The Academy of Sciences and the International Commission of Ballads opened in the “Aleks Buda” hall the 50th World Conference of Ballads, with the theme “Ballads and the audience in time and space”.

More than 60 researchers from the most important European and world universities and research centers from Albania, Italy, Kosovo, Macedonia, Slovenia, Greece, England, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, Holland, Scotland, South Africa, USA participate in the conference.

Renowned ballad and folklore researchers have come to Albania to hold the 50th conference in the Albanian capital and museum city of Gjirokastra from September 1-5. The conference was opened by the president of the Academy of Sciences, SkenderGjinushi, who welcomed the researchers to the conference.

“The medieval ballads of the peoples of the Balkans did not and do not know borders. Albanians and Greeks, Croats and Serbs, Montenegrins and Slovenians sing it; they are sung by Bulgarians and Macedonians, Turks and Bosnians, Romanians and Hungarians. The Roma and Egyptians sing, they traveled without the need for a visa from Israel to Scandinavia. The peoples of the Balkans have created spiritual bridges with their ballads. Despite that image ruled by antagonisms, which spread around the world in the last two centuries, the most prominent rhapsodists of this troubled region were and are bilingual, they sang in their mother tongue and in the language of the other, Albanian, Serbian, Greek and Albanian, respecting the audience, without jealousy and without resentment”, said Gjinushi in his speech.

He expressed his gratitude to those rare personalities of the study of ballads, who discovered their splendor in the Balkans, from George Gordon Byron and Victor Hugo, to the famous anthropologists Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the well-known Albanologists and Balkanologists, who collected the folklore of their own peoples and of their neighbors.

/Klara Ruci/