Frang Bardhi was an author and publicist. Known also as Frangu i Bardhë, he was born in Kallmet of Lezha in 1606 and passed away in Rome in 1643. He was an Albanian church prelate and writer. He stands out among the early authors of Albanian literature, as the author of the first dictionary of Albanian, Dictionarum latino-epiroticum, published in Rome in on April 12, 1635. He served as bishop of Sapa in the years 1635-1644.

Frang, the son of Mark, was born in 1606 in Zadrima, in a prominent family that had given clergy and bishops to the Catholic Church as well as soldiers for the Republic of Venice. He received his first lessons from his relatives and later he was sent to study at the College of Loreto and in Rome, in order to return and become the bishop of Zadrima, eing what his family had planned for him During his schooling, he received lessons about church services as well as in foreign languages. During that time he got acquainted with Slavic and Ottoman Turkish languages. He followed the second phase of his studies at the Illyrian College of Loreto (Italy) in 1628, and then continued in 1633 – as the first Albanian student – at the Urban College of Fide Propaganda, where he completed his in-depth studies and perfected his knowledge of Latin and Italian. After getting a doctorate in theology, he was appointed bishop of Sapa, without having previously been a parish priest. That was during the papacy of Urban VIII.

On April 12, 1635, he published in Rome the first dictionary of the Albanian language, specifically Latin – Albanian Dictionary, Dictionarum Latino-Epiroticum (Latin-Epirotic Dictionary) with 5640 entries. In its own appendix there are 113 proverbs, expressions and sayings, some of which have been translated from other languages into Albanian, but most of them have been taken from Albanian. In 1636, he published a biography of Gjergj Kastrioti Scanderbeg in Venice, with the (religious attribute Apology) and the exact title Skenderbeg’s Apology. The work was a polemic against the Slavic Catholic priest Ivan Tomko Mrnavić who claimed that Kastrioti was of Slavic origin. Bardhi is the first written testimony to bring to us Scanderbeg’s attribute of the time, ‘Kulçedra e Arb’nit” /Dragon of Albania/.

In 1636-37, he visited the northern Albanian dioceses as an apostolic missionary, where in the reports he made to the Holy See he included numerous data on the history, geography and ethnography of those places. The relations with the title Descrittione et informatione del stato del vescouato et chiese parochiali della Diocese Sappatense were translated by Injac Zamputti and published in 1956 under the title Relation of Frang Bardhi on Zadrima, addressed to the Congregation of Propaganda in Rome in the XVII cent.

/a.p./