Old postcard of the market in Kavaja.

 AL Voices  |  Robert Elsie

1921  |  Stavri STAVRO
      

Letter to his Brother in Kavaja

Stavri Stavro (born ca. 1886) was an Albanian from Kavaja who was living in Paris at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. He was born and raised in Kavaja and went to school in Monastir (Bitola), before going to France. Later he was made Albanian ambassador to Yugoslavia (1925) and to Greece (1926-1928).

It was on 8 June 1921, during his time in Paris that Stavri Stavro made an audio recording (2:10 minutes) of his native Albanian language at the library of the Sorbonne in Paris. There he read out a letter he had penned to his brother in Kavaja, together with a patriotic poem. We are grateful to Rudi Metaj for the discovery and to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris for making it available to the public.

 

[taken from: Gallica, Bibliothèque numérique, Bibliothèque Nationale de France]

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