Dervish Himan Ibrahim Mehmet Naxhi Bust

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Dervish Hima (1872–1928), born Ibrahim Mehmet Naxhi, was a 19th-century Albanian politician. A publisher and nationalist figure, he travelled from country to country, promoting Albania in with articles and pamphlets. Dervish Hima was born in Ohrid to a landowning family. He attended school in Monastir (Bitola) and Salonika (Thessaloniki), and studied medicine for two years in Istanbul, where he initially supported the Young Turk movement and began to reflect on the Albanian question. Dervish Hima was an extreme opponent of Ottoman rule in Albania and author of a number of radical manifestos calling for an all-out struggle against the Ottoman Porte. As such, his movements were carefully observed by the Ottoman authorities, and was imprisoned on several occasions. As a known Albanian literary man, he returned from Shkoder after a long absence in Europe and was arrested for speaking of the hopes of Albania and thrown into prison. In Bucharest, he edited the short-lived periodical Pavarësia e Shqipërisë (The Independence of Albania), which appeared in 1898 in Albanian, French, and Romanian. In October of the following year, he was obliged to leave Romania for Rome, where he collaborated with Mehmed bey Frashëri on the fortnightly Zën’i Shqipënisë (Voice of Albania), which was issued in French and Albanian. In 1903, Dervish Hima published the fortnightly periodical L’Albanie in Geneva, which he continued as a monthly from 1905 to 1906 in Brussels. In 1909, he was in Istanbul, where he ran the weekly Shqipëtari-Arnavud (The Albanian) with Hilë Mosi, a periodical in Turkish and Albanian subsidized by Austria–Hungary. This journal lasted until it was banned at the end of 1910. Hima was one of the signatories of the Albanian Declaration of Independence. Dervish Hima took an active interest in public life even after Albanian independence in November 1912. In the autumn of 1917, he was appointed school inspector for the Tirana district by the Austro–Hungarian authorities, and in 1920, he became the first director of the Albanian press office. Hima died in 1928.