Ilo Mitkë Qafëzezi
Ilo Mitkë Qafëzezi was a prolific Albanian writer of historical and religious subjects.Life
Born in 1889 in Korçë, Albania, he emigrated to Romania when he was 13 and then to the United States. In 1924 he returned to Korçë, where he worked as a teacher and then school director of the Romanian school of the city, in use mostly by the Aromanian minority. Until World War II, he was known as the foremost Albanian biographer.
An autodidact, Qafëzezi was very prolific in his publications in several literary and historical periodicals and bulletins. He also published important historical works on Voskopoja, Berat and Vithkuq, and he discovered manuscripts of Theodore Kavalliotis's work, as well as a copy of the first edition of the Εισαγωγική Διδασκαλία of Daniel Moscopolites, published in Venice in 1794. Later he discovered manuscripts of Kostandin Berati, as well as the primer of Naum Veqilharxhi, dated 1844. Qafëzezi translated into Albanian the Alipashiad, a poem on Ali Pasha of Tepelena, written originally in Greek, by Haxhi Shehreti.
