Were the Kyrias siblings, Kristo Dako, and the Kortcha Girls School Protestant? A response to the re-emergence of a communist-era narrative

One of the key Albanian families connected with the Evangelical Protestant Movement was the Kyrias family and, to a lesser degree, Kristo Dako. During the Albanian communist period, however, historians played down and explained away the religious connections of Albanian patriots like the Kyriases. For example, if Gerasim Kyrias preached the Gospel and cooperated with Protestant institutions, they claimed he did this subversively, as a pretext to win foreign support for his purely patriotic, educational, secular and completely non-religious aims. No primary source was ever cited to support this conjecture, but it received widespread acceptance in Albania. In the past 30 years, multiple scholars have debunked these outdated theories, citing hundreds of primary sources that were either unavailable to Albanian scholars, hidden, or censored. The Protestant identity of the Kyrias family and the Kortcha Girls School is now well established by published documentary evidence, but popular national myths are hard to correct—especially this one, immortalized as it was, in 1979, by a popular film about the Girls School (“Mësonjëtorja”). Furthermore, in late 2021 and 2022, the old narrative suddenly reemerged from an unlikely source who publicly denies the family’s Protestant identity and accuses our institute of manipulating history. This downloadable paper intends to serve those who are interested in exploring this question on the basis of documentary evidence.