The pharmaceutical legacy of the Malaj family, on which Akademia e Farmacisë “Eureka” stands today, begins with one name: Baftjar Malaj, a pharmacist whose unsparing contribution spanned many fields, and to whom the city of Elbasan owes decades of service.
After completing his higher education, and although he stood out as one of the most talented pharmacists of his generation in Tirana, he chose to return to Elbasan, first serving the community of Cërrik, and later his own city once again. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s he worked at various levels of the public health system of the Elbasan region, steadily improving services to the community.
In the late 1970s he served as deputy head of the health section, where he made an essential contribution to building the health infrastructure of the city and the region, from health centres to better conditions in polyclinic and hospital facilities. He created opportunities for specialisation quotas and professional development for health workers, and worked to develop public health across the territory: statistical registers, the monitoring of indicators, and the hygiene measures so important to the community.
In the 1980s he took charge of the pharmaceutical service for Elbasan and the whole region. There he fundamentally reorganised the pharmacy infrastructure, setting up around 30 pharmacies built on a new concept: located in central positions within the community. Within the possibilities of the time, this organic system managed to guarantee the citizens of Elbasan a quality of service similar to that of Tirana, which was recognised on several occasions by the institutions of the day; Baftjar Malaj himself received many awards during his life.
Under his direction, the Elbasan pharmaceutical network stood out for innovations ahead of their time: pharmacies specialised in paediatric care, the formalisation of traditional herbal pharmacy, and distribution managed at several levels (from the pharmaceutical warehouse to local and hospital pharmacies). His care for the professional and scientific development of pharmacists meant that colleagues from Elbasan often presented innovations and scientific papers.
In the early 1990s, together with his colleagues, he sought to privatise the city’s pharmaceutical enterprise, making its employees shareholders and preserving the structure built over the years. The conditions created for the fragmentation of the system made this impossible, and the enterprise began to break up.
Those were difficult times, when it was hard for Albanians to find medicines and shortages were severe. It was precisely then that he opened the first private pharmacy in Elbasan, in cooperation with Swiss and Greek pharmaceutical companies, and later with partners from all over Europe. He then opened the first pharmaceutical warehouse in Elbasan (which remained in operation until 2009), the foundation of the “Eureka” Shpk company and of the tradition that Akademia e Farmacisë “Eureka” keeps alive today.
