Albanians in Romania: History, Community and a Recognized Minority

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Albanians in Romania are a small but officially recognized national minority, with an organized community life that goes back to the 19th century, when Bucharest was its center. Though modest in number, the Albanian minority in Romania holds a formal place in Romanian public life, including guaranteed representation, and played a notable role in the Albanian national awakening abroad. This guide covers the community’s history, its recognized status, and its organizations.

A Historic Community

According to the League of Albanians of Romania, as cited by the national news agency AGERPRES, Albanians settled north of the Danube as early as the medieval period. In the 19th century the country, and Bucharest in particular, became an important center of the Albanian diaspora during the era of the national awakening. Albanian merchants, intellectuals and exiles gathered in Bucharest, which became one of several foreign cities where Albanian cultural and political life flourished at a time when such activity was suppressed at home. This places Romania within the wider story told in Albanians around the world.

Bucharest and the National Awakening

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bucharest hosted an active Albanian community that helped drive the Rilindja, the Albanian national renaissance. Albanian societies, printing and publishing took place here, contributing to the movement that eventually led to independence in 1912. Much as Faik Konica later did from Brussels and Boston, writers and publishers of the diaspora worked from Bucharest to keep the Albanian cause alive abroad.

A Recognized Minority

Modern Romania officially recognizes Albanians as one of its national minorities. Recognized minorities in Romania are entitled to representation, and the Albanian community holds a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Romanian Parliament, through its representative organization, the League of Albanians of Romania (ALAR). Romania’s constitution guarantees a seat to each recognized national minority organization that does not win one through the regular vote, whatever the minority’s size, so the Albanian seat reflects both the historic depth of the Albanian presence and Romania’s system of minority recognition.

Community Organizations

The Albanian community in Romania is organized through cultural associations that represent it in public life, promote the Albanian language and heritage, and maintain ties with Albania and Kosovo. These organizations run cultural events, support the community’s parliamentary representation, and connect Albanians in Romania to the wider diaspora network.

The Albanian Community Today

Today the Albanian community in Romania is small and largely integrated. The 2021 census recorded 645 people of Albanian ethnicity and 421 native speakers of Albanian, with the largest declared groups in Gorj, Dolj and Bucharest. It maintains its identity through cultural associations and its recognized minority status rather than through large concentrated settlements. Its significance lies less in numbers than in its historic role and its formal place in the Romanian state.

Albanians in the Region

Romania sits within a wider Balkan and eastern European diaspora. For neighboring communities, see our guides to Albanians in Serbia and Albanians in North Macedonia, and further afield Albanians in Italy. For the deep background of the people, see where Albanian people come from.

What the 2021 Census Shows

Romania’s latest census has a reference date of 1 December 2021. In the final results published by the National Institute of Statistics, 645 residents declared Albanian ethnicity and 421 named Albanian as their mother tongue. Those are small numbers in a resident population of 19,053,815, and they measure self-declaration only: for about 2.48 million residents the census has no ethnicity information at all, so every minority count is a floor rather than a ceiling.

The county breakdown holds a surprise. By declared ethnicity, the largest groups were recorded not in Bucharest but in the southwestern region of Oltenia, in Gorj and Dolj counties. Dolj’s county seat, Craiova, is where the community’s representative organization was founded, as described below. By mother tongue the picture changes, and Bucharest comes first.

Albanians in Romania by County, 2021 Census

County	Declared Albanian ethnicity	Albanian mother tongue
Gorj	158	7
Dolj (Craiova)	69	13
Bucharest	56	74
Bihor	49	51
Arad	46	49
Timiș	29	32
Constanța	28	19
Romania, total	645	421

Source: National Institute of Statistics, 2021 Population and Housing Census, final results, tables 2.02.1 (ethnicity) and 2.03.1 (mother tongue), resident population on 1 December 2021.

