Edith Durham (Mary Edith), anthropologist, writer, publicist and guide, was born in Hanover Square (London). She studied at Bedford College (1878\u20131882), then at the Royal Academy Schools. Her father, Arthur Edward Durham, was a well-known London physician and surgeon. Edith Durham became known for her travels to several countries in the Balkans. In 1900, she started traveling for the first time, for health reasons. In her travels, she focused especially on Albania, where she got to know the culture, history, traditions, customs and even the political demands of the Albanians. As a good connoisseur of the Balkan circumstances, she had informed the senior British officials about the important events in Albania, especially about the massacres of the Balkan Alliance armies on the Albanian civilian population during the years 1912-1913. Meanwhile, her contributions were published in various magazines and periodicals in Britain. Because of her interests and results in the field of anthropology, she became an important member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Edith Durham wrote seven books on Balkan affairs, including: “Upper Albania” (1909); “War for Shkodra” (1914); “Twenty Years of Balkan Confusion” (1920); “On the origin of some tribes, canons and customs of the Balkan countries” etc. Because of the closeness created with the Albanian highlanders and the respect they created for her, she was called “Queen of the Highlands”. During her stay in the Balkan region, Edith Durham collected many different documents and materials related to culture, tradition, anthropology and other important aspects of daily life in Albania. Her documents and materials collected during her travels in the Balkans are held by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Her diaries are in the Bankfield Museum, Halifax, together with her collections of Balkan dress and jewellery, which she donated to the museum in 1935. Edith Durham’s works on Albania and the Albanians are of cultural, ethnographic and historical value. She passed away in London (Great Britain) in 1944. (Photo: Edith Durham)<\/i><\/p>\n
Text:<\/strong> Encyclopedic Dictionary of Kosovo – Vol. I <\/i>, Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, Prishtina, 2018, pages 364\u2013365.<\/p>\n Photo: <\/strong>\u00a9 The British Council, Tirana.<\/p>\n Graphic processing: <\/strong>AHCF<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Hanover Square (London), Edith Durham (Mary Edith) was born, an anthropologist, writer, publicist, and travel writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ditelindje"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10703,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474\/revisions\/10703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albheritage.wpadmin.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}