Anastas Byku

Anastas Byku
Born	Lekël, Ottoman Empire, now in modern Albania
Died	1878
Ethnicity	Greek
Occupation	Journalist

Anastas Byku (died 1878) was a 19th-century Greek publisher and journalist. His publication of the Pelasgos newspaper in 1861 in both Albanian and Greek languages is considered to be one of the first publications of a periodical in Albanian. His endeavor was short-lived but he retried in 1878 with another newspaper, Promytheus o Pelasgos, this time exclusively in the Greek language. Byku held that the Albanians were descendants of the Pelasgians and the Illyrians, and were one single people, although they were of different religious faiths; still according to him they should be inseparable from the Greek nation: this idea would eventually estrange him from the activists of the Albanian National Awakening.

Life

Cover of Ελληνισμός και Χριστιανισμός (Hellenism and Christianity), 1874

Front page of the newspaper "Pelasgos and Pthiotis", Jan. 1860, vol.1, leaf 2. Up: Thucydides, History A, 3. Low: Editorial introduction

Byku, signing his publications as Anastasios Pykaios (Greek: Αναστάσιος Πυκαίος), was born in Lekël, an Albanian village in the district of Tepelenë, then part of the Ottoman Empire but now in modern Albania. After finishing the Zosimea Greek language school in Ioannina, he started to work as a teacher in various Greek schools and as a journalist. In 1861–1862 in Lamia, Greece, where he was living at that time, he started to publish one of the first Albanian newspapers Pelasgos (English: The Pelasgian): the newspaper lasted only one year. The periodical was written in Albanian with an adapted Greek alphabet and in Greek. At the same time he published a primer textbook in Albanian called Gramë për shqipëtarët (English: Grammar for Albanians). In 1878, his last year of life, he tried to publish another newspaper, this time only in Greek, the Promytheus o Pelasgos (English: Prometheus the Pelasgian), but without much success.

Byku deemed that it was important that the Albanians closely lived in peace with the Greek nation and both nations should be inseparable. Moreover, he noted that the Albanians and the Greeks share the same ancient origins and have to deal with common enemies. Byku also asserted that the Albanian language is a dialect of the Greek language. For this his ideas were strongly rejected by a number of Albanian nationalists, such as Thimi Mitko, who saw the Albanian nation as completely separate from the Greek one. Byku in his work Ελληνισμός και Χριστιανισμός (Hellenism and Christianity) claimed that the three enemies of the Greek nation are: Western Europeans, Bulgarians and Muslims.

Further reading

• Αναστασίου Ι. (Μ)πυκαίου. Ελληνισμός και Χριστιανισμός, [Hellenism and Christianity] 1874. (in Greek)