Fan Noli

(also Fan Stilian Noli). Born Jan. 6, 1882, in Ibriktepe, near Edirne; died Mar. 13, 1965, in the USA. Albanian public and political figure, statesman, poet, and translator.

Noli graduated from Harvard University in 1912 and from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1938. In 1945 he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University. In 1903, Noli became an ardent supporter of the Albanian people’s struggle for national liberation. In 1906 he emigrated to the USA, where he helped to organize the Pan-Albanian federation Vatra (Hearth) and founded the newspaper Dielli. In 1908 he became a priest, and in 1919–20 he served as bishop of the Albanian Orthodox Church in America.

In 1920, Noli returned to Albania, where he became a deputy to the parliament, minister of foreign affairs, and leader of the antigovernment opposition. In 1923 he became the metropolitan of Durrës. In 1924, Noli headed the democratic government that had come to power as a result of the victorious bourgeois democratic revolution of 1924. After A. Zogu’s coup d’etat in December 1924, Noli emigrated to Western Europe, later settling in the USA, where he became metropolitan of the Albanian Orthodox Church. At the beginning of the 1930’s he retired from political life.

Noli is the author of a work on the history of Albania (George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, 1947), patriotic and lyrical verse, and Beethoven and the French Revolution (1947). He translated works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Longfellow, and Omar Khayyam into Albanian.