Deti i gjerë e i pa anë – The Sea at the Center of Albanian Myth and Memory
Deti i gjerë e i pa anë – The Sea at the Center of Albanian Myth and Memory
Elton A. Varfi
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In this anonymous stanza, orally passed down for generations, a mystical view of the world is condensed. It is not just poetry; it is a fragment of cosmology. The sea is not described, but evoked as both beginning and end, as womb and tomb, as cradle and dissolution. Its boundlessness is not merely a geographical observation, but an allusion to mystery.
The absence of limits becomes a symbol of what cannot be measured, defined, or contained.
In saying that the sea 'holds within creation’s core', the popular voice reveals a truth that spans millennia of culture: everything is contained in water, everything originates in it, and everything returns to it.
This image is not far from Genesis, where the Spirit hovers over primordial waters. Nor is it distant from the Qur'an, which affirms: 'We made from water every living thing.'
It is astonishing that such profound thought survived in the simplicity of an oral culture — without writing, without theology — yet capable of preserving the core of origin.
'From you we came' is a verse that bridges science and spirituality. We came from the sea: biology says so, but so does myth. It is a declaration predating all, existing before religions, surviving in a verse sung by the people without understanding its meaning, yet guarding it faithfully. 'And to you we shall return' closes the cycle. We will return. There is no ultimate separation, no escape. There is a return — inevitable and natural.
The sea calls us back, welcomes us, reabsorbs us. In this return, there is no condemnation — only peace.
The same peace mystics seek in union with the Absolute, in dissolving into the One. Four verses. No names. No claims. And yet, everything is there. There is the archaic memory of humankind. The meeting of nature and spirit. The awareness that water is mother, judge, and refuge. There is the echo of Scriptures — even without having read them. And a wisdom that only those who listen to the silence of the sea truly grasp.
These verses, born from the collective voice of the Albanian people, seem to whisper an ancient, remote knowledge — yet remarkably close to the words that open the Bible. Genesis indeed begins the tale of creation with a scene dominated by water:
"Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." (Genesis 1:2)
This is no mere coincidence. Before light, before land, before the word, there were the waters. This is not a minor detail or a poetic flourish: it is an ontological vision of existence. In the Bible, as in Albanian folk poetry, water is not just one element among many: it is the beginning, the womb of possibility, the cradle of the world. It is there that the Spirit moves, it is there that the spark of creation ignites. Order emerges from that liquid chaos, from that primordial flow that precedes all form.The Albanian stanza, though devoid of explicit religious references, reflects with remarkable naturalness the same worldview. The sea that “holds within the entire universe” (që mban brenda gjithë gjithësinë) is a poetic echo of the biblical abyss: deep, dark, sacred. The absence of a named God does not signify the absence of the sacred—on the contrary, it grants the sea an implicit, impersonal, and universal divinity. There is no need to invoke a name to perceive the sacredness of what welcomes, contains, and returns life. The sea, as archetype, replaces the anthropomorphic deity: it does not speak, does not judge, does not create in the human sense, but it embraces, preserves, transforms.The third and fourth lines—nga ty kemi dalë / dhe prapë tek ty do të vijmë—recall another fundamental biblical idea: the return. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19), says God to man, sealing the circular destiny of the human being. Here, however, dust is replaced by the sea. It is a powerful variant: not dryness, but primordial moisture; not dissolution, but absorption. The return to the sea is not a loss, but a reintegration. It is the reabsorption into the whole from which we came. An ending that is not disappearance, but reunion. This concept, expressed so poetically, is itself a synthesis of religion and philosophy, spirituality and biology.But the Bible is only one of many sacred texts that celebrate water as both origin and destination. In Islam, water is the source of every living thing: “We made every living being from water” (Quran 21:30). It is the primal substance, the origin of biological life and cosmic order. In Hinduism, primordial waters precede the birth of the cosmos. They drift in nothingness before Brahma emerges to shape the world. In ancient Egypt, the god Nun represents the primeval ocean from which the gods and universe are born. In pre-Socratic philosophy, Thales claims that all things originate from water. All these visions converge on a central idea: before all, there was water, and from it everything derives.The resonance of this thought with the Albanian stanza is striking. Four anonymous verses, devoid of doctrine, yet filled with a universal truth. There is no dogma, no sacred text, but a profoundly intuitive insight: life comes from the sea, and to the sea it returns. In this vision, the sea is no longer a geographic space, but a cosmic concept. It is not just “sea” as we commonly define it, but a symbol of beginning and end, of mother and tomb, of origin and completion.What makes the Albanian stanza unique is precisely the fact that it does not stem from a doctrine, but from an oral tradition. It is not the product of systematic theology, but of a culture that knew how to read the world without books, to intuit truth by observing nature, to distill the sense of the divine in the brief verses of collective memory. This is the strength of folk culture: to say everything with little, to preserve mystery in an accessible form—no less profound for its simplicity.
In this sense, the sea is not only the subject of the poem—it is its very method. Just as the sea gathers and blends, so too does the voice of the people absorb scattered elements, sediment them, and return a greater truth. It is a form of knowledge that does not distinguish between science and myth, between religion and empirical observation, between the sacred and the profane. It is fluid knowledge, like water itself.In Albanian peasant culture, sacred texts were often passed down orally, reinterpreted, blended with pre-Christian or Islamic beliefs, and yet their echoes remained. Not as dogma, but as vision. Not as law, but as poetic perception. Ultimate truths were not written, but sung. Words, before ever being fixed on paper, lived on the lips of the people, transmitted like seeds from one generation to the next, changing only slightly but never in the heart of their meaning.Thus, the stanza about the sea becomes a sort of unwritten Genesis—parallel, popular, equally sacred. It reminds us that there are many ways to tell the beginning, and that words spoken softly around a fire, or whispered in song, can hold as much weight as a verse engraved in stone. What the Bible recounts as the origin of the universe, Albanian peasants entrusted to an image: the sea that gives us life and receives us at the end of our journey. They needed no written page—only a voice, memory, and daily experience with earth, sky, and water.
Nga ty kemi dalë
dhe prapë tek ty do të vijmë
These two lines, which form the second half of the stanza, contain one of the most profound insights ever expressed in folk poetry: that human life originated from the sea. For a peasant people, mountain dwellers, tied to the land and its seasons, such a statement is far from obvious. On the contrary, it is astonishing. It proves that instinctive observation, oral intelligence, and symbolic reflection can reach the same truths that science has only recently confirmed. It is a bridge between myth and microscope, between song and laboratory.Today we know, with reasonable certainty, that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, in the primordial seas. In those dense, mineral-rich waters, the first organic molecules formed, followed by the first cells, and then increasingly complex organisms. From there, through a long evolutionary journey, came fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and finally human beings. The ocean was not only our womb—it was our first home, our first breath, our first cradle. Water, even today, flows through our veins.It is therefore a confirmed fact that we were born from water, that the sea is our biological origin. But in Albanian folk poetry, all this is said without evidence, without experiments, without technical language. It is spoken with natural simplicity, with that quiet strength that belongs only to those who speak in harmony with nature: nga ty kemi dalë—from you we have emerged. There is no hesitation, no need for explanation—it is a fact that lives in the body and the spirit, in the blood and in the song.
How could the ancients have known? Perhaps simply by observing the world. All that lives depends on water. Animals, plants, humans—nothing survives without it. Newborns grow in the mother’s womb immersed in liquid. Women’s waters break before giving birth. Blood, with its saltiness, recalls seawater. And so perhaps, unknowingly, our ancestors connected the experience of birth to that of the sea. No need for abstract philosophy—just the concreteness of experience, of what is seen in the body and in the land.
If returning to the earth—to dust—is the dominant view in agricultural cultures, here an unexpected variation opens: not ashes, but waves. Not dryness, but fluidity. Death not as an end, but as a return to the primordial element. Dissolution in the sea is not loss, but reunion. This is a thought that consoles, that frees, that embraces. A form of natural religiosity, without dogma, made of deep intuitions that remind us who we are and where we come from. And they suggest to us, silently, where we shall return.
But perhaps there is more. Oral culture does not clearly distinguish between reality and symbol. Saying we come from the sea is not just a physical statement, but an act of symbolic recognition: the sea is womb, mother, origin. It is where we were born—even spiritually. It is from there we received our first breath, even if we do not remember it.And then there is the aspect of return. If we came from there, it is there we shall return. Like drops that fall and then return again. This circular vision of life is not scientific, but poetic—and yet, the two meet. The matter of our bodies—water, salts, atoms—returns to the environment after death, to the cycle of nature, and often ends up again… in the sea.
There is ancient wisdom in recognizing that we are not masters of the universe, but its children, and that our destiny is not ascent, but return. Return to the source, to the mother, to the liquid from which all things began. In this sense, Albanian folk poetry becomes almost a philosophy of natural balance. It does not preach, does not explain, does not argue: it simply affirms, with gentleness and power.
And by affirming that we come from the sea, it anticipates science—not to challenge it, but because it is guided by another form of knowledge: one born from slow observation, from collective memory, from intimacy with the earth and the water.
Deti i gjerë e i pa anë,
që mban brenda gjithësinë,
nga ty kemi dalë
dhe prapë tek ty do të vijmë.
This stanza is not born from a void. It is the child of an ancient world in which myth was not a distant tale, but a living part of daily reality. In the Balkans, water has always been more than just a natural element—it is a passage, a boundary, a living being. Every river had a name, every spring a legend, every lake a secret. And the sea—vast, dangerous, unreachable—was the most mysterious of all.
In Balkan tradition, water is sacred. It is tied to fertility, death, and rebirth. It is the element that connects the world of the living with that of the dead. Ablutions, offerings cast into rivers, prayers spoken to springs and wells—these are practices documented across the Albanian territories, from north to south, in pagan rituals that survived under Christian or Muslim names.
