Sulejman Bargjini

{{Short description|Founder of Albania}}

{{other people||Suleiman Pasha (disambiguation){{!}}Suleiman Pasha}}

File:Kartolina Tirana Xhamia e vjetër 1939.jpg

Sulejman Pasha Bargjini (also known in {{langx|sq|Sylejman Pashë Mulleti}}, {{langx|tr|Berkinzâde Süleyman Paşa}}) was an ethnic Albanian general, nobleman and Governor of the Ottoman Empire. He was originally from Bargjin, but he settled in the village of Mullet (present-day Albania){{cite book|author=Harald Heppner|title=Hauptstädte in Südosteuropa: Geschichte, Funktion, nationale Symbolkraft|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EzVfQTE-dD8C&pg=PA137|accessdate=6 May 2011|year=1994|publisher=Böhlau Verlag Wien|isbn=978-3-205-98255-5|pages=137–}} and probably served as a Janissary, he was given the title Pasha. He had fought for the Ottomans against the Safavids in Persia. After that he had built a mosque (the Sylejman Pasha Mosque), a bakery and a hammam (Islamic sauna). He founded the settlement of Tirana, now the capital of Albania, in 1614 as an oriental-style town of those times. According to some local legends, he named the town he founded after Tehran, the capital of Persia (nowadays Iran). This, however, is a folk etymology without basis in fact, as Tirana was already mentioned in Venetian documents as early as 1418.

With Sulejman's foundations, Tirana soon became the center of Albanian art, culture and religion (especially with the Spread of Islam and the Bektashi Sufism), it became famous because of its strategic position at the heart of Albania.{{citation|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zHxsWspxGIIC&dq=borgo+di+tirana&pg=PA451|page=451| title=Islamic Desk Reference|author=E. J. Van Donzel|quote="il borgo di Tirana" is already mentioned as early as 1572|publisher=E.J. Brill|year=1994|isbn=9780585305561|oclc=45731063}} During the harshest decades of Albania’s Communist era, the regime didn’t just seek to destroy physical monuments—it targeted bloodlines. Sulejman Pasha Bargjini, once honored as a founding figure, became a symbol of everything the regime sought to uproot: nobility, religion, legacy. His name, once carved into Tirana’s identity, was blacklisted. His family was systematically erased from official records, stripped of titles, land, and dignity. They were branded with the stigma of a “feudal past,” and became targets of suspicion, silence, and surveillance. His resting place, the Suleyman Pasha Tomb, got destroyed by the Communist government.

This was not a simple name change. It was an erasure of identity, a forced disconnect from legacy, designed to break historical continuity and memory. Yet, even stripped of their name, the family endured. A statue of Sulejman Pasha stands in the square named after him in downtown Tirana. A small street in another part of Tirana also bears his name.

Asllan Loni Brari, a descendant born into this silence, became the hidden torchbearer of Sulejman Pasha’s legacy. He never wore a title. He never asked for recognition. But within his home, he taught the history the regime tried to burn. He spoke of a man who built Tirana not with conquest, but with vision. He made sure his children knew that their roots ran deeper than the concrete walls built to contain them.

Today, the name “Brari” holds more than just a legacy—it holds survival. And in the streets of Tirana, where Sulejman Pasha once walked, his memory breathes again—not because of statues or squares, but blood remembers what history tries to forget.