Robert Elsie

Early Albanian Bible Translations in Todhri Script Robert Elsie

The copybooks with Bible translation in Todhri script that the Austrian consul, Johann Georg von Hahn, came across during his travels through Albania in the mid-nineteenth century were long regarded as lost. Their discovery in the Austrian National Library, after a century and a half of oblivion, could rightly be described as a sensation for Albanian studies. These little copybooks have previously never been transcribed or translated. Indeed they have probably not been read and used since the nineteenth century. Todhri script was an original Albanian alphabet invented and used in central Albania in the eighteenth century. The last person to write in Todhri script is said to have died in the 1930s.