Theth is a scatter of stone houses in the Accursed Mountains of northern Albania, and one of them is a tower where a man could wall himself in and wait. That was the Kanun, the customary law of these highlands, which ran to more than a thousand articles. A feud confined the killing to grown men and spared women, children and the old, so a marked man stayed alive as long as he did not step outside the stone. He waited for the elders to impose a besa, a sworn truce that froze the feud. Communism outlawed the whole system. The Kulla e Ngujimit is one of the very few such towers left intact, and you can walk into it. The mountains around it carry the same grim name in two languages, Bjeshkët e Nemuna in Albanian and Prokletije in Slavic — the accursed — for killing winters and for the shepherds who died on the high passes.
Now the valley is known for the way out of it. You climb out of Theth's pine forest to the Qafa e Valbonës at about 1,795 metres, the jagged range standing on both sides and the trail spilling down toward Valbona under bare grey summits. It is one leg of the Peaks of the Balkans, a loop of roughly 192 kilometres across Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro. That route was pieced together around 2013 from old shepherds' and smugglers' paths, many of them unused for decades while the borders stayed sealed. Shorter walks take you down into the Shala gorge and up a side valley to Theth's own Blue Eye, a small karst pool so clear and cold that the rock basin beneath it reads deep blue. The Grunas waterfall sits on the same route. Snow shuts the pass and the road for months, and the families move down to Shkodër for the winter. After dark, in a valley with almost no streetlights, the one lit thing you can see is the small Franciscan church standing alone in the meadow against the black wall of the mountains.