Blood stained shirts and communication with the dead

The blood stained shirts displayed by the feuding families in Brazil and in Ismail Kadaré's novel find echoes in other historical times. Kadaré reminds us that these shirts appear as a veil in The Oresteia, and were used by the people of Crete as a basic means of communication with those who had been killed. They played, therefore, a crucial role in the blood feud

The dead who aren't resting in peace, for the Greeks, were part of an intermediate zone between the world of men and the world of the gods.

As Kadaré recalls, the Greeks believed that avenging the blood couldn't be done without the permission of the dead man. The Greeks also believed that a corpse whose hands and legs had been amputated wasn't able to send messages to the world of the living. That's why, in The Oresteia, Clytemnestra cuts off her husband's limbs, foretelling the horror perpetrated centuries later by Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's play.

Finally, Aeschylus maintains that, in the case of vendettas between families, right is never on both sides. It migrates from one side to the other, subject to the killings committed.

It migrates, consequently, from man to man, from family to family, from faction to faction, from country to country, in an unending cycle.