Shkodra intellectuals appeal for Mjeda’s remains

TIRANA, April 4 – A group of Albanian intellectuals from the northern city of Shkodra have made a public appeal for the finding of the remains of Ndre Mjeda, one of the country’s greatest poets, clerics and albanologists. Seventy-four years after Mjeda’s death, the exact place where he was buried remains unknown. That’s why the intellectuals from his hometown of Shkodra have called on everybody who has any information to speak out so that his tomb becomes a site where generations can pay tribute to his work.
Mjeda’s researchers say his remains were being preserved in a cemetery office until 1990 but disappeared without trace later. The intellectuals’ initiative is an effort to fulfill the poet and catholic cleric’s last wish of resting in the Kukes village church which he founded.
Mjeda was left aside and neglected during communism as a religious scholar whose albanological thesis did not correspond to those of the communist elite.
Classical poet Ndre Mjeda (1866-1937) bridges the gap between late nineteenth-century Renaissance culture and the dynamic literary creativity of the independence period. Mjeda was born on 20 November 1866 in Shkodra and, like so many other Gheg (northern Albanian dialect) writers of the period, was educated by the Jesuits. Mjeda’s poetry, in particular his collection Juvenilia, Vienna 1917 is noted for its classical style and for its purity of language.