Kosovo’s Anton Pashku: Ahead of His Time in Work and Family

Fluent in Albanian, Serbo-Croat and French, and able to understand Turkish, Pashku nevertheless only once crossed the borders of socialist Yugoslavia and never held a passport.

A victim of political repression like other Kosovo Albanian writers, Pashku turned inwards, his writing rich in hermetic observation and detailed character analysis.

For Lule and Paulin, however, he was a devoted, caring and loving father who wrote mostly at night.

"As a child, I always loved guitars," Lule said.

"At one point, I started to save money so that I could buy a guitar I saw. I told my father and apparently he went to the store to see the price of the guitar. Later that day, he came home and asked for some money from me, if I could lend him some money. We made a contract - probably the first ever contract in my life - where it was written that he should return the money within a short deadline. And so he did"

"After a few days he gave me the money, thanked me for it and then, as a reward for saving him at that moment, he gave me more money, enough to buy the guitar. That afternoon, we went together and bought the guitar, a white one that still exists, though damaged."

Orwell, Kafka, Musil

Lulu Pashku. Photo: Family album

Anton Pashku was born in 1938 in the village of Grazhdanik near the bustling trading city of Prizren in southern Kosovo.

THE SCREECH - 1957

    As darkness flooded in, a golden shower of moonbeams rinsed the mountain ridges and washed the valley below, turning to ice on the slippery surface of the river that wreathed the meandering banks. Everything was laced and tied with the strings of quiet, with the threads of heavy silence, hovering. Even the cuckoo made no...

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