Karl Reinhold

Karl Reinhold (1834–1880) was a German physician and Albanologist from Saxony. He was born in Göttingen, and worked as the physician-in-chief in the Greek navy, after Otto became King in the then newly-constituted Kingdom of Greece. There, he fell into contact with the Arvanite sailors, especially from the islands of Poros (Arv. Porjea), Hydra (Arv. Nidhra) and Spetsai (Arv. Petsa). He collected a large corpus of folklore material (tales, folksongs, riddles, translations of the Bible and A Thousand Nights and One Night from his informant Vasil Saqellari (Βασίλης Σακελλάρης), an Arvanite Orthodox priest from Poros. In 1855 he published a small volume of the materials he collected, under the name Noctes Pelasgicae vel Symbolae ad cognoscendos Dialectos Graeciae Pelasgicae collatae cura Dr. Caroli Henrici Theodori Reinhold. After Reinhold's death, some of his notes fell in the hands of Gustav Meyer, who published them in his Albanesische Studien (1883–1896). His transcriptions and grammatical notes (463 pages) were published in Tirana, Albania (2005). Thanks to Reinhold's efforts, the Hydra/Poros dialect is one of the best documented dialects of Arvanitika, an endangered language facing extinction. He is not to be confused with another Karl Reinhold, the famous German philosopher.