Sami Frashëri

Sami Frashëri with his wife Emine (around 1900)

Sami Frashëri (born June 1, 1850 in Frashër , † June 5, 1904 in Istanbul ) was an Albanian man of letters and one of the most important activists of the Albanian national movement in the late 19th century. With his writing Shqipëria - ç'ka qenë, ç'është e ç'do të bëhet ("Albania - what it was, what it is and what it will be"), published in 1899, he first formulated the Albanians' claim to one of the Ottoman Rich independent nation-state and developed the vision of the development of the Albanian people into a modern nation .

As the creator of the first Turkish-language encyclopedia and several dictionaries, Frashëri is also an important figure in their cultural history for the Turks . In Turkey he is known by his traditional name Şemseddin Sami . Şemseddin ( Arabic ) means "sun of religion" and is a laqab , an honorific prefix.

Life

Coming from the Tuscan south of Albania, Sami Frashëri received his first training at the Frashër-Tekke of the Bektaschi order. His father Halit Bey Dakollari was a large landowner . After the death of their parents, the eight Frashëri siblings (three sisters and five brothers) went to Ioannina in 1865 , where the eldest brother Abdyl entered the Ottoman civil service, while Sami and Naim attended the Greek grammar school Zosimea . In addition to the Greek language , he also learned Latin , Italian and French there ; at the madrasa of the city also Turkish , Persian and Arabic .

In 1871 Sami Frashëri became a civil servant in the Vilâyet Chancellery in Ioannina. From 1872 he lived in Istanbul, where he continued to work in the civil service, namely in the supervisory authority for the press. In the capital he came into contact with the Turkish reformers, who were committed to transforming the Ottoman Empire into a modern constitutional state, but wanted to preserve its Islamic and supranational character.

On April 6, 1874, Frashëris drama Besa was premiered at the Ottoman Theater in Istanbul. In the same year he traveled in June to the Libyan Tripoli , where he spent nine months, the semi-official Arabic and Turkish-language newspaper Vilayetnameler Tarabulus headed.

Like his brother Abdyl, Sami was involved in the establishment of the "Central Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Albanian People" (Komiteti qendror për mbrojtjen e të drejtave të kombësisë shqiptare) in 1877 . In 1877 he worked for a short time in the troop administration in Ioannina.

In October 1879, Sami Frashëri was a co-founder of the "Istanbul Society for the Printing of Albanian Literature" (Shoqëria e të shtypurit shkronja shqipe) and was elected chairman of this association. As editor-in-chief, he headed the Albanian-language magazines Drita (1884) and Dituria (1885) in Istanbul , in which he himself published numerous articles. He was also editor-in-chief for the Turkish newspapers Sabah , Aile and Hafta for several years.

In collaboration with the Armenian newspaper publisher Mihran Nakkashian , Frashëri published the popular scientific Turkish-language book series Cep Kütüphanesi ("Pocket Library ") in 1884 , in which he also published fifteen of his own works.

Frashëri spent most of his life in the Ottoman capital, where he devoted himself to his writing and academic activities. In the late 1890s he built a villa in Istanbul's Mahalle Erenköy in the Kadıköy district . He lived there with his wife Emine Frashëri (née Velije) and their five children, as well as the two children of his brother Abdyl, who died in 1892. His son Ali Sami Yen became known among other things as the founder of the soccer club Galatasaray Istanbul .

When the Ottoman government cracked down on the national movements of the Balkan peoples in 1897, Frashëri's works could no longer appear in Istanbul. He therefore had it printed in Bucharest , where there was a large Albanian emigrant community with a lively cultural life. For the last year of his life, the police placed him under some kind of house arrest and he was prohibited from publishing.

Upon his death, Sami Frashëri left a library of 12,000 titles. While the remains of his brothers Abdyl and Naim were transferred from Istanbul to Tirana in 1937 , Şemseddin Sami , who is still venerated by the Turks to this day, remained buried in Istanbul.

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Bust of Sami Frashëris in Tirana

Sami Frashëri has written almost 60 works in Albanian, Turkish and Arabic within 30 years. In addition, he wrote numerous articles for Turkish and Albanian newspapers in which he commented on scientific, cultural, social and political issues and in particular on the situation of the Albanians in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1872 he published the novel Ta'aşşuk-ı Tal'at ve Fitnat ("The Love of Tal'at and Fitnat"), which is considered the first novel in Turkish literary history. Frashëri was also the first Albanian textbook author. In the years 1886–1888 he published an ABC book , a school grammar and a geography book. Six textbooks in Arabic and Turkish were added by 1902.

Sami Frashëri has made a great contribution to the Turkish language. His French-Turkish and Turkish-French dictionaries were published in 1882 and 1885. An Arabic-Turkish dictionary from his pen soon followed, but it remained unprinted for lack of money. In 1901, Frashëri's Turkish dictionary (Kâmûs-ı Turkî) was finally published , which contains 40,000 key words. It is still considered to be an important contribution to Turkish philology and was used by the Turkish Philological Society in 1932 as one of the foundations for the contemporary Turkish written language.

