The Highland Lute (Lahuta e Malcís)

In 1902, an old highlander named Marash Uci told a young Franciscan priest about the battles of his youth. That priest, Gjergj Fishta, spent the next three decades turning those stories into The Highland Lute, thirty cantos in which mountain spirits guard the warriors and winged heroes battle a seven headed kulshedra. He wrote it in the rhythm of the songs highlanders sang to the lahuta, whose Albanian tradition UNESCO recognized in 2025 as heritage in urgent need of safeguarding. Its translator called it the first Albanian contribution to world literature, and a hundred years after its first verses were printed, it finally arrived in English in full.