Ernesto Cozzi

Ernesto Cozzi (6 July 1870 – 23 March 1926) was a South Tyrol-born priest of the Catholic Church who worked as a missionary and ethnologist in Albania until, in 1920, he was given the rank of archbishop and made the representative of the Holy See to the Church in Albania.

Biography Ernesto Cozzi was born in Trent, in the South Tyrol, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 6 July 1870. He became a priest of the Catholic Church and served as a military chaplain in Bolzano. From May 1901 he was a parish priest and missionary to the northern mountain tribes of Albania. Albania was then under Ottoman rule, with Austria-Hungary providing for its Catholic population. on board a ferry en route to Bari, Italy. He was initially buried in Bari, but his remains were exhumed, returned to Albania, and buried in Shkodra on 29 May.