The silence of a nation that forgets its heroes and intellectuals
Today, Feb.26th marks the 74th anniversary of the execution of Sabiha Kasimati, Albania’s first modern female scientist, an intellectual titan whose name should echo in history as a national treasure. Instead, silence prevails. The Albanian media, enslaved by the mediocrity of the times, has not found the space to remember her. There are no TV programs dedicated to her legacy, no government ceremonies, no school discussions—only the usual flood of Big Brother VIP, Perputhen, and the grotesque spectacle of ignorance that feeds a society eager for cheap entertainment rather than intellectual enlightenment.
This silence is not an accident; it is an indictment of a country that still refuses to come to terms with its past. The execution of Sabiha Kasimati was not only the assassination of a brilliant scientist but a declaration of war against knowledge, against progress, against the very idea that Albania could be something more than a backwater of political repression and patriarchal darkness. In a time when 95% of the population was illiterate and women were seen as mere instruments for reproduction, Sabiha Kasimati stood as an anomaly, a woman of science, a beacon of intellect.
The journey of a pioneer: from Korça to the European scientific elite
Born in 1912 in Edirne, a city known for its intellectual vibrancy, Sabiha Kasimati was a rare phenomenon in a deeply feudal and patriarchal Albania. While most young girls were condemned to an existence of submission, Kasimati broke through the barriers of her time. Her family roots came from Libohova, near the city of Gjirokastra in South Albania. As a young girl, when her father returned in Albania and first settled in Korça, she attended the French Lyceum there, a prestigious institution that nurtured Albania’s brightest minds and gave many patriots to the county, though unfortunately also dictators. From there, she took the unthinkable step for an Albanian woman, she decided to pursue her higher education abroad, in Italy, at the faculty of biology at University of Turin, specializing in ichthyology (the study of fish biology). She completed her degree under the full scholarship given by the Albanian Kingdom at the time, finishing with excellence in 1941 and graduating with the thesis “Fish fauna of fresh water of Albania.”
At a time when Albanian women were denied by no education except maintaining the household, Kasimati stood alongside Europe’s greatest minds, proving that gender was no barrier to scientific excellence. If Marie Curie was revolutionizing physics, Kasimati was pioneering the study of Albania’s aquatic ecosystems, cataloging its fish species and laying the groundwork for future biological research.
Max Weber, in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, writes that “progress is impossible in societies that refuse to break the chains of tradition.” Albania, in the early 20th century, precisely illustrates the land trapped in the clutches of backwardness, with its political cast who like a Don Quixotte resisted every change with all its forces to preserve the status-quo of the society’s order.
And Kasimati, like all true intellectuals, was a threat to that status quo.
A scientist and humanist in a land ruled by fear & ideological dogmas
Sabiha Kasimati’s research in ichthyology was not only groundbreaking, but essential. She identified over 250 species of freshwater fish in Albania, offering insights into their habitats, migration patterns, and ecological importance. She was a pioneer in biological sciences, working at a time when Albania had neither the institutions nor the infrastructure to support such research. Yet, despite her brilliance, her work was largely ignored by the political elite. Albania was not a land for scientists, but rather for political opportunists and sightless ideologues.
In this real context of the time, Kasimati was not just an academic, she was a woman who dared to think, to challenge, to demand progress. And that made her dangerous.
Knowledge was the public enemy #1 to the communist regime
With the arrival of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime, Albania entered its darkest period. The dictatorship, paranoid and vengeful, viewed intellectuals as enemies of the state. Many contemporaries who survived the communist times, recall that Kasimati knew personally the intellectual deficiency of the dictator Enver Hoxha, with whom she had studied together in the French Lyceum.
On the other hand, another historical fact is that when she came back from Italy, while working for the Royal Institute “Mother Queen” in the female pedagogy staff, she taught also to Nexhmije Xhuglini, later to become the wife of the dictator. In Oct. 10th 1047, the honorable Pr. Selaudin Toto, founder of the Albanian Institute of Sciences, was executed with the accusation “treason against the motherland by plotting to overthrow the Albanian democratic power.” Kasimati had worked together in the Institute with Toto and was left shocked and bittered by his and many other intellectual executions that Hoxha had massively undertaken. Hence, she decided to request a meeting with the Premier Hoxha, where she famously asked him “With whom you intend to build Albania now, with the tinsmiths or the shoemakers?”, to which Premier Hoxha had replied “Stop reading the French Enlightenment, I advise you to read Marx and Lenin.” Apparently, this meeting signed her fate.
In 1951, an alleged (and fabricated) plot to bomb the Soviet Embassy in Tirana became the excuse for one of the regime’s most brutal purges. 22 intellectuals were rounded up, accused without evidence, tortured, and executed. Sabiha Kasimati was among them. Her crime? Being an independent thinker. Having refused to join the communist party, she was an easy target. On the night of February 26, 1951, she was dragged to a mass execution site near the Lana River, shot without trial, and thrown into a nameless grave. Her final words, as reported by fellow prisoners, were simple yet defiant: “I have done nothing wrong. I am guilty only of knowledge.”
Not only was she executed, but as it has brought into light by the researcher Leka Ndoja, even her academic work and intellectual copyright stolen. Her last academic work for the fauna and flora of Albania, submitted for publishing in the Academy of Sciences in 1950, but which disappeared from the archives shortly after her execution, later on was re-published with the same title “Fishes of Albania” but under the authorship of soviet scientist Anatoly Polyakov and two Albanian co-authors Ndoc Filipi and Ndoc Raka.
The morale of the history: the communist regime not only executed physically the intellectuals but attempted to erase every trace of history left behind by them which might constitute any form of legacy.
An epigram in memory of another martyr, by the victim of red terror, the Albanian Marie Curie
74 years later, Albania remains a country haunted by its past. The bones of Sabiha Kasimati and thousands of other victims of communism still lie in unmarked graves, forgotten by a state too cowardly to reckon with its crimes. Why? Because its Benjamins are still composing and holding important government positions, while pretending to navigate Albanian into the EU-integration.
As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” Sabiha Kasimati became a woman of science, of defiance, of brilliance, in an hostile environment filled with cultural barriers and medieval stereotypes. She was Albania’s Marie Curie, not because she merely pursued science, but because she dared to do so in a land that demanded her silence.
Today, let us remember Sabiha Kasimati not as a victim, but as a martyr of knowledge, as a symbol of the intellectual torch that shed light also in the acute darkness of fiendish ignorance.
To all the victims of the communist regime, we owe remembrance. But more than that, we owe them a commitment to never let ignorance, repression, and historical amnesia win again.
