The New York Times reported this week on a fading custom in northern Albania: women who take “an oath of virginity to live, and be treated, as a man.”  The article focuses on Pashe Keqi, who vowed to “forsake marriage, children, and sex” following her father’s death:

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying off.

I’ve been to Albania — twice — back right after the death of its long-time tyrant, Enver Hoxha.  I remember temporarily dislocating my jaw chewing some aged beef that can only have been roadkill, and watching out the window at the mocked-up bazaar of cars stolen from Italy being sold in a central square of Tirana, the nation’s capital.  In Tirana, and in the nameless coastal town where we visited one of Hoxha’s many palaces, the country seemed trapped in the 1940s, time standing still.  In the northern highlands, it seems, they carved out an entirely new world.