Kângë Kreshnikësh

The Kângë Kreshnikësh ('Songs of Heroes') are the traditional songs of the heroic legendary cycle of Albanian epic poetry (Albanian: Cikli i Kreshnikëve or Eposi i Kreshnikëve). They are the product of Albanian culture and folklore orally transmitted down the generations by the Albanian lahutarë ('rhapsodes' or 'bards') who perform them singing to the accompaniment of the lahutë (some singers use alternatively the çifteli). The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survivors of its kind in modern Europe, and the last survivor of the Balkan traditions. The poems of the cycle belong to the heroic genre, reflecting the legends that portray and glorify the heroic deeds of the warriors of indefinable old times. The epic poetry about past warriors is an Indo-European tradition shared with South Slavs, but also with other heroic cultures such as those of early Greece, classical India, early medieval England and medieval Germany.

The songs were first collected in written form in the first decades of the 20th centuries by the Franciscan priests Shtjefën Gjeçovi, Bernardin Palaj, and Donat Kurti. Palaj and Kurti were eventually the first to publish a collection of the cycle in 1937, consisting of 34 epic songs containing 8,199 verses in Albanian. Important research was carried out by foreign scholars like Maximilian Lambertz, Fulvio Cordignano, and especially in the 1930s by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, two influential Homeric scholars from Harvard University. Lord's remarkable collection of over 100 songs containing about 25,000 verses is now preserved in the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard University. A considerable amount of work has been done in the last decades.