An unusual practice has stubbornly endured in remote villages in the Balkans since medieval times. Traditionally, if the head of a household in this strongly patriarchal society died without a male heir, one of his daughters could choose to become a man.
She would dress like a man. She was permitted to smoke and mingle with men in the village cafe. She could even carry a weapon.
But these privileges came at a price. She had to become a “sworn virgin”.
Her vow of celibacy and her promise to look after her mother, sisters and the family property were lifetime commitments. In many cases, it was the only way by which a woman could inherit her family’s wealth.
In May the last so-called sworn virgin of Montenegro was moved from her village near Savnik to a home for the elderly in the coastal town of Risan, amid fears for her health. Stana Cerovic was born in 1936, the youngest child in a family of five girls and two boys – both of whom died young.
While still a child, she promised her father she would never marry and would, instead, take care of the family. All her life, she socialised with men. She started smoking at the age of five. She began working in her father’s fields at seven. Her father taught her how to shoot.
“She thought of herself as a man and that [her sisters] visit her like being with their brother,” her cousin Mara Cerovic said recently.
Cerovic never dressed as a woman. Traditional “women’s tasks” such as laundry and cleaning were always done by her sisters. She was always “the man of the family”.
All her life, her family say, she saw herself as privileged rather than deprived of her female identity and her life as a woman. The belief that it is an honour for a woman to assume the role of a man has been the foundation of the sworn-virgin custom over the centuries.
But now, at the age of 80, Cerovic is slowing down. She was forced to sell off most of her cows after one of them injured her a year ago.
A recent television feature about Cerovic was widely viewed in Montenegro, with offers of help coming in from around the country. The local authorities arranged a place for her in a nursing home, turning back offers of financial help from the public.
“It is our duty to take care of Stana,” a Savnik social worker told Montenegrin television.
This archaic set of social rules originated in the mountain villages of Montenegro, southern Kosovo, and northern Albania in the 15th century. Some Dalmatian coast islands also adopted the practice. The women cut their hair short, dressed as men, and often changed their names. Many adopted male mannerisms and gestures.
In 2012 US photographer Jill Peters traveled to northern Albania and took a unique collection of portraits of sworn virgins in order to document this dying phenomenon.
The custom survives in Albania but has already died out in Dalmatia and Bosnia and now it is in its final days in Montenegro.
The 2007 novel Sworn Virgin by Albanian novelist Elvira Dones traces the life of one woman who, with the help of her sister, managed to reconnect with her female identity. Italian filmmaker Laura Bispuri made a film based on that novel in 2015.
Unlike the heroine of Dones’s novel, Cerovic seems to have no regrets. Her last wish, she says, is to be remembered in her family graveyard as her father’s only surviving son.
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