Albanian Bee

Albanian Bee (Albanian: Bleta shqiptare) was a collection by Thimi Mitko of Albanian folklore. Published in 1878, it was the first compilation of oral works designed for the Albanian public.[1][2]

History

The first to collect Albanian folk material were European scholars of the mid 19th century, followed particularly by philologists and linguists concerned with recording a little known Indo-European language.[3] The Albanian National Awakening, aimed at protecting and promoting the interests of the Albanian people, gave rise to native collections of Albanian folklore.[3] By highlighting the long traditions, national affirmation was sought.[4] Thimi Mitko, a member of the Albanian community in Egypt, first showed interest in Albanian folklore in 1859.[5] According to Spiro Dine, by 1866 Mitko was providing Demetrio Camarda with material for his collection.[5] Mitko also had contacts with the European poets Gustav Mayer, Urban Jarnik and Girolamo de Rada.[6] In 1874, he finished his own collection of 505 folk songs, and 39 tales and old sayings.[5] The work, focused mostly on material from southern Albania, was written in Greek script.[5] According to Mitko, the intention was to provide Egypt's Albanian community with information about Albanian origins, customs and character.[4] His view was that the heroic songs collected by him showed that Albanians, by keeping the memory of history through songs, had a love of country and their fellow countrymen, regardless of religion.[4] Mitko preserved the wealth of Albanian folk literature by classifying the content based on genre.[5] In 1878 it was published in Alexandria under the Greek title  Albanike melissa, with the Albanian Bëlietta shqipëtare placed as subtitle.[5] Mitko also prepared an additional collection of folk literature, the Little Bee that never got published.[1] A copy of Albanian Bee is said to have been publicly burned by Greek nationalists in Athens.[1] By the time the work was published, the Western European Romantic Movement was in decline, and interest in folklore was waning.[5] Albanian Bee gained new popularity after it was published in the modern Albanian alphabet by Gjergj Pekmezi in 1934.[5]

See also

References
  1. Robert Elsie. A Biographical Dictionary of Albanian History. I.B.Tauris. p. 313.
  2. Veli Veliu (1982). Recherches albanologiques: Folklore et ethnologie. Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës.
  3. Donald Haase (2008). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: A-F. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 24.
  4. Skendi, Stavro (1967). The Albanian national awakening. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 121–122.
  5. Marcel Cornis-Pope; John Neubauer (2004). History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 337.
  6. Stuart Edward Mann (1955). Albanian literature: an outline of prose, poetry, and drama. B. Quaritch. p. 45.
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