Why in Albania, the roof or garden of many houses is decorated with soft toys. It's all about superstition
Albania is a rather unexplored country for our travelers in the Balkans. The long influence of the Ottoman Empire, the proximity to Europe and the many Albanian traditions have created certain unique overall impressions of Albania.
If you walk around the main large cities of Albania, you will notice that there are almost no high-rise buildings and multi-storey buildings being built there. Most of the residential buildings resemble our private sector. An untrained tourist can be surprised by many things when visiting Albania for the first time. For example, all the time you can see soft toys that decorate houses. They are located both on rooftops, on balconies, in gardens.
They are often faded already, and many have a rather frightening look. In order to understand the meaning of this "tradition", you need to delve a little into modern history.
In Albania, age-old traditions and modern technologies coexist at the same time. The country is actively developing, in large part due to the fact that many Albanians left to work in neighboring countries and returned, bringing a lot of new things. This is especially noticeable in the developing sphere of tourism and the latest IT-technologies.
The number of those who left was so great that many families were temporarily left without sons, husbands, fathers, and main breadwinners. This was especially noticeable in the 2000s: Albanians began to leave their country en masse to work abroad.
Then the "fashion" for decorating houses with toys appeared: the mothers, wives, and daughters who remained at home wanted to somehow "protect" their home and wish good luck to the men who had left to work. Often the toys were updated, new ones were added. But the old ones were not cleaned either - they symbolized that the breadwinner was still waiting in the house, who had gone to work.
Now most of them have returned to their homeland, to Albania, and no longer want to leave it, since the standard of living in this country has increased significantly.
Read also:
- I was very surprised that they do not build studio apartments so popular in our country in Turkey. It turns out that this is legally prohibited.
- Didn't expect to see a typical Chinese in the apartment instead of a toilet - a hole in the floor