Aleksander Moisiu’s museum house under restoration

TIRANA, Sept. 9 – The house where famous early 20th century Albanian stage actor Aleksander Moisiu spend some of his childhood years in the city of Durres is finally being reconstructed after four decades of lack of interventions in the building which also houses the local ethnography museum.
Reconstruction works are being carried out by a specialized company licensed by the National Restoration Council, says the regional cultural directorate.
The house, built in the 19th century by a merchant family, was announced a monument of culture of the first category in 1973 and since 1982 has housed the local ethnographic museum.
The famous Albanian actor, lived there during his childhood years of 1884-1889 and attended the elementary school. His photos and different works of art dedicated to him are displayed in two of the museum rooms.
The local cultural centre and university in Durres are also named after the famous actor.
Actor Alexander Moissi (1879-1935), known in Albanian as Aleksander Moisiu, was born in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, of an Albanian father from Kavaja and an Arberesh mother. After a childhood in Trieste, Durres and Graz, the 20-year-old Alexander finally settled with his mother and two sisters in Vienna. It was there, with the encouragement and support of Austrian actor Josef Kainz, that Moisiu’s careers as one of the great European stage actors of the early decades of the 20th century began. The following years took him to Prague and then to Berlin where he became a protꨩ of Max Reinhadt.
Moisiu accompanied the Reinhardt Ensemble to Russia in 1911 and was acclaimed in St. Petersburg by critic and dramatist Anatoly Lunacharsky for his interpretation of Oedipus. Among other roles for which Aleksander Moisiu is remembered are Hamlet, Faust, Fedya in Tolstoy’s The Living Body, and Dubedat in George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma. Though primarily a stage actor, Moisiu appeared in ten film productions, from 1910 to 1935, of which seven were silent and three talking films. His own play The Prisoner, about Napoleon’s later years on St. Helena, proved to be a failure. Aleksander Moisiu was buried at the Morcote cemetery overlooking Lake Lugano in Switzerland.