"Musiche, sospiri e voci dalle tekke di Delvina"

Our journey begins from some buildings that were Dervish centres (tekke) in Delvina, Southern Albania. Far from the archaeology, in 2009 the visionary and far-sighted Gianclaudio pro- posed me to deal with what was happening and what was resonating inside such centres, i.e. of the intangible convivial and musical life of the dervishes. This would have taken me to a serious ethnomusicological fieldwork in Albania but, for some reasons, this fieldwork didn’t take place. This is why I cannot but propose here the phase of the preparation to the field that I’ve carried out at the times: I begin my article by retracing the history of the order of Dervishes in Albania, which very probably inhabited the centres, and then I focus on some of their musical genres, called nefes, that were played and sung during their rituals, called cem, âyin or âyin-i cem, on the long necked lute saz by a peculiar oral poet/troubadour called (lover).