TIRANA, March 12 – Aleks Buda, one of Albania’s most renowned scholars and historians, has been immortalized with a bust at the front garden of the Academy of Sciences, where he served as the first head in the early 1970s.
Myzafer Korkuti, the head of the Academy of Science, described Aleks Buda as the first traveler in Albania’s science, a teacher and architect of the major project of Albania’s history. “The placement of the bust makes him an eternal citizen of Tirana,” he said.
Sculptor Ilmi Kasemi said he felt privileged to have carved the bust of such a renowned figure.
In a major reform back in 2008, the Albanian Academy of Sciences was deprived of most of its research functions which were transferred to the universities and research centres. For the most important field of Albanian studies, a new Centre for Albanalogical Studies was created in April 2008, encompassing the institutes of history, linguistics and literature, folk culture and archaeology. The centre is currently led by Ardian Marashi.
A scholar and historian Aleks Buda (1910-1993) was born in Elbasan apparently of a merchant family of Jewish origin and went to school in Lecce in southern Italy. He finished secondary school in Salzburg in Austria in 1930 and completed his university studies in Vienna in 1938. He returned to Albania in February 1939 and taught school in Korça and in 1943, in Tirana. After World War II, he was appointed director of the National Library (1945-1946). Although he had specialized in literature up to this point, he was to make a name for himself as a historian, in particular for the ancient, medieval and the Renaissance periods. Much lauded during the communist period, he was also a member of the People’s Assembly and from January 1973 was president of the Academy of Sciences. Buda edited many standard works of Albanian history and published numerous “representative” articles. His writings were collected in the volume Shkrime historike (Historical Writings, Tirana 1986)
