Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Labëria
Summary
Labëria is a historic region that is roughly situated in southwestern Albania. Its inhabitants are known as Labs (referred to as Lab, pl. Lebër, also dial. sing. Lap) and its boundaries reach from Vlorë to Himara in the south, to the Greek border near Sarandë, incorporating the Kurvelesh region of Gjirokastër District and extending east to the city of Tepelenë.
Names of the Albanians and Albania
The toponym Labëri/-a and the name of the Albanian sub-group: Lab (also Labe, Labi), pl. Lebër, are endonyms formed from the root *arb/*alb (cf. the ancient ethonym Αλβανοί, Albanoi by Ptolemy, and Αλβανοί, Αρβανίται in Byzantine sources). The variant lab-, which goes back to *alb-, resulted from a metathesis characteristic of Common Slavic, and was reborrowed in that form into Albanian. The toponym Arbëri, now used as a variant of Labëri and only to refer to a small mountainous region extending within the triangle: Vlorë-Sarandë-Tepelenë, formerly had a broader usage referring in the old times generally to Albania and Albanians (arbëror, subst. arbëresh). The variants Arbëri/Labëri were used narrowly to designate a country inhabited by the Labs, i.e. Albanians proper.
The link to the older form of the toponym was preserved until the late Ottoman period as suggested in documents of the court of Ali Pasha of Tepelena and other publications. As reported by Hahn (1854), at his time the toponym Arbërí was used in the strict sense to denote the highland area at the back of Vlorë, i.e. Kurvelesh and Labëria; however, according to him, it was used in a wider sense including also Himarë up to Delvinë, that is the ancient Chaonia.
In Ottoman times, the region became known as Laplık in Turkish, comprising the areas of Delvinë, Avlonya (Vlorë), Tepedelen (Tepelenë), Kurules (Kurvelesh), and Ergiri (Gjirokastër). The Greek name is Λιαπουριά, Liapouriá.
In the Middle Ages the Labs were followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church but many converted to Islam during Ottoman rule, with the bulk of conversion occurring in the 18th century.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.