Pashko Vasa, writer, one of the ideologues of the National Renaissance, was born in Shkodër. He was mostly self-taught, with the exception of the lessons he took in Italian in his hometown and in Venice. He started working, since 1842, as a secretary in the British consulate in Shkodër, then he moved to Italy, engaged as an officer in Rome and then in Venice. In 1849 he was in Istanbul, first as a clerk in a tram company, then in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ottoman Empire and in its Embassy in London. He was one of the organizers of the League of Prizren (1878), a member of the Central Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Albanian Nation, one of the founders of the Society of Printing Albanian Letters, a member of the Alphabet Commission. In 1879 he received the title of Pasha and in 1883 he was appointed Governor General of Lebanon, a post he held until the end of his life. His most famous poem, “Moj Shqypni“ (“Oh Albania”), written around 1880, together with the short historical prose “Shqypnia dhe shqyptart” (“Albania and albanians”) (1879) are the only two texts published in Albanian by Pashko Vasa. The poem “Moj Shqypni” can be considered as one of the most important texts in terms of function and influence for the ideas and spirit of the National Renaissance. He passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1892. (In the photo: Pashko Vasa)
Text: The encyclopedic dictionary of Kosovo – Vol. II, Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, Prishtina, 2018, page 1723.
Graphic processing: AHCF
