– Anastas Kondo, 2001 –
On August 23 of this year, Tirana awoke poorer; Albania lost one of its most distinguished men, the last patriarch of the General Staff of the National Liberation Army, Spiro Koleka.
He was perfect in honesty, endowed with virtues and a patriot wholly dedicated to work, unlike anyone else. We say wholeheartedly “the Koleka phenomenon” because he was such! People with virtues and extraordinary lives like his come rarely, very rarely, to our suffering nation. He was undoubtedly a man of strong character, like the reinforced concrete of his constructions, with an iron will and a titanic passion.
He does not only deserve credit for being one of the most prominent leaders of the Albanian state for nearly half a century after the Second World War, but he was the first among the first to lay the solid foundations of the New Albania. He was a model of a hardworking man who measured the value of others by the yardstick of work. He was also perhaps the only engineer of his generation who joined the partisans for the liberation and construction of wartime Albania.
While many of his colleagues were building villas for themselves and the collaborators, Koleka dedicated his life to the sacred altar of our holy war. He was among the few people who never separated words from deeds. Entirely the first in sacrifices and the last in claims. The day when the Albanian villains and murderers forcefully evicted him from his home, he left with only what he was wearing, and his only wealth was his books. He lived long because he lived with work and only for work!
He was born in Vuno, Himara, on July 7, 1908, in a family with fiery patriotic traditions. Another Spiro Koleka from his lineage was a minister in the Tirana government of 1920 and one of the organizers of the Vlora War, which drove Italy into the sea. He grew up an orphan to the tunes of the songs of captains Nase Labi and Nase Beni. He completed elementary school in Vuno with the teacher of the people, Naqe Konomi, being the top student. The village awarded him a scholarship to continue at the classical college of Saint Demetrius of Corona, founded by the great De Rada in Arbër of Italy.
Again, as the top student, he won a scholarship for the ancient University of Pisa, where Galileo Galilei himself had taught. Seeing that Albania lacked roads, hydro-electric power stations, factories and railways, he did not continue his classical studies in linguistics or history, which he had completed in high school, but chose civil engineering.
As a polyglot who mastered Latin and ancient Greek, spoke Italian, modern Greek and French fluently, and understood English and Russian well, he could have become a colleague of his fellow student Eqerem Çabej. Passionate about history, he left us a manuscript on the Pelasgians and another on the history of Himara, as well as his wartime memoirs. He could have been a colleague of Aleks Buda. But no! He chose the most concrete field of social life: construction.
After successfully completing his studies, he worked in Shkodra, where he also had as a colleague the distinguished architect and painter Kol Idromeno. The fascist occupation of April 7, 1939 found him in Shkodra, where he secretly distributed what might have been the first Albanian anti-fascist pamphlet, written by himself.
A year later, he came to Tirana, where he connected with his fellow villager and peer, the Hero of the People, Kozma Nushi, who likewise left France in 1940 to liberate Albania. He embraced communist ideas and became a member of the Communist Party in February 1943. Four months later, on July 10, he was elected a member of the General Council of the National Liberation Army and was tasked with Public Works in the Anti-Fascist Committee. In October 1944, in Berat, he was elected the first Minister of Public Works when Albania needed to be rebuilt. As the country began to raise burnt houses and bridges, the first railways, factories, plants and hydro-electric power stations that still keep us powered today, Spiro Koleka was the Minister of Constructions for nearly three decades, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Chairman of the State Planning Commission, and finally, Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly. A Hero of Socialist Labour, not because he was awarded this high order, but because he was the sole exemplar of love for work and one of the hardest-working men the Albanian state has ever had.
The people loved and valued him greatly, and it is no coincidence that since 1945, for nearly half a century, he was the permanent deputy of Vlora in all the legislatures of the People’s Assembly.
For his love of the purity of the Albanian language, he was uncompromising to the point of obsession. He actively participated in editing the dictionaries of scientific terminology for engineers. The Academy of Sciences, Radio-Television, and the Ministry of Education and Culture know well what they “suffered” from his concern for the purity of the language. He traced the roots of Albanian beyond Illyrian, to biblical Pelasgian.
The loss of Spiro Koleka creates a great void in our social life. We will miss this man of genuine ideals who could not be swayed or bought, a fighter for human emancipation.
To the first Koleka, the people sang, “Spiro Koleka of Vuno / Honoured Himara so.” To our Koleka, the people immortalized with, “Spiro Koleka, the falcon / Beautified Albania.”
I am proud to have called him a friend, and I am happy to have lived in the same time as him.
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