Naim Frashëri

Naim Frashëri was born on May 25, 1846, in the mountain village of Frashër, Kolonjë. After studying at the Greek Zosimaia Gymnasium in Ioannina, where he mastered Persian, Arabic, French, and ancient Greek, he worked in Istanbul as a high-ranking official on the Ottoman censorship board, secretly using his position to permit Albanian books.

Frashëri wrote twenty-two major literary works across Albanian, Persian, and Turkish. His 1886 lyrical masterpiece Bagëti e Bujqësi (Cattle and Crops) praised the mountains, valleys, and shepherds of Albania with tender romantic love. He composed the epic poem Histori e Skënderbeut (History of Skanderbeg, 1898) and foundational schoolbooks in the new Albanian alphabet, dying of tuberculosis in Istanbul before his remains were triumphantly returned to Tirana in 1937.