Anastas Byku

Anastas Byku was a 19th-century Albanian publisher and journalist. After finishing the Zosimea Greek language school in Ioannina, he started to work as a teacher in various Greek schools and as a journalist. The periodical was written in Albanian with an adapted Greek alphabet and in Greek. At the same time he published a primer textbook in Albanian called Gramë për shqipëtarët . In 1878, his last year of life, he tried to publish another newspaper, this time only in Greek, the Promytheus o Pelasgos , but without much success. His two newspapers are regarded as the first affirmation of the existence of an Albanian nation in the international public scene. For this his ideas were strongly rejected by a number of Albanian nationalists, such as Thimi Mitko, who saw the Albanian nation as completely separate from the Greek one. Byku in his work Ελληνισμός και Χριστιανισμός (Hellenism and Christianity) claimed that the three enemies of the Greek nation are: Western Europeans, Bulgarians and Muslims. He regarded the Albanians as natural allies of Hellenism, and was not concerned by the fact that many Albanians were Muslim. He was also unhappy with the way Greece treated the Albanian language.