The gap between the two columns is worth noticing. In Gorj and Dolj most people who declared Albanian ethnicity were not recorded with Albanian as their mother tongue, which points to a heritage identity rather than a spoken one. In Bucharest, Bihor, Arad and Timiș the mother-tongue count is slightly higher than the ethnicity count, so some native speakers there were recorded under another ethnicity or with none.

Books the Bucharest Colony Printed

The main article describes Bucharest’s role in general terms. The detail is in the imprints. The Albanologist Robert Elsie records that a “substantial Albanian colony” had settled in Bucharest and that in 1886 an Albanian printing press was set up there by the Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing. Because the Ottoman government would not tolerate Albanian-language books in Constantinople, the national poet Naim Frashëri had his best known works printed in Bucharest instead.

The list is long. Bagëti e bujqësija (Bucolics and Georgics), the 450-line pastoral poem he is most remembered for, appeared in Bucharest in 1886, and Elsie notes that copies were smuggled into Albania in caravans. Luletë e verësë (The Flowers of Spring) followed in 1890, Parajsa dhe fjala fluturake and the essays Mësime in 1894, and both the epic Istori’ e Skenderbeut (History of Scanderbeg) and Qerbelaja in 1898. A good part of the classic Albanian bookshelf carries a Romanian imprint.

Asdreni and the Anthem Written in Romania

The author of Albania’s national anthem spent nearly his whole life in Romania. Aleks Stavre Drenova, known as Asdreni, was born in 1872 in the village of Drenova near Korçë. According to Elsie’s biography, he arrived in Bucharest in the autumn of 1885 as a thirteen-year-old orphan to join his two older brothers, worked first as a coal-boy and apprentice, and later studied for a short time at the University of Bucharest.

In 1905 he taught at an Albanian school in the port of Constanța, and in 1906 he became president of the new Bucharest chapter of the Dija (Knowledge) society. All three of his poetry collections were published in Bucharest: Rézé djélli (Sunbeams) in 1904, Ëndra e lotë (Dreams and Tears) in 1912, dedicated to the English traveler Edith Durham, and Psallme murgu (Psalms of a Monk) in 1930. From March 1922 he served as secretary of the Albanian consulate in Bucharest. He died in poverty on 11 December 1947.

The anthem ties Romania to Albania twice over. Asdreni’s poem was first printed on 21 April 1912 in Liri e Shqipërisë, an Albanian newspaper in Sofia, and it is sung to the melody of “Pe-al nostru steag e scris Unire,” a patriotic song by the Romanian composer Ciprian Porumbescu.

Brăila, Constanța and the Wider Colony

Bucharest was the center, but not the only Albanian address in Romania. The Danube port of Brăila comes first chronologically. AGERPRES, Romania’s national news agency, credits Naum Veqilharxhi with publishing the first Albanian primer there in 1844. Veqilharxhi, born in Vithkuq near Korçë in 1797, worked as a lawyer in Brăila, and his primer, the Ëvetar, used an original alphabet of his own design.

Brăila also produced the first newspaper of the Albanian diaspora in Romania. A 2026 study by Jolanda Lila, based on the only known copy in the National Library of Albania, describes Drita-Lumina, a literary and scientific paper issued there in 1887 and 1888, and the disputes it records between the Brăila branch and the leadership of the Drita Society in Bucharest.

The colony kept producing writers into the twentieth century. Lasgush Poradeci, whom Elsie says many now regard as the greatest Albanian poet of the twentieth century, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he befriended Asdreni and began publishing in Albanian periodicals, including Shqipëri e Re of Constanța. His two major collections, Vallja e yjve (1933) and Ylli i zemrës (1937), were both published in Romania. AGERPRES also lists Pandeli Evangjeli, later prime minister of Albania in 1921 and from 1930 to 1935, among the figures who came out of the Romanian colonies.

