Anastas Byku

Who is Anastas Byku?

Anastas Byku was a 19th-century Albanian publisher and journalist. His publication of the Pelasgos newspaper in 1861 in both Albanian and Greek languages is considered to be one of the first publications of a periodical in Albanian. His endeavor was short-lived but he retried in 1878 with another newspaper, Promytheus o Pelasgos, this time exclusively in the Greek language. Byku held that the Albanians were descendants of the Pelasgians and the Illyrians, and were one single people, although they were of different religious faiths; still according to him they should be inseparable from the Greek nation: this idea would eventually estrange him from the rest of the Albanian activists of the Albanian National Awakening.