In its section dedicated to memory, the Shkodra Regional Directorate of Cultural Heritage recently released a rare photograph from the early twentieth century. The 1905 photograph is part of the collection compiled by Hungarian Baron  Franz Nopcsa during his exploration of the northern region of Albania. It depicts a group of men in folk traditional clothes , and the original, made on glass, is preserved at the Hungarian Museum of Natural History in Budapest.

 Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás  (1877-1933) was a Hungarian scholar and expert on Albania. He traveled extensively in Albania and the southern Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia) from 1903 until the beginning of World War I.

A researcher and travel writer, a doctor of paleontology and a passionate albanologist, geologist and anthropologist, photographer, archivist, he explored almost every corner of Northern Albania with great curiosity. He was also a specialist on Albanian studies and completed the first geological map of northern Albania.

 Franz Nopcsa lived in Shkodra for several years, using it as a base for his travels in the northern mountains of Albania, continuously taking photographs with his “Kodak”, images that are exceptionally rare today and represent the ethnographic as well as natural riches in these areas.

/k.s/