HARTOGRAFIA SI SHTRAT I ALBANOLOGJISË PARASHKENCORE
CARTOGRAPHY AS CRANDLE OF PROTOSCIENCE ALBANOLOGY

Summary/Abstract: The process of sketching Albania in European cartography of modernist age surface the construing of Albania and the level of knowledge regarding Albanian space at that time. Its geographical position as a country bordering on Adriatic Sea and its geopolitical position as frontier edge of Ottoman Empire are among principal reasons why Albanian lands appear so often in the first centuries of modernist age cartography. The sketching of Albanian lands in those maps is an outcome of continuous efforts to “translate” the world of Albanians mainly for utilitarian reasons and cultural ones at times. The sketching was originally preceded by a minutiaerecognition of geographical relief and political and cultural world as well. While the earliest description about Albania amounts to travelogues, more particularly descriptionsfrom littoral areas, whose authors were navigators, maps which accompanied them are pictographies, drawings and words which heralded the advent of Albanology. While the history of Albanian studies is being assessed, cartography appear to be the stratum of pre-scientific Albanology and beyond this the first strata of Albanological knowledge.

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