Frascineto

The hamlet of Frascineto has a name that was changed in order to be rid of it. The old toponym was Li Porticilli, which in time turned into Percile and finally into Porcile — pigsty — until towards the end of the nineteen-thirties a change was asked for: it became Eianina, in memory of Ioannina, the city in the north of present-day Greece, near the Albanian border, inhabited by Albanian populations. The inhabitants, however, go on calling themselves purçilotë, out of tradition and out of affection for their own past: the name was replaced, the way people call themselves was not. The village, formerly called Casale Novo or Casal San Pietro, was repopulated in the fifteenth century by a colony of Albanian refugees, received by the abbot of the old Greek monastery of San Pietro, who assigned them lands of the abbey; in 1552 the two hamlets merged and took the name Frascineto. Since then the community has kept its language, its religion and its rite: the services are celebrated in the Byzantine rite, under the eparchy of Lungro.

On the Monday and Tuesday after Easter the vallje are danced here, the Albanian round dances, and they end with the capture of the lëtinjt, that is of the non-Albanians, the Latins, whom a group of appointed men have already picked out by blackening their faces. On the second Sunday after Easter the people go up in procession to the Madonna di Lassù, a chapel cut into the rock of the Timpone del Corvo, today little more than a ruin, which began as a set of cells for the Basilian hermits; they eat at the foot of the sanctuary and, coming down the steep path, they weave the dances again, singing old Albanian rhapsodies. The Byzantine church of Saints Peter and Paul, of the tenth century, was the seat of Italo-Greek monks until 1750 and was reconsecrated in 2017; the parish church keeps an iconostasis of Russian school. And the comune has two museums: one of the traditional Albanian costume, one of icons.