By Albert Vataj

I had the privilege of being part of the filming crew for Nikoll Lesi’s “Koha Jonë Debat” show. It was one of those professional engagements that starts as a business meeting and ends as a confrontation with history, memory and the silent grandeur of knowledge. As we drove to the house of Prof. Dr. Aleksandër Meksi, the conversation with Mr. Lesi naturally slid to the time when Meksi was Prime Minister, in the most turbulent years of post-communist Albania. As two contemporaries, we shared not only political memories, but also an awareness of the historical burden of that dramatic transition, when the Albanian state was learning to walk on the ruins of a collapsed system. But we were not going there for politics.

We were not going to meet the former prime minister of Albania from 1992 to 1997, a period of brutal transformations, crises, and attempts to build democracy on uncharted territory. We were going to meet the researcher, the archaeologist of our architectural memory, the man who had dedicated his life to reading stone, the silence of churches, and the secret language of monuments.

The reason for this meeting was the Church of Saint Llezhdr, or the Church of Saint Alexander, in Prullë-Spiten, a spiritual monument that documents speak of since 1402. One of the earliest testimonies of the Catholic faith in those lands, a temple that carries not only architecture, but also the memory of centuries, prayers, ruins and re-erections. And to talk about such a monument, it was necessary to have exactly him, Aleksandër Meksi.

Because he is not just a political figure in modern Albanian history. In essence, he remains one of the most authoritative scholars of medieval Albanian architecture, especially Byzantine and post-Byzantine. He is among those people who have not simply studied monuments, but have built the way we read them today. He has typologized, dated, and structurally analyzed dozens of Albanian churches, monasteries, and fortifications, unraveling the architectural evolution from the Paleo-Christian basilicas of the 4th–6th centuries to the domed churches of the late Byzantine period and the ecclesiastical buildings of the Ottoman era.

His studies on the churches of Gjirokastra, Myzeqesë, Berat, Voskopoja or Dropulli are today a point of reference for every researcher of cultural heritage. In particular, his work on the Church of Saint Mary in Labova e Kryqit remains a cornerstone in the scientific interpretation of this unique monument. But his greatness does not lie only in the bibliography. Aleksandër Meksi belongs to that breed of researchers who have not known knowledge only from books. He was a man of the field.

As a civil engineer, graduated from the University of Tirana in 1962, he managed to combine technical knowledge with historical intuition and aesthetic sensitivity. In restoration, he fanatically defended the principle of authenticity, the preservation of historical stratifications and the rejection of aesthetic falsification of monuments. For him, restoration was not an ornament, but a moral responsibility towards history.

Little known to the public is his work in codicology, the study of rare church manuscripts. He has dealt with the history and cultural significance of Albanian codices, including the “Codex Purpureus Beratinus” and the “Codex Aureus”, treating them not only as religious objects, but as evidence of Albanian written civilization throughout the centuries. When we arrived, he himself answered our knock on the door,
Alexander Meksi.

It was one of those moments when reality seems heavier than the image you have created in your mind. A short man appeared before us, gray-haired and with the burden of years on his shoulders, but with an unusual energy. Nothing demonstrative, no theatrical gesture, no attempt to impose his presence. And that was precisely where his strength lay. He welcomed us into his studio.

A desk, two leather-covered armchairs, books everywhere. Shelves that didn't look like intellectual decor, but like a living working organism. Every book had its place. Every notebook, every letter, every document seemed to have been placed by a hand that continued to live in the discipline of thought.
The house was modest. Not the home of a former prime minister, but of an intellectual who was content to have as his wealth the light of knowledge, the sun of thought, sacrificed for our identity consciousness.

Yes, Aleksandër Meksi reflected that rare nobility of learned men. I had imagined meeting this great man of politics and knowledge differently. But nothing was more impressive than being where a mind like his still continued to work, with the same perseverance and the same thirst to understand and systematize facts. There was something touching in the way he refused to surrender to age, as if intellectual work were his form of resistance to time.
And time had long knocked on his life.

Eighty-seven years. But the years had not managed to subdue the man. During the conversation with Nikoll Lesi about the Church of Prulli, what amazed him was his iron memory. Dates, events, names, toponyms, archival references, architectural details — everything came with an almost mathematical precision. He spoke with the calmness of someone who does not need to impress anyone, because he is secure in the territory of his knowledge. But above all, the way he thought impressed you.

There was no dogma in his analyses. There was logic, comparison, and verification of facts.

He was willing to accept corrections, to confront hypotheses with new evidence, with an admirable scientific positivity. He remained a scholar even in the way he doubted. And perhaps that is precisely where the greatness of such people lies: not in the power they had, but in the ability to remain humble in the face of knowledge. As we left that house, I was left with the feeling that we had not simply visited the residence of a former prime minister. We had entered one of those rare spaces where history, culture, memory and thought still continue to project a dialogue between the past and the present.

What stuck with me the most from that meeting was a kind of silent reluctance on the part of Aleksandër Meksi to talk about politics, especially about the Democratic Party of Albania, which he himself had founded and represented during one of the most difficult periods of modern Albanian history. It was a reluctance that came not from avoidance, nor from a lack of thought, but from a deep awareness of the distance that time creates between the ideal and reality.

Nikoll Lesi's persistent questions about current political events, about the Democratic Party, about the developments and deformations of the transition, were met not with direct rejection, but with something heavier and more meaningful: silence. And that silence spoke. It spoke through hand gestures, through a slight smile, through a look that seemed to seek to avoid not the question, but the fatigue of returning to a territory where he had perhaps said everything he had to say.

