SABIHA-KASIMATI MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCES
Go there and contact
Founded in 1948, this national museum houses 3,000 minerals and specimens of Albanian flora and fauna in seven rooms.
Founded in 1948, this national museum (Muzeu i Shkencave të Natyrës Sabiha Kasimati) is the only one of its kind in Albania. Since its renovation in 2018, it has been named in honor of the biologist and ichthyologist Sabiha Kasimati (1912-1951), one of the country's first female scientists. The seven rooms house 3,000 minerals and specimens of Albanian flora and fauna, including many naturalized animals. Part of the collection comes from two former educational establishments: the Jesuit Saint-Xavier College (Kolegji Saverian) in Shkodra and the American Harry-Fultz School in Tirana. These were the first to record the country's biodiversity in the 1920s-1930s, before being taken over by the dictatorship of King Zog (1933 for the American school), then by that of Enver Hoxha (1947 for the Jesuit college). From 1948 onwards, the collection was enriched by donations from members of the Communist Party and by the museum's biologists. Sabiha Kasimati made a major contribution to our knowledge of Albania's river fish. Although she was a former classmate of Enver Hoxha at the French Lycée in Korça, she was executed on his orders on February 26, 1951, along with 21 other scientists wrongly accused of planting a bomb in front of the Soviet embassy seven days earlier. A small room in the museum recounts the story of the scientist, who, like the other victims of the 1951 plot, was rehabilitated in 1991.
