Sotir Kolea, a lexicographer, folklorist, and social activist, passed away in Elbasan. He was born in Berat in 1872. From a young age, he connected with prominent figures of the Albanian Renaissance and was actively involved in the national movement. Between 1912 and 1920, he engaged in political and journalistic activities to defend the rights of the Albanian people. From 1915 to 1919, he directed the newspaper L’Albanie in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1928, he was called to Tirana to reorganize and lead the National Library and National Museum. In 1937, after retiring, he settled in Elbasan and devoted himself to scholarly work. He focused on the Albanian language, folklore, and ethnography, making valuable contributions, especially in lexicography and various folklore genres. Throughout his life, he worked to gather the lexical wealth of the language from oral sources and publications, compiling bilingual dictionaries of Albanian. He left a manuscript of an Albanian dictionary of orientalisms and an extensive Greek-Albanian dictionary. A portion of the proverbs he collected was published under the title A Bundle of Proverbs (1944). (In the photo: Sotir Kolea)
Text: Albanian Encyclopedic Dictionary – Vol. 2, Academy of Sciences of Albania, “Kristalina-KH,” Tirana, 2008, pp. 1207–1208.)
Photo: © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotir_Kolea)
Graphic Processing: AHCF
