Granai della Memoria :: Gjyustina Grishaj

Gjyustina Grishaj

A farmer's life in the Albanian Kelmendi mountains

Gjystina Grishaj was born in 1965 in Lepushe, a rural village in the Kelmendi mountains in Albania. She spent her childhood in the years of the communist regime. They were very hard years for the country, she tells us. She suffered hunger and extreme poverty: potatoes, bread and salt were often the only thing to eat.

Gjystina's family has always been open minded and free from the rigid social paradigm dictated by the kanun - the unwritten law of the Albanian mountains. Gjystina 's father, originally from Montenegro, was keen on botany and medicinal plants. He was a teacher in Lepushe. From him, Gjystina learned to recognize more than 100 wild plants and their use. The communist regime fell in 1990, and since then the farmers were able to reoccupy the lands and work them for the subsistence of their families.

At the time of communism Lepushe was inhabited by 30 families. Nowadays only 13 remain, for a total of about 70 people. Many emigrated, and other are leaving the village. Only in recent years thet have seen some tentative of return. In 2011, Gjystina opened a small shop selling local products. She moreover works with other five women. She explains that is still very difficult to overcome the shared hate for the idea of ??"cooperation" that Albanians feel. However, Gjystina strongly believes in collaboration and work to develop the economy of the community on the basis of this principle.

In the interview, Gjystina tells her history and the one of her village, evenutally, describing the most important wild herbs of the village and their uses.