Tirana, May 25 - With his dedication and intense patriotic and cultural activity, the great Albanian writer Naim Frashëri became the central figure of the National Renaissance and was forever baptized as the "Apostle of Albanianism".
Today, the National Historical Museum commemorates the writer Naim Frashëri on the 174th anniversary of his birth. He was born in Frashër in Dangëllia on May 25, 1846. He received his first lessons in his hometown, where he began to learn Persian near the Bektashi teke. In 1865, his family moved to Ioannina, where he attended the "Zosimea" high school. After returning to his homeland, he made the first attempts at Albanian poetry under the influence of the Beytezhians, but also in Persian, in the collection "Tehajylat" (Dreams) that he published in 1885.
Naim Frashëri participated in the events of the Albanian League of Prizren, in the meeting of the Southern branches of the Albanian League in Frashër (1878). He devoted himself to the work of national awakening through the cultivation of the Albanian language and national literature and to the establishment of the Albanian school and its equipping with textbooks in the mother tongue. In 1882, he finally settled in Istanbul.
For less than 20 years, he published a wide range of works in Albanian and other languages, poems, collections of lyrics, artistic prose, as well as poems and texts for schools and translations. His most notable works are "Cattle and Agriculture" (1886), the collection of patriotic and philosophical lyrics "Summer Flowers" (1890), the epic poem "The Story of Skënderbeu" (1898), the Persian lyrics "Dreams" as well as the poems in the Greek language "O alithis pothos ton Skyperaton" (The true desire of the Albanians, 1886), etc.
Naim Frashëri's work has been and continues to be widely published and has become the subject of scientific studies. Naim Frashëri died in Istanbul on October 20, 1900. His remains were brought home in 1937 and rest in the Memorial of the Renaissance in Tirana/ATSH.
