Names
Introduced in 1926 by King Ahmet Zogu, the First Lek may have been named after Alexander the Great. In the front of 1 Lek coin was the portrait of Alexander the Great, and on the reverse was Alexander on his horse. Another possibility is that is was named after the Albanian feudal prince, Lekë Dukagjini. The name qindarkë comes from the Albanian qind, meaning one hundred. Qindarkë thus is similar in formation to centime, cent, centesimo, stotinka, eurocent, etc.
Read more about this topic: Albanian Lek
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)