San Giorgio existed long before the Albanians. In September 1104 count Roger gave the monastery of Santa Maria del Patìr, along with other hamlets, that of Santo Jorio «with their appurtenances, men, workers and non-workers, mountains, pastures, vineyards, gardens, mills, rights and jurisdictions»: the inhabitants were in the list like the vines and the mills. Then came the plague of 1348, and behind it famines, epidemics and dynastic wars: the population collapsed, dozens of villages were abandoned and their uncultivated lands became rough pasture and hunting reserves. San Giorgio stayed empty for more than a hundred and fifty years. Around 1469 or 1470, with the consent of the archimandrite of the Patirion and the approval of the prince of Bisignano, Albanian families fleeing the Ottoman invasion arrived here. They cleared the woods with fire, broke the ground and brought those lands back into cultivation, and for that they had a few years of tax exemption; then they began to pay everything: the tithe of the produce to the monastery, the land rents to the count of Corigliano and, to the crown, five carlini a year per family — that is half a ducat, half of what the others paid.
The Albanian hamlets were watched more closely than the others, because they were made of huts and not of masonry houses: the treasury considered them unstable, people who might vanish from one year to the next. So in the spring of 1543 the royal counters came up here and found sixty-four hearths, that is households, for a total of two hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants. They also wrote down the surnames, and that list is the most precious thing the village owns: Bardi, Bellizza, Buscia, Camideca, Campiscia, Cerriconi, Chinigò, Corchilan, Cucchia, Drames, Masci, Masi, Pangrati, Posito, Scandera, Scura, Stamati. From one of those names, Buscia — that is Buza — comes the Albanian name of the village, Mbuzat, «(the village) of the Buza», who must have been the leading family; and the shift from Buza to Buscia is the same that leads from Mazi to Masci, because the royal officials wrote in Calabrian vernacular and knew nothing of Albanian. The village, meanwhile, has kept its language: here they still speak Arbëresh, follow the Byzantine rite and belong to the eparchy of Lungro.
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📅 Every year, on 23 April
On 23 April San Giorgio Albanese, a municipality of 1,555 inhabitants in the province of Cosenza, celebrates its patron Saint George (Shën Gjergji i Math) with a popular and religious festival and the traditional «rooster auction».
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
