It’s unavoidable, especially here in the Balkans.” Dushan soon stirs up the Albanians to smash the Irishmen’s tape-recorder and thereby destroy their dangerous discoveries.Kadare and Andric were writing before the collapse of the old Yugoslavia, but Dubravka Ugresic, a writer born in Croatia and now living in the Netherlands, turns her anger upon the contemporary scene, sometimes in fiction, sometimes in essay form. Yet, as one of them explains, this would not be possible “if the Albanians had not been here since classical times”. He knows that what arouses “the jealousy and anger of the Serbs is precisely the question of historical precedence in the occupation of the Balkan peninsula.”Later, the scholars meet Dushan, a Serbian monk from Kosovo, who argues fiercely that the Homeric epics in Albanian also exist in Serbo-Croat, and then apologises for his outburst “I am Serbian, and I support my nation’s cause. They are trying to prove that Albanian epic poetry is “Homeric in origin”.

Their movements are followed through the reports of Dull Baxhaja, the secret policeman detailed to shadow them.Soon they understand the implications of their research. “They remembered persons punished by their own families, whole families punished by the village, or even whole villages punished by a group of villages …” Later, going through the historical records, they note that it was only during “years of revolutions or wars against foreigners” that “the number of blood-feud killings fell.” Public battles take precedence over private quarrels.In Kadare’s The File on H, first published in 1981, two Irish scholars travel with a primitive tape-recorder along the Kosovo frontier in the 1930s in search of an area where epic Homeric poetry might still be in production. The description, as Gjorg moves out to a mountain ridge at nightfall to avenge the killing of his brother, has a contemporary ring: “Slowly the gun barrel swept over some patches of half-thawed snow towards the wild pomegranates scattered through the brush-covered space on both sides of the road.”Back at the village, people recall the rules of “the code” by which their lives are governed. Horrified by what has happened, the monk Gjon seeks to upbraid the foreman. “That new world you told me about the other day,” he imagines himself saying, “that new order … which is going to carry the world a thousand years forward, it too is soaked in blood.” At the end of the book, the monk has another vision: “I saw whole plains awash with blood, and mountain ranges burned to cinders.”Broken April, also by Kadare, evokes the tradition of the peasant blood feud. A man is murdered, and his body is plastered into the stonework.

His hero-chronicler, “the monk Gjon”, describes the building of a bridge between Europe and Asia that keeps falling down. Unaware of the wider world, he has an enigmatic conversation with the foreman builder who tells him how “the lineaments of a new order that would carry the world many centuries forward had faintly, ever so faintly, begun to appear in this part of Europe”.People in the town come to believe that only by walling up a man within its piers will the bridge be able to stand firm. In The Three-Arched Bridge, written in 1978, he recalls the arrival of the Turks six centuries earlier. Born in 1936 in the Albanian town of Gjirokastra, Kadare lived and wrote in Tirana throughout the isolationist Communist regime of Enver Hoxha, only leaving for French exile in 1990. He has drawn the attention of the European States to your position and, at a Council of the Nations, it has been unanimously decided that Austria-Hungary shall restore to you the peace and prosperity that you have so long lost.”The image of the bridge over troubled waters has also been used by the great Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare.