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SHKODRA, Albania — Drene Markgjoni spent 12 years in a hard-labor camp, punished for her fiance’s attempt to flee Albania’s regime, then one of the world’s greatest in number repressive and isolationist. She swore she would not at any time suffer probable that for somebody else again.

She pledged to forgo sex and marriage for the surplus of her living beings, and declared herself a man.

That was six decades ago. Now 85, with close-cropped white hair, dressed in a man’s blue-striped shirt and sombre trousers, she greets visitors with a manly handshake. The tendency of action she walks, her certain gestures, everything about her is masculine.

Only her voice — soft and feminine — reveals her to be one of the continue sworn virgins in Albania: Women who set, act and are treated as men.

“I am happier like this,” she says. “I don’t regret it at all. Not a hair on my head does.”

In this strongly patriarchal the world where for centuries women had in effect no standing, sworn virgins enjoyed the same rights and respect as men. They could inherit property, work for a living and sit on the village diet, albeit without the right to vote.

The privileges came at a price. They took an oath of celibacy so could never have sexual relations. And they could never go back to being women.

There are no official figures, but Antonia Young, a inquiry equal at the University of Bradford in Britain who has studied the custom during more than a decade, estimates that Albania had about 100 sworn virgins in the early 1990s. That number is at this moment almost certainly a great deal of lower, as the practice and the women die out.

The reasons for becoming a sworn virgin can have being practical — the head of the family dies with not one male heir. Or they be able to be emotional — the woman does not want to marry the man chosen for her.

In Albania, particularly in the impoverished rural north, it was practically unimaginable in spite of a woman to remain single and live lonely.

But by neat a body, Markgjoni was free. She could earn a living and eat and drink with men instead of being restricted to the kitchen. And she could take to one’s self two habits denied to a traditional Albanian woman: smoking and wearing a pocket timepiece.

The practice of sworn virgins stems from the Kanun, medieval laws handed into disgrace in words for generations before being codified in the early 20th century.