Albania
Albania (officially the Republic of Albania) is a country in the Balkans, bordered by Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece.
Culture
In parts of northern Albania, families follow a code of ethics called the Kanun. This is not a religious document, but a sacred code of ethics. According to the Kanun, wealth is inherited through men, and women move to their husband's family's household when they marry. Marriages are normally arranged very early in life and women become the property of their husband's family.
The normal dress of men in Albania is usually pants and close-fitting caps. Women normally wear skirts covered by aprons. Their headgear is usually a headscarf and sometimes a veil. Albanians have an unusual way of regarding dress as a gender marker, however. Women who dress in masculine clothes are considered to be men and called virgjinesha, or 'sworn virgins'.
Under Kanun law, these virgjinesha take a vow to become a man. Once they have done this, they act like men in all respects, and are treated as men by their family and the wider community, including being referred to by masculine pronouns. However, unlike a normal man a virgjinesha never marries and preserves lifelong celibacy.
There are two reasons under Kanun law why a woman might choose to become a man. One is if she chooses not to marry a man whom her parents have chosen for her. The other is if her parents have no sons and they require her to become a ‘man’, because in Albania only men can inherit family wealth or head households. [1]
Communist era
From 1944 to 1991 Albania was a Communist nation known as one of the most extreme and isolationist of the Communist states. Enver Hoxha ruled from 1944 to his death in 1985. A hard-line Stalinist, Hoxha denounced the Soviet Union as insufficiently hard-line in 1961 and broke off relations with the Soviet Bloc. This led to a short-lived alliance between Albania and Communist China under Mao, which ended with Hoxha began criticizing the Cultural Revolution and then broke ties completely in 1978, denouncing China in much the same way he had the Soviet Union. Albania's isolation from the rest of the world led to widespread poverty and backward technological development if at all. At the time, Albania was the poorest country in Europe. However, Hoxha died in 1985 and within five years anti-Communist demonstrations were openly held in the streets, around the same time similar anti-Communist revolutions were occurring in countries like East Germany, Poland, and Romania. In 1991 the government gave in and allowed multiparty elections.
In 1967, Hoxha banned all religions from Albania, earning himself the dubious distinction of being the first person in history to ban religion from an entire nation. He also outlawed the ownership of private property [2].