Gjon Buzuku

Who is Gjon Buzuku?

Gjon Buzuku was an Albanian Catholic priest who wrote the first known printed book in Albanian.

Gjon Buzuku was born in the village of Ljare in the Bar district, close to Northern Albania, then Ottoman Empire. He probably lived in or near Venice, Italy. There are claims that he was the bishop of two dioceses in north Albania or that he was a monk.

From March 20, 1554 to January 5, 1555 he wrote a translation of the Catholic missal into the Gheg dialect of Albanian. He published it as a book of 188 pages. The Apostolic Library in the Vatican holds the only known copy of the book. It is missing the frontispiece and the first 16 pages, which explains why the title and year of publication of the work are not known.

The book was discovered in 1740 by Gjon Nikollë Kazazi, the Albanian archbishop of Skopje. In other libraries there are three photocopies from the original, one of them in Tirana. In 1996, the librarians were not able to locate the book, which had been used in 1984 for the last time. Eqrem Çabej wrote a monograph on the book in 1968. The dialect used in Mëshari was one of the main subjects of Selman Riza's works.