Literary developments have always been influenced by historical, social, and political developments. In the Balkan geography, the first interaction started with language in the 14th century and continued with culture, tradition, and literature. At the end of the five-century rule of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, almost all Balkan languages had been influenced by Turkish. After the adoption of Islam, Turkish became widespread in the Balkan countries, through which Arabic and Persian elements also entered the language. Albania has always been of considerable importance among the Balkan countries due to the historical and cultural relations between Albanians and Turks. The Anatolian Turks first recognized Albanians in 1337 as a result of their alliance with the Byzantine Empire. The earliest records of Albania under Ottoman rule date back to the reign of Bayezid I. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the influence of Turkish is clearly visible in the first works written in Albanian. During this period, the areas where Turkish words were used are understood to have expanded and been enriched through the proliferation of Turkish. The Islamic influence in Albanian literature emerged in the 18th century, when the development of Albanian cities and the consequent increase in the efficiency of social and economic activities paved the way for the creation of a new class. Albania was a part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century, and the fact that the people living here learned Islam, Persian poetry, Persian literature, and culture through the Turks was effective in the spread of the Persian language throughout these lands. The best examples of first Turkish, then Arabic and Persian oral folk literature were observed in the regions where the Ottomans had settled. In fact, the influence of Persian literature and Iranian civilization in general in the Balkan region is also surprising in terms of the wide geography in which Persian literature was found as well as the extent of its presence among other nations. Those who grew up in the Ottoman tradition and were interested in science, culture, art, language, and literature had noteworthily been influenced by Arabic and Persian literature and produced works in Turkish or Persian; these works also have an important place in the Albanian literature. During the Ottoman period, Arabic was the language of science, theology, and Sharia; Turkish was the language of administration; and Persian was the language of emotion and thought for those with a taste for language and art. The Ottomans established many madrasas and tekkes [dervish lodges] in the various Albanian cities where Persian language and literature were taught. Tekkes were places where classical Islamic Sufi literary works were read and experienced. One of the tekkes that contributed to the development and spread of Sufi ideas and the Persian language among Albanians was the tekke founded by Tahir Nasibi, a dervish from the Khorasan region, in the village of Frashër in the Permet district of Albania. Great literary figures and intellectuals of the Albanian nation such as Dalib Frashëri, Shahin Frashëri, and the brothers Abdyl, Naim, and Shamsaddin Sami Frashëri were raised in this tekke. These madrasas and tekkes were first opened under the name of maktabs [schools] and were places where students began their education by reading and memorizing Sadi’s Bostan and Gulistan. These students would go on to read Firdavsi’s Shahname, Nizami’s Hamse, and finally Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Balhi’s Masnavi. Mehmet Naim Frashëri was one of Albania’s great literary figures and intellectuals and was born on May 25, 1846 in the village of Frashëri in the district of Permeti in the Ergiri Sanjak of Ioannina Province. He was the older brother of Shamsaddin Sami Bey, a wellknown journalist, lexicographer and linguist of Turkish literature after the Tanzimat who is more commonly referred to as Sami Frashëri in the Albanian literature. The Frashëri family ensured that their children received religious education from private teachers and had them learn Turkish, Persian, and Arabic in order to raise them as Ottoman intellectuals. Naim Frashëri was one of the leading poets of Albania. In his works, he tried to combine Sufism and Western philosophy. His poetic ideas were always intertwined with Bektashism, the Sufi order in which he’d been raised and to whose basic ideologies he’d always adhered, and Albanian national ideas. Naim Frashëri wrote various works in Albanian, Turkish, Greek, and Persian. As a poet shaped by Persian knowledge and culture, Naim Frashëri expressed his first linguistic writings and poetic experiences in Persian. Most of his works in Albanian are textbooks for primary school students and were written in the style of La Fontaine’s fairy tales, which contain basic historical information about certain nations and states, and in verse and prose to teach moral rules to children. Naim’s first book was a Persian grammar book titled Kavaʻid-i Farsiyye ber-Tarz-ı Nevin [Rules of Persian Based on the New Method], which was published in Istanbul in 1871. When considering that Dastur-i Sokhan [Rule of Speech], the first Persian grammar book written by Mirza Habib-i Isfahani under the influence of Western grammar books, was published in Istanbul in 1872, Naim Frashëri’s Kavaʻid-i Farsiyye berTarz-ı Nevin, having been written the prior year, can be considered the first Persian grammar book to have been written in the Western style. In 1873, Naim at only 25 years old started to write his first Persian poems while in Ioannina; he later collected these Persian poems in the divan [collection of poems] titled Tahayyulat [Dreams], which was published in Istanbul in 1885.