From UCAR to ALAR: Who Holds the Seat in Parliament

The community’s modern organizations date from the fall of communism. The Cultural Union of Albanians in Romania (UCAR) was founded on 24 May 1990 with Gelcu Maksutovici as president, and received legal personality on 6 July 1990. It published a newspaper called Albanezul. In 1996 Oana Manolescu was elected to the Chamber of Deputies on its behalf.

In 1999 a second organization, the League of Albanians of Romania (Asociația Liga Albanezilor din România, ALAR), was founded in Craiova, and Manolescu became its president. She won the seat for ALAR in 2000 and kept it through the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections. Since 2016 the deputy has been Bogdan-Alin Stoica, and the newspaper Adevărul listed him again among the 19 national minority deputies who took their seats after the December 2024 election.

ALAR runs the cultural side as well. AGERPRES reports that it has its own publishing house, first called Privirea and reorganized in 2018 under the name Asdreni, that its monthly magazine Drita continues an earlier title, Prietenul Albanezului, and that in 2002 it founded Serenada, an ensemble for traditional Albanian song and dance.

Timeline: Albanians in Romania

• 1844: Naum Veqilharxhi, a lawyer in Brăila, publishes the first Albanian primer.
• 1885: The future poet Asdreni arrives in Bucharest at age thirteen.
• 1886: An Albanian printing press opens in Bucharest; Naim Frashëri’s Bagëti e bujqësija is printed there.
• 1887 to 1888: Drita-Lumina, the first Albanian diaspora newspaper in Romania, appears in Brăila.
• 1898: Frashëri’s History of Scanderbeg is printed in Bucharest.
• 1905: Asdreni teaches at an Albanian school in Constanța.
• 1912: Asdreni’s anthem poem is published; his collection Ëndra e lotë appears in Bucharest.
• March 1922: Asdreni becomes secretary of the Albanian consulate in Bucharest.
• 1933 and 1937: Lasgush Poradeci’s two major poetry collections are published in Romania.
• 24 May 1990: The Cultural Union of Albanians in Romania is founded.
• 1996: Oana Manolescu wins the Albanian minority seat in the Chamber of Deputies.
• 1999: ALAR is founded in Craiova.
• 2016: Bogdan-Alin Stoica becomes the ALAR deputy.
• 1 December 2021: The census records 645 Albanians by ethnicity and 421 by mother tongue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are there Albanians in Romania?

Yes. Albanians are a small but officially recognized national minority in Romania. The 2021 census recorded 645 people of Albanian ethnicity. Bucharest was the community’s historic center in the 19th century.

Why were Albanians important in Bucharest?

Bucharest was a major center of the Albanian diaspora during the national awakening, where Albanian societies and publishing helped drive the movement toward independence.

Do Albanians have representation in Romania?

Yes. As a recognized minority, the Albanian community holds guaranteed representation in the Romanian Parliament through its organization.

How large is the Albanian community in Romania?

It is small: the 2021 census recorded 645 people of Albanian ethnicity and 421 people with Albanian as their mother tongue. It is defined more by its historic role and recognized status than by numbers.

Learn More

Continue with Albanians around the world, Albanians in Serbia, and where Albanian people come from.

Sources

• National minorities in Romania (Wikipedia)
• Albanians in Romania (Wikipedia)
• National Institute of Statistics (Romania): 2021 Census final results, ethno-cultural characteristics (tables 2.02.1 and 2.03.1)
• AGERPRES: 30 years since the founding of the Cultural Union of Albanians in Romania
• Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature: Asdreni (Aleks Stavre Drenova)
• Robert Elsie: Albanian literature, an overview (2003)
• Robert Elsie: Studies in Modern Albanian Literature and Culture (1996)
• Jolanda Lila: Drita-Lumina, a literary and scientific periodical at the dawn of the Albanian press in Romania (2026)
• Adevărul: The 19 national minority members of the Chamber of Deputies (December 2024)
• Wikipedia: Himni i Flamurit (first publication and melody of the anthem, citing Vasil Tole)