GJADËR, DAJC, ALBANIA, JUN 13 (AFP/APP): Albanian women have long been famed for their stylish and colourful traditional attire that some still wore until relatively recently.
And few were more chic than the women of Zadrima who wore their own handmade silks and headdresses, their fine gauze blouses set off with belts and swathes of red silk.
But that age-old know-how was almost lost until silk making was dragged back from the edge of extinction by a group of local women who now master every stage of production, from raising the silkworms to weaving the precious fabric.
“The history of silk” in this region of northern Albania nestled between the mountains and the Adriatic Sea “goes back to the 10th century”, ethnologist Aferdita Onuzi told AFP.
Often the silk was exported and it was particularly prized by the Italian and French nobility.
But Albania’s postwar communist regime centralised it all to a single factory for processing and weaving silk, which was completely destroyed after the fall of the dictatorship in the early 1990s.
Then massive emigration and competition from synthetic fibres nearly killed the tradition.
But for the last 15 years or so Franceska Pjetraj and her family, along with other women in the picturesque region, have been working to revive the craft.
“It is a tradition as old as Zadrima,” said Franceska, 30, who has opened a workshop with her mother Mimoza.
“In the past, women here dressed in silk — it was one of their joys,” she added.
Like other women in the long impoverished region, they are also weaving dreams of a better life.
“Here, everything is done in an artisanal way, from cultivating and extracting silk threads to weaving and completing the final product,” said Mimoza, 54, a nurse.
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