The Singing That Shaped Southern Albania

My father still sings the old songs—under his breath while he’s fixing something, or out loud when the mood takes him—the same way his father did in Grabovë. Sometimes he makes up words as he goes, fitting them into melodic shapes I’ve heard my whole life. He doesn’t call it iso-polyphony. He just calls it singing.

His family is from Përmet, born in Grabovë village, though the name Zhulati traces back to a village called Zhulat that my ancestors left during the Ottoman invasions of Skanderbeg’s era, heading for the highlands. My mother’s side is from Gjirokastër. Both regions sit in the heart of Labëria, where this style of multipart singing has been passed down for as long as anyone can remember. I didn’t grow up thinking of it as heritage. It was just there, the way food and language were there.

In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed Albanian folk iso-polyphony a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, later inscribing it on the Representative List in 2008. The recognition put a name and a framework around something that villages across southern Albania had been doing for centuries. For people like my father, nothing changed. He kept singing the same songs. But for the rest of the world, it was an introduction to one of Europe’s oldest and most distinctive vocal traditions.

This article is for travelers who want to understand what they’re hearing when they encounter this music—and for Albanians abroad who, like me, grew up with it in the background and want to know more about what it means.

What Iso-Polyphony Sounds Like

If you’ve never heard it, here’s what to expect: multiple voices singing together without instruments. Two solo lines—a leader and a response—woven over a continuous drone held by a group. The drone is the iso, from the Greek word for “equal” or “same,” and it’s what gives the music its weight. That low, sustained hum underneath everything else.

The effect is dense and layered. The harmonies aren’t sweet in a Western choral sense. They’re tighter, sometimes dissonant, with intervals that create tension before resolving. The voices overlap and interlock. When it works, it sounds ancient in a way that’s hard to explain—like the music belongs to the landscape it came from.

The structure has names. The marrës (taker) starts the song and carries the main melody. The kthyes (turner) answers and creates the countermelody. The iso is the group of voices holding the drone underneath. In some Labëria songs, there’s a fourth voice called the hedhës (launcher), which adds another layer of ornamentation. Four-part songs are a Labërian specialty. Most other regions work with two or three voices.

None of this requires instruments. Iso-polyphony is purely vocal, and the tradition likely predates instrumental music in the region.

Where It Comes From

The heartland of iso-polyphony is southern Albania: Labëria, Toskëria, Çamëria, Myzeqe. The villages of Labëria—the mountainous southwest, including the areas around Gjirokastër, Përmet, Tepelenë, and down toward the coast—are considered the tradition’s strongest carriers. This is where four-voice singing developed and where the most complex repertoire survives.

Some musicologists trace the roots back to Illyrian times, over two thousand years ago. The theory is that shepherds calling across valleys developed the call-and-response patterns, and the drone emerged as a way to anchor the harmonies over distance. The mountains may have shaped the music. Certainly they preserved it, keeping villages isolated enough that outside influences didn’t wash the old forms away.

By the time Ottoman chroniclers and European travelers started writing about Albania, they were already noting the unusual multipart singing. It wasn’t new then. It was already old.

Why UNESCO Recognized It

UNESCO inscribed Albanian folk iso-polyphony in 2005 (as a Masterpiece) and again in 2008 (on the Representative List) because it met the criteria for outstanding cultural value and active community practice. The nomination highlighted the music’s role in social life—weddings, funerals, harvests, religious celebrations, informal gatherings—and its function as a carrier of collective memory.

The listing also flagged concerns. Emigration, economic pressures, lack of institutional support. Young people leaving villages for cities or for work abroad. The natural chain of transmission—learning from parents and grandparents at home—weakening as families dispersed.

UNESCO recognition brought attention, funding, and a framework for preservation. Training programs were established in southern Albania. Documentation projects recorded master singers. The Gjirokastër National Folklore Festival, already running since 1968, gained additional international visibility.

The tradition didn’t need UNESCO to survive in places like Labëria, where it remains part of daily life. But the recognition helped formalize protection and gave younger Albanians—especially those in cities or abroad—a reason to pay attention to something they might have otherwise dismissed as old-fashioned.

The Gjirokastër Festival

If you want to hear iso-polyphony performed at scale, the National Folklore Festival in Gjirokastër is the place. It happens roughly every five years inside the walls of Gjirokastër Castle—one of the largest in the Balkans—and brings together hundreds of performers from across Albania and the diaspora.

The most recent festival ran from June 24 to July 1, 2023, after pandemic delays pushed it back from 2020. Over a thousand artists performed. Groups came from Labëria, Toskëria, Myzeqe, and Albanian communities in Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Greece. The event is part competition, part reunion, part living museum.

If your travel dates overlap with a festival year, plan around it. The experience of hearing dozens of polyphonic groups performing in a medieval fortress, voices echoing off stone walls, is hard to replicate anywhere else.

The next festival is expected in 2028.

Hearing It Outside the Festival

Between festival years, options exist but require some effort.

In Gjirokastër itself, the city recently opened a Museum of Iso-Polyphony in a network of historic Cold War bunkers. The museum covers the tradition’s history and includes audio installations. It’s a starting point, not a substitute for live performance, but useful for context.

Restaurants and cultural associations in Gjirokastër and Përmet occasionally arrange live performances for visitors, especially during tourist season. Ask locally. Some guesthouses in villages across Labëria have connections to singers who might perform informally.