Pre-Christian cultures, such as the Illyrians and Thraco-Pelasgians, worshipped water as a feminine principle. The water goddesses, nymphs, and spirits of the lakes were manifestations of an animated nature, of a world where every visible element was inhabited by invisible presences. A lake was not merely a body of water, but a dwelling. A river did not flow by chance, but followed a will. This way of perceiving the world did not vanish with the arrival of monotheistic religions; it remained embedded in the folds of daily life—in gestures, proverbs, and songs. Albanian folk poetry does not invent this vision: it inherits it. It preserves and transmits it like a fragile but steady flame carried across the centuries. It needs no complex myths or elaborate narratives. A few verses suffice to evoke a cosmos. Saying “the sea contains the entire universe” is a total declaration, a substitute for an entire system of thought. It is condensed philosophy, metaphysics distilled to its essence. And those final two lines—“from you we came, and to you we shall return”—say all that is needed to conceive a cosmology: an origin, an end, and the thread that binds the two. It is not just poetry: it is a worldview.
Even the historical religions of the Balkans have come to embrace this vision. Christianity, with baptism, immerses in water to be reborn. Islam, with ablutions before prayer, sees water as purification and renewal. Bektashism, with its symbolic practices tied to water sources. Faith, even when it changes form, continues to pass through water.
And so the verse about the sea is not merely an image. It is a fragment of a lost religion—or perhaps only a transfigured one. A religion of matter, of cycles, of continuity between the visible and the invisible. A faith that does not divide the human from the natural, but weaves them together.
Every time an Albanian sings the sea, there is something more in that song than landscape. There is the memory of a time when water spoke, and people listened. The sea is not only a geographical boundary: it is a symbolic one. It is what separates and connects, gives and takes, hides and reveals. The respect felt for it is not romantic reverence—it is deep awareness. It is the knowledge that water decides, that water commands. It is knowing that we come from it, and that to it, inevitably, we must return.
Even those who live far from the sea, in mountainous inland regions, carry it within as an idea, an echo. It’s in the eyes of the grandmother who scans the horizon even if she’s never seen it. It’s in the silence of the man waiting for news from his migrant son. It’s in the act of bringing water to the field with care, as if it were a gift. The sea is not merely a place: it is a constant presence. It is a voice calling from afar, and to which one responds without speaking.
With these two lines, the circle is closed. If the sea is the origin of life, it is also its end. But not an end that is tragic or final—it is a return. In the vision contained in this verse, existence is not a line, but a cycle. We are born from the sea, and to the sea we shall return.
There is no escape, no detour: a path is fulfilled. This idea is not merely poetic. It is profoundly spiritual. The return to the origin is one of the most recurring images in ancient religions and philosophies. In the East, it is called *samsara*, the cycle of rebirths. In pre-Christian Mediterranean cultures, it was believed that the soul returned to merge with the primordial element. Ecclesiastes says that all returns to dust. But in the Albanian verse, it is not the dust that calls us back—it is the sea. And that makes a great difference. Dust is dry, cold, final. The sea is alive, welcoming, infinite. Returning to the sea means returning to something that belongs to us, that once held us in its womb, that recognizes us. It is a dissolution that brings no fear, because it is a reunion.
Even in biological terms, this return has real meaning. After death, the human body disintegrates, and its elements—water, salts, minerals—return to the natural cycle. More often than not, they end up in rivers, lakes, and eventually in the sea. It is not metaphor—it is physics. In Albanian folk culture, this return is not described with dread. It is expected, accepted, even at times desired. Funeral songs speak of journeys, of crossings, of landings. Death is not disappearance, but passage. And where does one pass to? Toward the det, toward the water, toward that original womb that once generated us.
The sea, then, becomes our true horizon. Not only the visual one, but the ontological one. It is the final boundary, but also the promise of continuity. There is no need for heavenly paradises or divine rewards. There is the return to the whole.
Whoever wrote—or better, passed down—this verse may have known nothing of philosophy, comparative religion, or biology. But they knew how to observe. They knew how to listen to the cycle of the seasons, the flow of rivers, the power of the sea. And from that humble and deep knowledge, a great truth was born: that what has begun also has a place to end. And that place is the same from which everything started. In a world that has lost the sense of return, that believes only in accumulation and linear progress, this vision is revolutionary. It reminds us that we are not the masters of time, but its children. That we do not always have to move forward: sometimes, we must go back. Go back to the beginning, return to the origin, return to the sea.
When we read those verses today—*“nga ty kemi dalë / dhe prapë tek ti do të vijmë”*—we are not just reflecting on the sea. We are listening to an ancient voice, telling us where we come from, who we are, and where we will end. A voice that reminds us that man is not only history, but also myth. And if that voice still lives, it is because someone remembered it, spoke it, sang it. And that is the task of memory: to preserve what matters, even as the world changes.
That is why Albanian folk poetry is important. Because it is not only beauty—it is testimony. It is the way a people without great means managed to speak great truths. And the truth this verse conveys is simple and profound: that the sea is everything. That we come from it, and to it we shall return. And that in between—in the brief space we call life—we must not forget where we came from.
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