The most extensive work by Sami Frashëri is a six-volume geographic-historical encyclopedia (Kâmûsü'l-A'lâm) , the first book of its kind in the Turkish language. Frashëri paid particular attention to the entries relating to his Albanian homeland. Many smaller Albanian towns and villages were described encyclopedically for the first time by him.

Frashëri's estate contained a manuscript of an Albanian dictionary and a handwritten collection of Albanian folk songs, both of which have remained unpublished.

"Albania - what it was, what it is and what it will be"

Of great importance for the Albanian national movement was Frashëri's widely read political manifesto Shqipëria - ç'ka qenë, ç'është e ç'do të bëhet, published anonymously in Bucharest in 1899 . Around 1910, shortly before Albanian independence was proclaimed, it was also noticed in Western Europe because Greek, French and Italian translations were printed in addition to a Turkish one. A German version appeared in Vienna in 1913.

After a brief historical review, the author stated that the Ottoman Empire was near doom and that it was time for Albania to break away from it. He describes the boundaries of a future Albanian state, outlines the structure of government and administration as well as that of the education system. He pleads for the establishment of an autocephalous Albanian church and formulates thoughts on the economy. The demand for independence was new and daring to the Albanians. So far, most Albanian leaders had viewed the continued rule of the Ottoman Empire over Albania as a necessary protection against the expansion of the other south-eastern European nations, because both these and the western great powers rejected not only the creation of an Albanian state, but the existence of an Albanian one Nation at all denied.

The achievement of Sami Frashëris was that he destroyed the illusion of the reformability of the Ottoman Empire, which was still widespread among the Albanian Muslims , and brought the creation of an independent Albania into play as a difficult but nevertheless feasible alternative to the political problems of his nation.

Work (selection)

• Taaşşuk-ı Tal'at ve Fitnat (The love of Tal'at and Fitnat) . Novel. 1872
• Besa yahud Ahde Vefâ (Besa or the fulfillment of the given word) . Drama. 1875
• Kâmûs-ı Fransevî . French-Turkish and Turkish-French dictionary. 1882/85
• Abetare e gjuhës shqipe (Primer of the Albanian language) . 1886
• Shkronjtore e gjuhës shqipe (grammar of the Albanian language) . 1886
• Dheshkronjë (description of the earth) . Geography textbook. 1888
• Kâmûsü'l-A'lâm . First historical-geographical lexicon in Turkish, six volumes. 1889-1898
• Shqipëria - ç'ka qenë, ç'është e ç'do të bëhet. Mendime për shpëtimt të mëmëdheut nga reziket që e kanë rethuarë (Albania - what it was, what it is and what it will be. Thoughts on saving the fatherland from the dangers that surround it) . 1899

German under the title: Albania - what was it, what is it, what will it be. Thoughts and reflections on the dangers threatening our holy fatherland Albania and their averting. Vienna 1913

• Kâmûs-ı Turkî . Monolingual Ottoman-Turkish dictionary. 1900

Honor

Streets, squares and schools are named after Sami Frashëri throughout Albania, Kosovo and other Albanian-speaking areas of the Balkans . So also the largest high schools in Tirana and Pristina . There are also busts of him in many Albanian-speaking cities. Şemseddin Sami is also venerated in Turkey and other Turkish-speaking areas, and many public buildings have been named after him.

literature

• Peter Bartl: The Albanian Muslims at the time of the national independence movement (1878–1912). Wiesbaden 1968.
• Bülent Bilmez: Sami Frashëri or Semseddin Sami? Mythologization of an Ottoman Intellectual in the Modern Turkish and Socialist Albanian Historiographies based on 'Selective Perception'. In: Balkanology. No. 7 (2003), issue 2.
• Robert Elsie : The three Frashëri brothers. In: State Museum of Ethnology (Ed.): Albania. Wealth and diversity of ancient culture . Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich 2001, pp. 147–152 ( online , PDF file, 106 kB).
• Johannes Faensen: The Albanian National Movement . Wiesbaden 1980.
• George W. Gawrych: Şemseddin Sami, Women, and Social Conscience in the Late Ottoman Empire. In: Middle Eastern Studies. Volume 46, No. 1 (2010), pp. 97-115 (English).
• Hasan Kaleshi: Frashëri, Sami . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe. Volume 1. Munich 1974, pp. 543-546.

Web links

Commons : Sami Frashëri  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sami Frashëri: Përpjekja e heronjve në përhapjen e Islamit (Albanian). Original Arabic title: Himmetu-l-Himâm fî neshri-l-Islâm . Istanbul 1884.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see e.g. Geoffrey L. Lewis: The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-823856-8 , p. 50.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 8, 2006 .