50 Lekë Congress of Manastir

The Congress of Manastir, held in November 1908 in what is now Bitola, North Macedonia, standardized the Albanian alphabet — ending decades of regional fragmentation in which different communities wrote the language in Arabic, Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic scripts. The political timing was deliberate: convened under the relative loosening of Ottoman control following the Young Turk Revolution, Albanian intellectuals moved quickly to consolidate a unified national written identity before the window closed.

The 28-character Latin-based alphabet ratified there remains the official Albanian script to this day.