Late Father honoured with statue

TIRANA, June 18 – Late Catholic priest and writer Father Zef Pllumi has been honored with a statue in the seafront promenade of his hometown of Shengjin, in the northern Albanian district of Lezha. The inauguration of Pllumi’s statue last weekend also marked the opening of the tourist season in the commune of Shengjin which offers beautiful sandy Adriatic beaches.
Zef Pllumi (1924-2007), a Franciscan friar was born in Mali i Rencit village in Shengjin. As a twenty-year-old, he witnessed the Communist takeover and the unprecedentedly violent suppression of the Catholic Church in northern Albania. Most clergymen were arrested and many were executed. Though he suffered much abuse, Pllumi managed to survive and was ordained in 1956. He worked as a parish priest in Shosh in the mountains of Dukagjin for some twelve years until 1967, when a government edict was issued for the total abolition of religion. He was arrested at that time and spent the following twenty-three years in prisons and labour camps. His harrowing experience as a Catholic priest in Stalinist Albania is recorded in his moving, 730-page memoirs, “Rrno vet쭠p철me tregue” (I only live on to tell), Tirana 2006. Father Zef Pllumi died in Rome on 25 September 2007.