Petro Marko
Encyclopedia
Petro Marko was an Albanian
Albanians
Albanians are a nation and ethnic group native to Albania and neighbouring countries. They speak the Albanian language. More than half of all Albanians live in Albania and Kosovo...

 writer. His best-known novel is titled Hasta la vista and recounts his experiences as a volunteer of the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. Petro Marko is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Albanian prose.

Life

Petro Marko was born in Dhërmi
Dhërmi
Dhërmi is one of the nine villages of the Himara region/municipality, in Albania. The village lies 42 kilometers south of the city of Vlorë and about the same distance north of the southern city of Sarandë. The village is built on a slope of the Ceraunian Mountains, at approximately 200 meters in...

, southern Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...

 in 1913. He started writing at the age of twenty and his first works were published in journals of the time with support from Ernest Koliqi
Ernest Koliqi
Ernest Koliqi was an Albanian-Italian poet, prose writer, dramatist, and literary scholar and translator.-Biography:Born in Shkodra, where he also attended his first lessons in the Jesuit College he moved to Italy to study in Brescia and then at the University of Padua, and become knowledgeable in...

 his mentor. From March 1, 1936 he became the editor of ABC, a literary review which was banned by the monarchist authorities soon after. In August 1936 he joined the Garibaldi Battalion
Garibaldi Battalion
The Garibaldi Battalion was a group of mostly Italian volunteers that fought in the Spanish Civil War from October 1936 to 1938...

 of the Republican forces of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

 along with other notable Albanians like Mehmet Shehu
Mehmet Shehu
Mehmet Ismail Shehu was an Albanian communist politician who served as premier of Albania from 1954 to 1981...

, Asim Vokshi
Asim Vokshi
Asim Vokshi was a staff officer of the "Garibaldi Battalion" in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.He was an Albanian Kosovar from Đakovica, Kosovo Province, Ottoman Empire. He studied at a military academy in Italy....

 and Thimi Gogozoto.

During the Spanish Civil War along with Skënder Luarasi, son of Petro Nini Luarasi
Petro Nini Luarasi
Petro Nini Luarasi was an Albanian rilindas activist, Christian orthodox priest, teacher and journalist...

 he published in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

 the Albanian newspaper Vullnëtari i Lirisë (Volunteer of Freedom), which was discontinued after two issues because of the military status of Madrid. His best-known work Hasta la vista published in Tirana
Tirana
Tirana is the capital and the largest city of Albania. Modern Tirana was founded as an Ottoman town in 1614 by Sulejman Bargjini, a local ruler from Mullet, although the area has been continuously inhabited since antiquity. Tirana became Albania's capital city in 1920 and has a population of over...

 in 1958 was largely influenced by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 after being repatriated from France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 to Albania he was arrested by the Italian
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)
The Kingdom of Italy was a state forged in 1861 by the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was its legal predecessor state...

 army and sent along with 600 other prisoners to Ustica
Ustica
Ustica is the name of a small island, about 9 km across, situated 52 km north of Capo Gallo, Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea...

, an island of the Tyrrhenian Sea
Tyrrhenian Sea
The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy.-Geography:The sea is bounded by Corsica and Sardinia , Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata and Calabria and Sicily ....

.

In October 1944 he joined the forces of the Albanian National Liberation Front
Albanian National Liberation Front
The National Liberation Movement , also translated as National Liberation Front, was an Albanian resistance organization that fought in World War II. It was created in 16 September 1942, in a conference held in Pezë, a village near Tirana...

 as a partisan. After the war he became editor-in-chief of the periodical Bashkimi (Unity), but was arrested again in 1947 by Koçi Xoxe
Koçi Xoxe
Koçi Xoxe was the Defence and Interior Minister of Albania for some time under Enver Hoxha. According to different sources, he was an ethnic Macedonian or ethnic Bulgarian from Aegean Macedonia and was initially a tinsmith....

, Minister of Defense and was released after Xoxe's downfall in 1949. He died in 1991, while in 2003 President of Albania, Alfred Moisiu
Alfred Moisiu
was the fourth President of the Republic of Albania from July 24, 2002 to July 24, 2007. He is the son of Albanian Army general Spiro Moisiu....

 decorated him with the medal Nderi i Kombit (Honour of the Nation). In 2009 a square in Dhermi was dedicated to his memory and the ceremony was attended by Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha
Sali Berisha
Sali Ram Berisha is an Albanian politician and cardiologist, currently the Prime Minister of Albania and the leader of Democratic Party of Albania ....

.

Work

Marko's best-known works are Hasta la vista and Nata e Ustikës (Ustica night) republished as Një natë e dy agime (One Night and Two Dawns). The latter is 380-page novel recounting the life of prisoners at the Ustica labor camp, where Petro Marko was also imprisoned. Many works of Marko exhibit surrealist motifs and patterns such as his novel Qyteti i fundit (The Last City), portraying the end of the Italian occupation of Albania.

In 1964 a 204-page collection of tales he wrote in his early active years from 1933 to 1937 titled Rrugë pa rrugë (Road by Road) was published. Petro Marko. In 1973 his novel Një emër në katër rrugë (A Name at the crossroads) set in the monarchist era was published. The book was immediately banned because of its content and Marko lost his publishing rights until 1982.

Sources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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