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Pjeter Mëshkalla didn't just write a letter...

Pjeter Mëshkalla didn't just write a letter...
Father Peter Meshkalla (1901-1988)

From: Frano Kulli

Many people, who have also encountered the name of the Jesuit Father Pjetër Mëshkalla, have united his authorial name with the authorship of a letter he wrote to the bloodthirsty prime minister of the dictatorship, Mehmet Shehu. A letter, truly worthy to be taken as a work and a masterpiece, perhaps one of the biggest "blasphemies" that could be against the dictatorship, as the supreme courage of the Albanian intelligentsia at that time. One with the word and resistance of all the martyrs of the church in fact, but probably a couple of decades later when the current violence had finally put its wild hoof in the throat of the people it ruled. For those who touched it with all the senses of the soul and in all the tissues of the body at that time, especially, even today the power of the person-author of that letter, who took the courage to argue with the executioner, with the bed, remains almost mysterious. reason in the face of the regime that has excluded reason as an existence, leaving it as an action, consciously going towards self-violation, in respect of freedom for oneself and beyond it, for others.

A stay at the limits of mysticism that does not begin on that day, on April 5 of the evil year 1967, when the letter is written. Even though he had to experience within his own being the ordeal of torments in the prisons of hell. Examples from his life tell us that he was always at odds with the empires during which he lived his life; the Ottoman one in the beginning, who felt the oppression since he was a child, but even more with the rulers who covered the events after the First World War, and those who covered the period of the Second; actively faced fascism and Nazism. But, what happened later, the post-war that did not bring peace after the leading compatriots, established the dictatorship of the infidels and declared Albania as the first and only atheist country in the world, which was a fruitless ordeal for him. Peter Meshkalla was then condemned not only as an opponent, but as a missionary of Christ; twice they condemned him as insufficient: the first time they gave him 15 years in prison and the second time another 10 years, and he appeared as humble as he was invincible. And, for Karshi, stoic, surely the Word of God stands: "Why, I am sending you as kings among wolves! Beware of people: maybe they will accuse you in the courts...! Because of this they will bring you before rulers and kings to testify before them and before the Gentiles... do not worry about what and how you will speak, because at that moment I will give you what you should say, because you will not it is you who will speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaks through you" (Mt 10, 16-20) ...


Yes, that skinny person, thin of bone and skin, who appears to us in the last photo of him, was an excellent student in Austria in the 20s of the last century, and he studied theology and philosophy in Gorica, Slovenia at that time. in Naples in Italy ... If you are, however slightly curious, know a little more about this name, the indomitable Jesuit priest, discover in Father Pjetër Meshkalla the intellectual, the thinker, the historian, the linguist, the deep connoisseur of good European and contemporary literature.

But he also left us the poet's testimony. A master of poetry, equally soulful and humble, the poet Visar Zhiti has brought us a foreword with glittering words as an introduction to Meshkalla's literary work (the first part-poetry) published recently, under the designation of superior evaluation: The heavenly poetry of Father Peter the Elder. A poem completely unknown until now, which was researched by the young writer Andreas Dushi; at the beginning of a trust manuscript of the Shkodran lord Paulin Ujka, and then the traces led to the original manuscript of the author Meshkalla himself. The initiator of this publication is the current parish priest of Shkodra, don Vlash Palaj. With a feeling beyond being there, beyond the beginning of the schooling path in the school that has recently been baptized with the name of Mishkalla, the literature teacher at the then Pontifical Seminary, in the 31s until 1946, when he would be exiled to the darkness of communist prisons for 15 years. The shining sympathy for Mishkala himself, has illuminated his calling, as he himself says, to devote himself to God.

The reasons that pushed me to publish and promote ... the prose and poems of Father Pjetër Meshkalla are closely related to that providential meeting, which I believe influenced so much the calling of my life towards the same mission as that of Father. That meeting was just like the Consecration of Christ in the Temple. It happened, thanks to the mediation of my parents, who constantly visited Padri, especially Nana, that one good day, in that difficult period of 1983, took me and took me to Padri, who blessed me and gave me a sign for the rest of my life. ! From that meeting, a war broke out inside me, where I learned to seek and find myself, amidst the incessant ideological pressure, through a propaganda in the limits of the devil, supported by every state machination and inexorable antagonism, based on the strength of of reason and faith, which appeared visibly, grand in proportion to Father Meshkalla's physical smallness.

What makes up Meshkalla's prose is scattered in the most up-to-date cultural periodicals: "Leka" (acronym of the Association of Education, Culture and Entertainment), "Sunday Kumona", and also in "Tomorri i molja", biweekly culture of the Albanian youth, the philosophy treatise comes first as a deep knowledge of the order of things through detailed analyses, as an insight into the psychology of the person being analysed. But also as an aesthetic reflection that is read with pleasure and interest even today. "Map of Morality", "Constructive Criticism", "Campaign of Christian Nobility" ... While an "apology" for Atte Gjergj Fishta, with the title "Poet of the Nation", begins with the counterposition: "Why is Atte Gjergj called the National Poet , while she is only the poet of a part of Northern Albania?", taken from a dialogue with a teacher whom he values ​​as "valuable". To be honest with him, even though his assessment was completely contrary to the myth that had been created about the poet.

No shyness about the match. With self first and myth beyond self, too. And following the confrontation of the opposing evaluations, he for himself, that is, for the people to whom he speaks, reveals the conclusion: "That Gjergji is the Poet who, with the power of his Genius, knew how to extract from the landscapes of the ideal and the real, all the notes of the most complete harmony of the Motherland. It seems that nature itself had the preparations for this mission: amazing intelligence, assimilative power, inexhaustible and conquering oratory, artist's soul, feelings as masculine as they are tender, deep insight of the psychologist, skin-deep dialectics and fearless metaphysics, complete from such a long and dark culture"!

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