E Bukura e Dheut ("the Beauty of the Earth") was a figure of Albanian folk-tale — a beautiful woman of the underworld who appeared in many of the traditional Albanian tales as the object of heroic quests, the captive princess to be rescued, the magical bride to be won. Her dwelling was beneath the earth (an underground palace where she lived among supernatural beings), and reaching her required descent into the chthonic realm. She was sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile; her character varied across the tales in ways that suggest she was a class of figure (the underworld beauty) rather than a single deity, with various tale-particulars attaching to her in different versions. Her parallel figure E Bukura e Detit ("the Beauty of the Sea") inhabited an analogous undersea realm.
The figures have been variously interpreted by Albanian and foreign folklorists: as memories of pre-Christian Albanian goddesses (chthonic and aquatic), as parallels to the Greek Persephone (the underworld bride, perhaps surviving in Albanian as a substrate from the ancient Greek-influenced period of the southern Balkans), as fairy-tale formulas without specifically theological content. The truth probably lies somewhere among these; the figures certainly exist in the folk-tradition, but their pre-Christian theological status is harder to recover. With them we close the European volume — at the southeastern margin of the European pagan inheritance, where Indo-European antiquity meets the Mediterranean classical world meets the long Ottoman overlay, and where the folk-tradition has preserved what the documentary record could not.
