Burrnesha Duni was demanding £200 to speak to us. Having travelled to Lepusha, a tiny outpost high in the mountains of northern Albania, she knew the Express team was out on a limb. “You can just go back,” Duni, dressed in a grey tracksuit and walking boots, told us with a flick of the hands. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
It wasn’t just that she lived at the end of a rubble path it had taken a 4×4 three attempts to scale, Duni knows how unique her story is. We wanted to speak to her because she is the last of a kind.
About 35 years ago Duni decided to follow an ancient Balkan tradition and become a sworn virgin, or ‘Burrnesha’ as Albanians say. This meant, as well as a vow of celibacy, she committed to “live as a man”.
Duni, now 58, embraced the role, cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothes. Characterising herself as tough and strong, as her approach to negotiations suggests, she spends her days in a mountain chalet with only a vicious-looking Alsatian for company.
A keen football fan, the sworn virgin loves watching the Italian national team, so much so that she once kept her nephew locked out of the house for two hours after an argument sparked by his loyalty to the England side.
Being a Burrnesha also allowed her, in the past, to adopt the role of breadwinner and head of the household, which were the main reasons for her taking the vow.
“When my father passed away my brother and sister were young,” she explained. “At that time a girl or a woman was always someone who is serving. So I had two options; to serve to the family of a husband or to [become a sworn virgin and] serve my own family.”
Not that it was an easy time for Duni to support her siblings. Albania was in the last throws of communism which meant the sworn virgin spent days toiling on the collectivist farm for little reward.
But even Duni will concede, by the standards of the rural mountain town, her vow of chastity, aged 23, came rather late.
In fact, prior to choosing to live as a man, she turned down 15 marriage proposals.
“I had a lot of options,” Duni continued. “But I wanted to be free and feel different. I had the opportunity because my father was very educated and open-minded [so I was able to remain unmarried]. I’ve said to all my brothers and sisters ‘don’t get married too quickly. Enjoy your life’.”
Being a sworn virgin was clearly to Duni’s taste. Once her siblings were grown her mother introduced another two suitors keen to marry her and she rejected them both.
This was despite not having any obligations and the difficult conditions of communism being a distant memory.
“In every village in Albania, especially in the Old North, it’s not that a guy comes in a house and says ‘do you want to marry me?’ it is the father who comes to speak only with the parents, not me directly,” she explained.
“I just said ‘no, no, no I don’t care who the guy is’. Different families came into our family house to convince me for their boys. I always said no, even during the good times of Albania after democracy, so I was always against that.”
Duni said she had no fear a persistent suitor would refuse to accept her decision. She had a reputation as someone not to be messed with. “I was very strong so most of the guys were scared for me, even today, they are scared of me,” she said.
Not that she thinks women today need to become a sworn virgin to live as she has.
“Women nowadays are so lucky because they can be independent and do whatever they want,” she added. “I am happy when I see a lady can be a lawyer, president or director.”
As someone who’d chosen to ‘live as a man’ long before the transgender debate exploded, Duni was non-plussed on the thought of women choosing to make permanent physical alterations to be more like a man.
She said: “I don’t want to judge them because everyone has their own body, but God made us man and woman and you can’t change that. I don’t like these things that are happening in England or all around the world, but they can do whatever they want.”
The interview having finished, Duni invites us for mid-morning coffee washed with a large glass of Raki – a local spirit which is 50 per cent alcohol. It turns out to be an unfortunate interruption because as we head to the chalet our cameraman loses his drone in the woods.
Several hours later the sworn virgin calls with good news; she’d found the drone. But we were mistaken if we thought it might be returned for free. Duni was clear; the price of its return was 24 cans of beer.
