A literary oasis in the heart of Durrës
A senior librarian introduces us to Durrës Public Library, founded in 1945 and open to all..
In its current incarnation, the Durrës Public Library first opened to the world on September 10, 1945, founded by Vangjel Toçi, celebrated as the father of archaeology in Durrës for his groundbreaking work on the ancient city’s Amphitheatre and Illyrian heritage. He later founded the city’s Archaeological Museum. You can read more about him here.
The library began life with a collection of about 5,000 publications, many donated by Toçi himself. Today, it has 254,164 titles in its collection. It was initially housed in a two-story villa belonging to an Italian missionary, located in the city center, but is now to be found in a purpose-built structure, just off Sheshi Liria. This building also houses the British Library section, which contains about 25,000 books in foreign languages. There’s a small reading room, open to every reader, including those not currently library members. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to our building. We urgently need to find a new home for the library, as the current space is no longer suitable for preserving our books and it’s becoming harder to provide a comfortable space for readers.
The library retains its vibrant role in local culture through the annual expansion of its range of titles: we buy about 65% of these new books with funds provided by the municipality, while others are donated by authors or publishers. Our books are listed with the online Corbiss Catalogue System, where readers can search for titles that interest them without even visiting the library. However, if you prefer a more traditional, non-digital way of finding titles, there’s a card-based catalogue system on both floors of the building, with Albanian books on the upper floor and foreign-language books on the lower.
We welcome everyone to the library, especially expats and visitors to Durrës. In fact, we’ve been seeing more and more expats coming through our doors recently as the community grows. Many come out of curiosity (libraries can be ‘tourism’ too!), for information, but also to become members and readers, and this is most welcome. Anyone with a residence permit can become a member; just come to the library with your identity card. After you gain membership (which is free), you can borrow up to two titles and return them within a period of two weeks. And if Albanian isn’t your first language, we have many up-to-date titles in English in our British Library section, along with books in French, German, Italian, etc. Most of them are, of course, works of fiction and literature, but there are also materials from many different fields of knowledge. One strange fact about our foreign language titles is that so many of them are in Russian, due to Albania’s earlier relationship with the Soviet Union.
We organize events and book launches, which are often held in the hall of the Children's Cultural Center or even at the University ‘Alexander Moisiu’. We recently held an event with Arian Galdini, author of the book ‘Neo-Albanianism', and we’re launching the ‘Anthology of Durrës Poetry ’, which will soon be available in print. Although these events are mostly held in Albanian, all are welcome.
And for literature lovers whose Albanian goes beyond the basic, for 4 years, there has been the "Gjergj Vlashi" Book Club, which meets to discuss a specific book once a month at the Redon bookstore on Bulevardi Dyrrah.
If you’re a lover of books and reading, we hope to see you at the library!
For almost 25 years, Enton has worked as a library specialist at Durrës Public Library. He is the author of ten books (prose, poetry, literary studies, from Kutel to Kadare) and seven translations from French and Italian into Albanian. (Hermann Hesse, Marcel Pagnol, Jacques Prévert, Nevine Yousry, Jean-Ch. Rufin, etc.).
