Professor Robert Elsie

Thirty Agas Were Conversing Professor Robert Elsie

To many people's surprise, the Albanian epic is still alive and kicking. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, one can still find a good number of singers, called lahutars in Albanian, who are able to sing and recite the heroic deeds of Muja and Halili and their thirty Agas. These are men, and now a good number of women, who have inherited their repertoires as part of an unbroken oral tradition passed down from generation to generation. One can safely assume that they are the very last native singers of oral epic verse in Europe! In 2011, a major project was initiated to record and document the Albanian epic in the five Balkan countries in which it is still sung: Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The wealth of material collected from 2012-2014 shows that the Albanian epic, although perhaps not what it was in former years, is by no means moribund. About 4,000 lines of verse were translated into English for this volume.