It was a silence that did not carry indifference, but a kind of restrained, noble, almost ascetic disappointment. Because Aleksandër Meksi could not be outside the Albanian political reality. He had been one of its protagonists. He had entered politics at a time when Albania was emerging from the darkness of communist dictatorship and when many intellectuals felt it a moral obligation to become part of a collective dream of freedom, pluralism and democracy.

His role at that time was not that of a classic politician.

He did not come from the laboratory of power, but from the library, the archaeological field, the study and the culture. He was, in essence, an idealistic intellectual who agreed to enter the political vortex not for personal ambitions, but because he believed that Albania needed people who thought and not just people who ruled. And perhaps this is precisely what always made him somewhat of an outsider in politics.

Because the Albanian transition politics, with its brutality, conflict and compromises, has rarely been able to keep such natures inside for long. In the way he remained silent, one got the impression that he had long understood this incompatibility between his ideal and the reality that took other forms.

His position today, somewhat on the periphery of public and political debate, seemed to carry within it not anger but a calm acceptance of human and historical limits. As if he were accepting with dignity that his efforts, however honest and serious, had not been enough to change everything he had dreamed of. But there was something majestic in this retreat as well.

Because he did not remain a hostage to politics. He did not get caught up in it. He did not become a figure who endlessly seeks return or protagonism. As a man of work and dedication, he chose to leave in time to return to what he knew how to do best and what fulfilled him most deeply: research, study, investigation, dialogue with history and monuments. And perhaps therein lies the noblest form of survival for an intellectual. To return to knowledge.

To choose the book over the noise. To remain on the side of thought, when politics consumes everything. That man, in that room surrounded by books, with the camera in front of him and with an almost liturgical calm in his speech, seemed as if he were not just conversing with us. There was something of the infinite audience in the way he constructed the sentence, how he argued, how he remembered. It seemed as if he was speaking ahead of time, not ahead of people.

And what expanded his size was not the former political authority, but the light of thought and the competence of an academic who had lived his whole life in the discipline of knowledge. Within that halo I tried to understand man. But at a certain point he ceased to be simply human and took on the form of an almost mystical being, like those figures who emerge from the pages of history and continue to live on an intermediate border between the real and the symbolic.

Under the shadow of that fluent speech and that determined voice, he seemed like a living testimony of a time when thought had moral weight. The meeting did not last long. But there are meetings that are not measured in time. When we left Aleksandër Meksi's house, we took with us not only the memory of a conversation, but the warmth of a humble, simple man, white in presence and in communication. There was something almost testamentary in that quiet parting, as if we were leaving the presence of a living monument of our cultural and historical belonging.

He was exactly as I had tried to imagine him, and yet completely different. A creature who seemed to have come out of books, from history, from the deep memory of this country. A man who carried within himself the idealist, the scholar, the passionate, the scrupulous, and a kind of silent sanctity of humanity, which was not proclaimed with pomp, but was slowly revealed through his words, his thoughts, and the way he chose to live.

He belongs to that generation of scholars who did not produce knowledge for academic decorum, but to build a national consciousness on scientific foundations. Each of his studies is an attempt to save the stone, the church, the fresco, the codex, the memory from oblivion. In this sense, his work has not only been academic; it has also been a silent act of defense of identity. His scientific legacy is spread in some of the most fundamental works of Albanian studies on architecture and cultural heritage.

Dozens of articles published in magazines such as “Monumentet”, “Studime Historike” and “Studia Albanica” still remain indispensable references for researchers of history, architecture and restoration today. Among his most important works is “Architecture of Albanian Churches (7th–15th centuries)”, a scholarly monument in itself, where Aleksandër Meksi manages to build not only a cataloguing of church structures, but an entire reading of the cultural and civilizational influences that have passed through the Albanian territory.

In that work, Albania appears as a great bridge between the Byzantine East and the Romanesque West, a territory where architectural forms are not simply construction techniques, but traces of civilizations that have communicated with each other through stone. Equally important remains the book “Restoration of Architectural Monuments”, a theoretical and practical manual that laid the methodological foundations of scientific restoration in Albania.

Through this work, Meksi articulates a clear professional philosophy: the monument should not be embellished according to the taste of the time, but should be preserved in its historical authenticity, with all the layers, damages and traces that time has left on it. For him, restoration was not an artificial recreation of the past, but an honest dialogue with it.

In collaboration with Emin Riza and Pirro Thomo, he also contributed to the synthesis work “Medieval Architecture in Albania”, one of the most serious products of the golden period of the Institute of Monuments. It was a time when the study of cultural heritage in Albania had the dimension of a national mission and when scientific research was built on the terrain, measurement, documentation and dedication.

This research universe is also enriched by special monographs such as “The Lab of the Cross: History, Architecture and Restoration”, dedicated to one of the most enigmatic and important churches in the Balkans, as well as studies on the “Codices of Albania”, where he penetrates the Byzantine manuscript heritage not only as a researcher of objects, but as an interpreter of an entire spiritual and cultural tradition. And yet, what shocks you most is not just the size of this work. It is the fact that he is still working.

At an age when most give up before their time, Aleksandër Meksi still tries to put down on paper the truth of his political involvement, from the first steps of pluralism to his departure in the dramatic March of 1997. And so, as I left that house, I had the feeling that I had met one of those people who do not live only in their time.

They remain as bridges between eras. As proof that thought, work and dedication can resist oblivion. Aleksandër Meksi seemed to me like one of those men who have spent their lives talking to stones, churches, codices and history, until they themselves have become part of that history they once studied./ Memorie.al