San Martino di Finita

San Martino di Finita — Shën Mërtiri in Arbëresh — was founded in the second half of the fifteenth century by Albanian families come from Chameria, in south-western Albania, after the Turkish-Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, and their descendants live there still. The first documented notice is of 1503, when the royal collectors of Cosenza made a fiscal census of the Albanian villages of Calabria Citeriore: at Sancto Martino they counted twenty-two straw houses, that is hearths, for about eighty inhabitants. Forty years later, in 1543, a new census found two hundred and forty-one of them divided into seventy-one families, and of those families the surnames are known: Basti, Bua, Calì, Coppola, Dardes, Drames, Golè, Greco, Licursi, Radi, Spata, Sulla, Tozio, and others besides. The Arbëresh language and customs have been kept to this day; the Byzantine rite has not. In 1643 the community passed to the Latin rite, and the reason is one of those that are not forgotten: the papàdes of Greek rite had to go to Greece to study, and almost all of them stayed there.

The name comes from the little church of San Martino, which stood near the present village, in a place the land register of 1825 calls San Martino Vecchio and which in the village is called Qisheza, the little church, or Qisheza e vjetër, the old little church: there are still crypts there and the ruins of what stood above. «Di Finita», instead, is the name of the stream that runs alongside, and comes from the Latin finitus, bounded, because that watercourse marked an old border; the specification was added by royal decree on the twenty-second of January 1863. The village stands at five hundred and fifty metres on the inner slopes of the Coastal Range, among centuries-old chestnut woods, and belongs to the Arbëresh communities of the left valley of the Crati, with Cavallerizzo, Cerzeto, Cervicati, Marri, Mongrassano, San Benedetto Ullano and San Giacomo. It is also a fragile land: after the landslide of March 2005 that made Cavallerizzo uninhabitable, making the village safe has become again the most urgent question.