise, when you could have a washing machine delivered to your door instead of hauling it for four hours up a rugged mountain track, that so many of the younger generation had relocated to the city or abroad.
During the time of communism however, things were very different; unlike during the Ottoman invasion, no one was safe, not even the mountain folk. Age and others were sent away from their villages to a town near Pukë to work for the cooperative. Your job was allocated, as were your food rations, and personal effects such as cars and livestock were strictly banned. Many Albanians compare the communist regime to that of North Korea, but stricter.
After the fall of communism the villagers of Kelmend were free to return home and begin life anew with their regained freedom.
After drinks, Age happily showed us around her property; in her larder at the back of her house she kept vegetables, cheese and dried mountain herbs she had collected for their medicinal properties, for their flavour or else to brew into a particular concoction the Albanians referred to simply as mountain tea. The tea is brewed from ironwort flowers, a plant that grows at altitudes of above 1,000m which is well-known by Albanians for its many healing properties.
After demonstrating her milk churn, Age led us out to a barn where she kept dried cuts of meat after preserving them through smoke curing. The entire carcass of a pig was suspended on racks above us; haunches, intestines, everything but its squeak. The meat from this pig would feed her and her husband the entire summer, and not one part was wasted.
In a field adjacent she kept sheep for their milk, churning this by hand to make butter and knitting clothes and rugs from their wool. Her water supply came from a nearby spring and her income came from raising cattle and collecting medicinal mountain herbs to sell; her children who’d moved abroad also sent money home from time to time.
Every part of Age’s life was fascinating to us; our minds boggled at the length and difficulty of the journey we had taken, hours from the nearest city with amenities, right up to this woman’s house that would be ordinary if not for its exceptional location atop a mountain.
It was still incomprehensible, even though we’d completed the journey ourselves, and we imagined her and her husband making their monthly trip to Shkodër then hiking back up the vertical path with their supplies; it was world away from simply visiting the supermarket. Stocking up on supplies for the winter was essential, and Age recalled the worst winters she had experienced were during the years 1985 and 2005, when her house was buried under two metres of snow, cutting her off entirely from civilisation for several months. But now the winters were growing milder and there was less snow every year; this change in temperature was felt acutely by the people living at such high altitudes, people who depended on the seasons for their very livelihood.
From this vantage point atop the plateau we could see dozens more houses scattered across the mountains in even more unlikely places, and we were curious whether anyone still lived in them and what their stories were. Our guide pointed out a particularly small building in an even more unlikely location than the one we were stood on now, clinging onto the rocky slope of a wild mountain peak across the valley. It looked so precarious, as though one bad storm could sweep it right off the mountainside. But he explained that over the years the villagers of the Albanian Alps had worked out where you could and couldn’t build a house, and this particular house was not only protected from avalanches by a natural barrier of trees, it was also still inhabited.
Age led us across the fields to one final barn where she kept her cows, refusing to let Lucy carry any of her own camera gear; tripod under arm, drone bag swinging from her shoulder as though it weighed nothing, she still had one hand free to pull Lucy’s jacket tight around her chest for her against the wind. We watched as she herded the cows out, filled their metal bowl with water, and chased after them with a stick if they tried to stray. Her energy seemed boundless, her strength easily double ours, the result of working day in day out for survival.
Life in the Albanian Alps was hard, sure, but it also seemed to us strangely rewarding, free of the complications of modern life. Our romantic ideology of mountain life battled with the reality of what we saw before us, the stories of people’s hardships, the difficulties of simply getting to school, making an income or bringing home supplies, all made so much harder by the mountains’ unyieldingly harsh conditions. We had visited on a mild, sunny day, but to imagine ascending that path in the rain, or battling through snow to rear your livestock knowing that it made the difference between life and death, sustenance or starvation, was a grim prospect. But against all odds the mountain folk here survived, thrived even; and their biggest opposition wasn’t the elements, it was the lure of modern life that threatened to destroy centuries of tradition.
It was time we said goodbye to Age, who still had much work to do before the sunset, and we began our painstaking journey down the other side of the mountain, left in complete and total awe.
This is an excerpt from an ongoing project documenting the lives of people living in some of the most remote regions of Europe.
This project is the collective work of Ben Fuery and Lucy Pinnell. For inquiries, please email contact@lbjournals.com .