by Victoria Fitore Malo. Translation Petrit Latifi

At a time when many girls in Albanian lands did not leave home unaccompanied, Hoxha Çabrati made a decision that few would dare: to send his only daughter to be educated in Istanbul. It took courage, it took faith, and it took an eye that saw further than usual. The Tanzimat reforms had brought about a major change: after 1858, Rüşdiyet for girls, primary secondary schools were opened where girls learned:

Writing and grammar according to the reformed alphabet, Ottoman literature and elements of Persian, mathematics, geometry and logic, ethics, hygiene and family education and French, the language of the empire’s elites.

The lessons were conducted with the new Tanzimat textbooks, which aimed to create a generation educated according to European models. These schools were among the most advanced of the time in the entire Muslim East.

Meyremja entered this system, not as a spectator, but as part of the first generation of Albanian girls who received a modern Ottoman education.
The Istanbul that shaped her Istanbul at that time was not only the capital: it was a laboratory of modernization. In the streets of Pera, you could hear French, in the libraries of the madrasas, classical Persian was read, in the new schools, standardized Ottoman was spoken, while in the bazaar dozens of languages ​​from all over the empire mingled.

The city was buzzing with steamers that crossed the Bosphorus incessantly, printing houses that published the first Latin alphabets of Albanian, newly established girls’ schools, Albanian student dormitories, cultural clubs where the ideas of the Renaissance would later be born.
And in this mosaic landscape, a girl from Mitrovica learned how to walk like an “Ottoman” young lady, but to think like a girl seeking light for herself.

What she learned, and what she understood At school, Meyremja learned beautiful writing in the pre-standard Latin alphabet, used in those years in the Albanian printing houses of Istanbul, Ottoman poetry and Persian verses, mathematics and ethics according to the new Tanzimat manuals, and French, which paved the way for every educated woman of the empire.

But the deepest lesson was the inner one: to know herself. To protect herself. To know how to seek her place in a city that could pull her in many directions. In her manuscript, she writes:

“Do not lose interest…
The mask is a bag of ears…
Look at your path…”

Words of a young girl, but with a wisdom that surprises you. She did not write to be seen. She did not write to be read. She wrote so as not to get lost. The cornerstone of a line of strong women. Hoxha Çabrati must have understood what many others did not see then:

“If you enlighten a girl, you enlighten a generation.
If you leave her in the dark, the house becomes poorer.”

His decision was not a sentimental act. It was visionary. It was a statement against darkness. It was planting light for a descendant that he saw the value of. And Mejremja did not remain simply a student. She became the beginning of a new line, of educated, courageous, independent women of our tribe. Women who opened the way, not who waited for it to be opened for them.

From that fragile letter, written in distant Istanbul, began a legacy that has reached us. Today, when I read her faint words, I understand more clearly than ever: Mejremja was the cornerstone. My maternal grandmother, but in reality the beginning of a line that today reaches my daughter and the other daughters of the tribe. She started what we continued: generations of women who walk towards the light and pave the way themselves She started what we continued.