Albanian blood feud

In traditional Albanian culture, Gjakmarrja (English: "blood-taking", i.e. "blood feud") or hakmarrja ("revenge") is the social obligation to kill an offender or a member of their family in order to salvage one's honor.

[4] Nineteen percent of male deaths in İşkodra vilayet were caused by murders due to vendetta and blood feuding during the late Ottoman period.

[7] In 1881 local notables and officials from the areas of Debar, Pristina, Elbasan, Mati, Ohrid and Tetovo petitioned the state for the prevention of blood feuds.

[8] To resolve disputes and clamp down on the practice the Ottoman state addressed the problem directly by sending Blood Feud Reconciliation Commissions (musalaha-ı dem komisyonları) that produced results with limited success.

[14][2] An Albanian study of 2018 on blood feuds that included data from police records noted that there are 704 families affected with 591 in Albania and 113 having left the country.

[15] Ismet Elezi, a professor of law at the University of Tirana, believes that in spite of the Kanun's endorsement of blood vengeance, there are strict rules on how the practice may be carried out.

[2] In Kosovo, most cases of Gjakmarrja were reconciled in the early 1990s in the course of a large-scale reconciliation movement to end blood feuds led by Anton Çetta.

[17] Families and other extended kin in the Malesia region made a besa and agreed to cease blood feuding and accept state judicial outcomes for victims and perpetrators.

[18] His 1980 novel Broken April (Albanian: Prilli i Thyer) explores the social effects of an ancestral blood feud between two landowning families, in the highlands of north Albania in the 1930s.

[19][20][21] The New York Times, reviewing it, wrote: "Broken April is written with masterly simplicity in a bardic style, as if the author is saying: Sit quietly and let me recite a terrible story about a blood feud and the inevitability of death by gunfire in my country.