Bajram Curri

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This page is about the Albanian national hero - for the town named after him, see Bajram Curri (town).

Bajram Curri (1862 – March 29, 1925) was an ethnic Albanian nationalist from Kosovo.

Curri was born in Đakovica, in the Rumelia Province of the Ottoman Empire (now Kosovo). Whilst the present-day regions of Albania and Kosovo were under Ottoman control, Curri represented the interests of the Albanians. He successfully fought in 1912 against the Young Turks. During the First World War he organised a guerrilla unit as part of the Kachak movement.

When Albania was reconstituted after the war, he held various governments posts as a Minister and as a commander in the army. As an opponent of the later King Ahmed Zogu, to whom the Kosovo issue was less important, he was pursued by the King's troops and encircled in the northern Albanian mountains. He shot himself on March 29, 1925, in order to escape capture. The place where he died, Dragobi in Tropojë District, is today called Bajram Curri, as the Albanian communists revered him as a freedom fighter and nationalist.