A national library is measured not only by how many books it has gathered, but by how well it can protect them from fire, water and forgetting.

The National Library of Albania was founded on 10 July 1920 and inaugurated on 10 December 1922. At its inauguration, its holdings numbered about six thousand volumes. The commission that prepared it had begun work as early as 1917. The library is thus one of the oldest cultural institutions of the Albanian state.

In the 1930s, as staff increased, the books collected until then were systematised for the first time, with cataloguing and data recording, work now regarded as the beginning of scientific librarianship in Albania. Until the end of the Second World War, the library was housed in several different places; in 1966 it moved to its current location on Skanderbeg Square in Tirana. Over the decades, the collections grew from a few thousand to nearly a million items: books, periodicals, maps, atlases, microfilms.

The library's role is not only to lend books. Under the law on books, every Albanian publication must be deposited with it in five copies, which makes it the official archive of the country's entire publishing output. The library compiles the national bibliography and houses the National ISBN Agency, created in 1997, the National School of Librarianship, operating since 1969, and the only centre for the restoration of rare collections. In 2023 the “Sotir Kolea” Centre also opened there as a space for cultural events. The library has also announced the relaunch of its scholarly journal “Bibliothecae”, originally published from 2000 to 2010.

These are signs of an institution trying to stay alive. But the history of recent years also shows its fragility.

Fire, water and shelves that are not enough

On 15 May 2017, a fire on the third underground floor damaged 3,308 books. Just a year later, in June 2018, a flood damaged some 12,000 items. Three days after the flood, the library's director, Persida Asllani, stated publicly that the building was not up to standard and that the long-term solution would be a new library. The then Minister of Culture, Mirela Kumbaro, wrote that over a million books and periodicals were kept on overloaded shelves, in conditions outside storage norms. According to data gathered by Citizens.al at the time, for the years 2015–2018 the library had received no funds under the budget line for reconstruction and maintenance of the building.

At that time, with the announced demolition of the National Theatre in the background, one question became unavoidable: would the library suffer the same fate? The building still stands where it was. But the real question was never only about the building. It was about how the state treats written memory: as an asset that requires constant investment, or as a storehouse noticed only when it burns or floods.

Literary archives that scatter

There is another, less visible issue. The manuscripts, letters and personal libraries of twentieth-century Albanian writers are today scattered across different institutions, or remain in family homes. When Dritëro Agolli's daughter donated a notebook of her father's handwritten poems to the Academy of Sciences, she made a precious gesture. But such gestures, however generous, do not replace a national policy for literary archives: who collects them, who restores them, who digitises them and how they are made accessible to researchers.

The National Library already has an online catalogue, digitised catalogues and digital collections. This is the foundation on which a living archive of Albanian literature could be built. Digitisation is not a technological luxury but the surest way to protect documents from the same fire and damp that have already struck its shelves. At 106, the question is not whether the library has survived; it has survived wars, regimes and relocations. The question is whether it will become the platform where future generations find the full memory of Albanian writing, or remain an overloaded depot remembered only on anniversaries.

Sources