Background
Bajazid Doda was born in 1888 in Štirovica, an Albanian inhabited village of the Upper Reka region of Macedonia in what was then the Ottoman Empire.
Photographer author ethnographic writer
Bajazid Doda was born in 1888 in Štirovica, an Albanian inhabited village of the Upper Reka region of Macedonia in what was then the Ottoman Empire.
He went to Romania to work abroad, like many other Upper Reka inhabitants. In 1906 Bucharest, Romania he met with the Hungarian baron and scholar Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), who hired him as his servant. The two became close companions and began to live together.
From Bucharest Nopsca and Doda left for the Nopcsa family mansion in Săcel, Transylvania and thereafter spent some several months in London where Doda fell ill with influenza.
In mid-November 1907 the two traveled to Shkodër, where they maintained a house from 1907 to 1910 and again from October 1913. They travelled around Mirditë and where kidnapped by a famous bandit Mustafa Lita.
After their release in Prizren, they travelled to Skopje and went to visit the home of Doda in Upper Reka. Back in Shkodër, they went and visited the lands of tribes Hoti and Gruda.
Both traveled together and separately throughout the Albanian lands.
During the First World War in 1915-1916, Nopcsa took Doda with him while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in Kosovo. After the war, they lived mainly in Vienna where Nopcsa published several books and became known not only as an albanologist, but also as a paleontologist and geologist. On April 25, 1933, suffering from depression Nopcsa killed Doda in his sleep and then committed suicide.