In Tirana, the secret museum dedicated to Albanian women
Elsa Ballauri in the study of her apartment-museum.
Tirana, July 2021 © Olivier Favier / RFI
Text by: Olivier Favier Follow
7 mins
The capital of Albania is home to a museum dedicated to women, a few streets from the center and from Skanderbeg Square.
It tells the story of an emancipation that has nothing linear, since its golden age dates back to Antiquity.
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You need a little patience before you find the entrance to the building, which is not on the street side, then climb the stairs until you find the apartment a few floors higher, displaying on its door the logo "MiG, for Muzeu i Grave ”, Women's Museum, in Albanian.
The idea for this museum dates back to 2008, but it only settled there ten years later.
Its founder, Elsa Ballauri, is a journalist and president of the Albanian Human Rights Group.
She comes from a well-to-do family in Korça, in southern Albania, and she has terrible memories of what she and her family had to endure under the Communist dictatorship.
The
libër shtëpisë
, literally the "House
Book
", which she has kept and which she exhibits on a bedside table, testifies to this.
It was reserved for supervised families, who had to record everything they did and do, and present it to the authorities at the slightest visit.
As a child, she was strictly forbidden to touch it.
One in five victims of communism was a woman
"
The two periods which have done the most harm to this country are those of the Ottoman occupation and the regime led by Enver Hoxha
", she likes to repeat. The terror inspired by the one who considered himself at the head of the only socialist state in the world, other places tell, starting with the National Historical Museum, the largest in the country, and the House of leaves, name given to the former headquarters of the political police, the Sigurimi, since transformed into a museum.
But in either case, what totalitarianism has done to women and their emancipation is hardly mentioned.
Of course, we dwell on the case of Sabiha Kasimati, a renowned biologist, wrongly accused of taking part in a bomb attack, hastily executed and buried with other false culprits in an anonymous field. .
She was 38 years old and a high school friend… to Enver Hoxha.
For the rest, that 20% of the victims of the dictatorship were women, some of whom have their portraits in the Elsa Ballauri museum, and that communism has ruled out many questions linked to the feminist struggle, you have to come here to take the measure.
The pieces presented are all from his personal collections.
Some relate to her family history, such as this old photograph of her mother dressed as a boy, which impresses visitors because “
it shows,
explains Elsa Ballauri,
how the dictatorship has atrophied our society, leaving women no chance to
win.
live their lives with dignity, displaying their values.
"
Praksithe Plumbi, one of the forgotten figures of Albanian feminism, who worked for the education of young girls and who died indifferent during the communist era.
Tirana, July 2021 © Olivier Favier / RFI
The freedom of Illyrian women
These emancipated women can also be found on figures painted on silk and inserted in cigarette packs, which her grandmother had collected in a painting. “
Attention is mainly focused on the beginning of the Albanian state from 1912 to 1939, because it is a rich period which remains to be discovered.
"
Other objects tell of the total separation between the sexes during the Ottoman period. From a screened gallery, the Mahfil, the women could see the men who visited the head of the house, even in their bedrooms, but remained invisible to people of the opposite sex. A fragment of this grid adorns the first room in the museum. We can see similar ones,
in situ
, in the beautiful
museum
residences of
Berat or Gjirokäster, cities classified as World Heritage by Unesco.
“
Exhibiting a lot of old objects
,” explains Elsa Ballauri, “
is not an end in itself for me. They have an important task in the museum: to show the stages in the history of Albanian women, their roles in society, their relationship with their husbands and families. The spiritual world of women, its contribution to emancipation and politics, the use made of it by men, its challenges.
"
“
I cannot say that Albania has an excellent history of female emancipation
,” she adds.
However, she recalls during each visit that in ancient times, in what was then called Illyria, women were much freer than in Greece or Rome.
They could have a political or military role, drank with men and were also stakeholders in important financial transactions, proof if there is one that progress in history is not obvious, and that the fighting for emancipation are always to be reinvented.
►
For more information: Women's Museum in Tirana
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