The villages themselves—Pilur, Dhërmi, Himara, the communities around Tepelenë—still practice the tradition at weddings, funerals, and local celebrations. If you’re staying in the region and a family event happens nearby, you might hear it. This isn’t something you can schedule, but it’s worth knowing that the music is still woven into ordinary life in these places.

In Tirana, there are amateur polyphonic groups made up of students and professionals who learn under older masters. Performances happen occasionally at cultural centers. Check local listings.

The Roles Inside a Song

For visitors trying to follow what’s happening in a performance:

Marrës (mah-RESS): The taker. Starts the song and carries the main melody. Usually the strongest or most experienced voice.

Kthyes (kth-YESS): The turner. Answers the lead with a countermelody, often overlapping in call-and-response style.

Iso (EE-soh): The drone. A group of singers holding a sustained tone underneath the soloists, usually on an open vowel. This is the foundation.

Hedhës (hedh-ESS): The launcher. A third soloist found in four-part Labëria songs, adding ornamentation or briefly taking over the melody.

Not all songs use all parts. Two-voice songs (often sung by women) are common. Three-voice is the most widespread. Four-voice is the Labërian specialty and the most complex form.

What the Songs Are About

The repertoire covers everything. Wedding songs. Laments for the dead (vajtim). Historical ballads about battles and local heroes. Love songs, work songs, seasonal songs, religious songs for both Muslim and Christian communities. Some songs are centuries old. Others were composed within living memory.

One famous example, “Doli shkurti, hyri marsi,” tells of a 1908 battle where the guerrilla fighter Çerçiz Topulli defeated Ottoman troops near Gjirokastër. The song is still performed as a point of local pride.

The lyrics encode history, values, and collective memory. In communities where literacy came late, the songs carried what books carry elsewhere.

Men, Women, and Who Sings What

Traditionally, the forms divide along gender lines. Two-part songs are often sung by women, especially laments. Three-part songs are sung by both men and women. Four-part songs are traditionally male.

This is shifting. At recent festivals, female ensembles have performed four-part songs that were historically male repertoire. Mixed groups are more common now than they were a generation ago. The boundaries are becoming more flexible as the tradition adapts.

The Cross-Border Tradition

The polyphonic tradition doesn’t stop at Albania’s southern border. Villages in what is now northwestern Greece—territory that was historically Albanian and Illyrian—practice a closely related form of multipart singing. The musical structure is nearly identical: lead voice, response, drone.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The region was Illyrian before it was anything else, and the modern border cuts through what was a continuous cultural zone. Albanian-speaking communities extended south to Janina and beyond for centuries. The Cham Albanians, expelled from Greece in 1944-45, came from this same territory. Greek was the administrative and religious language of the Ottoman period, but that doesn’t make the population ethnically Greek any more than Latin made medieval Europeans Roman.

Today, some Greek cultural institutions present this polyphonic singing as “Epirote Greek” tradition. In 2020, UNESCO recognized the Polyphonic Caravan—a Greek preservation initiative—as a model safeguarding practice. But the music predates modern national boundaries by millennia. It belongs to the land and the people who have always lived there, whatever passport they now carry.

Joint performances occasionally bring together singers from both sides of the border. The music doesn’t care about the politics. The harmonies work the same way they always have.

Notable Performers and Groups

A few names worth knowing:

Neço Muko of Përmet made some of the first recordings of Albanian polyphonic songs in the 1920s and 30s, including sessions in Paris for Pathé Records. He helped codify the four-voice style and preserved songs that might otherwise have been lost.

Arian Shehu first performed at the Gjirokastër Festival in 1978 at age sixteen. He’s been at every festival since—over four decades of carrying the tradition. Known for a powerful voice and emotional delivery, he’s become something like the elder statesman of iso-polyphony.

Shkëlqim Beshiraj, a singer in his seventies who emigrated to Italy, became an unlikely internet phenomenon by posting videos of himself singing traditional songs from hilltops and mountain settings. Some of his videos have over a million views. He returned to Albania for the 2023 festival.

Saz’iso, an ensemble of veteran musicians from southern Albania, released an album in 2017 (At Least Wave Your Handkerchief at Me) that brought iso-polyphony to international audiences. The album blends vocal polyphony with instrumental saze music and received critical praise.

The villages of Labëria produce new singers every generation. Pilur, sometimes called “the balcony of polyphony,” has its own renowned group. Himara, on the coast, has performers who sometimes sing in both Albanian and Greek. The tradition renews itself through people who grow up hearing it and decide to keep it going.

Why It Matters

Iso-polyphony isn’t a museum piece in southern Albania. It’s still sung at family gatherings, still hummed by old men doing chores, still taught—formally or informally—to the next generation. The villages of Labëria haven’t stopped carrying it forward.

For visitors, hearing iso-polyphony live offers something rare: a vocal tradition that’s been continuous for centuries, performed not as a revival or a reconstruction but as a living practice. The sound is strange at first—those tight harmonies, that unbroken drone—but once it settles in, you don’t forget it.

My father doesn’t perform. He’s never been on a stage. But when he sings while working, he’s doing the same thing his father did, and his father before that. The songs don’t need an audience to survive. They just need someone willing to keep singing them.

For more on Albanian intangible heritage, see our guide to the lahuta epic singing tradition (newly inscribed by UNESCO in 2025) and the Gjirokastër National Folklore Festival.