Aromanians Viachs; Vlasi; Volokhs; Arumun; Aromunians; Koutsovlachs; Koutzo-Vlachs; Torvlaks; Mavro-Vlachs; Tsintsars POPULATION: Approximately (2002e) 500,000 Aromanians in the southern Balkan states of Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Other estimates put the total Aromanian population between 150,000 and 1.5 million. The vast discrepancies between official numbers and estimates and the population figures put forward by nationalists and linguists are partly due to the respective methods of enumeration and partly a result of the fact that the Aromanians have traditionally assimilated in order to survive. Besides those in the Balkans, there are sizable Aromanian pop- ulations in western Europe, Canada, and the United Staves. The Aromanians include two smaller related populations—the Meglens in northern Greece, about 20,000, and the Istro- Romanians in Croatia, some 2,000. THE AROMANIAN HOMELAND: The Aromanian homeland lies in the southern Bal- kan Peninsula, south and west of the Danube River, with pockets of Aromanians located in 174 Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Bul- garia, and Romania. Greece has the largest Aromanian community and is the only country where Aromanians have a compact geographic distribu tion—in the Pindus Mountains in northwestern Greece, which is consid- ered the core area of the Balkan Aromanians. The capital and major cultural center of the Aromanians in Greece is the town of Metzovo, called Aminciu by the Aromanians, (2002e) 5,000, the self-proclaimed “capital of the Aromanians,” The other important cultural center in Greece is Trikala, called Tricala by the Aromanians, (2002e) 48,000, whose population is swollen in winter by the annual migration of Aromanian herdsmen from the mountains. The cultural center of the Aromanians in Romania is Con- stanta, called Custanta in Aromanian. The center of the Macedonian Aro- manians is the town of Krushevo, Crushova to the Aromanians. Thecultural center of the Bulgarian Aromanians is the city of Sliven, where an annual Aromanian summer fair is held. FLAG: The Aromanian national flag, used by most communities, is a vertical bicolor of navy blue over white. The nationalist flag of the nine- teenth century, which carried at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, has five horizontal stripes of red, yellow, pale blue, yellow, and black. PEOPLE AND CULTURE: Their Slav neighbors call them Vlach or Viassi, but they call themselves Aromani or Aromuni, meaning Roman. Viach or Vlah is now often used as a pejorative or generalized term, al- though the Meglens continue to call themselves Viach. Traditionally the Aromanians were herdsmen, horse breeders, and shepherds, following their herds from pasture to pasture. Only about 20% continue to live the tra- ditional seminomadic life, but only the Meglens adopted farming. The Aromanians are now mainly merchants, traders, and artisans. Like other national groups, the Aromanians have long linked their consciousness and primary loyalty to their villages, clans, valleys, or regions. The Aromanians, even in urban areas, tend to live apart, rarely intermarrying with Slavs, upholding an ancient tradition of superiority to the newer nationalities in the Balkans. They consider the Romanians as a separate but closely related nation. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the Aromanians spent the period between Gherghiovden (St. George’s Day, 23 April), and Kras- tovden (Day of the Cross, 14 September) in the Balkan, Rila, Pirin, Pindus, and Rhodope Mountains, before setting off with the vast migrations of the herds to the lowlands. The small nation has close ties to the Meglens, the Megleno-Romanians of Greece and Macedonia, and the Istro-Romanians, also called Morlakhs, in Croatia. LANGUAGE AND RELIGION: The Aromanian language, called Ar- minesti or Aromaneashti, is a distinct Romance language, belonging to the southern or Balkan Romance group of the eastern Romance language fam- ily. It is structurally distinct from Romanian, and mutual intelligibility with standard Romanian is very low. The language is derived from late provin- cial Latin; it split from Romanian between A.D. 500 and 1000. Some lin- guists consider Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian as dialects of Romanian, but the majority consider them separate languages. Aromanian shares many common features with Bulgarian, Greek, and Al- banian, but the lexical composition, though rich in Greek, Slavic, and Turkish borrowings, remains basically of the Romance type. The other important dialect, Meglen or Megleno-Romanian, spoken in Greece and Macedonia, is considered an intermediate dialect, between Aromanian and Romanian. There are numerous dialectical differences among the widely scattered populations. In the 1980s a separate alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet, was devised for the language. ‘The number of Aromanians in the Balkans is estimated to number up to 1.5 million, but speakers of the Aromanians 175Aromanians 176 Aromanian language are estimated to have dropped from 500,000 in 1900 to around 250,000 in 2000. ‘The Aromanians are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, most belong- to the Greek Orthodox Church. Some Aromanians, particularly outside Greece, have suggested the creation of an autonomous Aromanian Ortho- dox Church to serve the needs of the widely scattered Aromanian diaspora. NATIONAL HISTORY: The Atomanians claim descent from the ancient Romans who conquered Macedonia in the second century B.c. Some scholars believe they are descended from the aboriginal Thracians, Greeks, Illyrians, and others who amalgamated with the Latin colonists. Following the Roman evacuation of the region in A.D. 271, the area was subject to a series of barbarian invasions. The Romanized population survived, prob- ably by taking refuge in the mountains, where they remained as shepherds and primitive farmers. They are thought to have returned to the plains when conditions improved in the sixth century, when the first mention of their distinct language was recorded. Another theory claims that they are descendants of Romanized Dacians who moved south of the Danube after the Ror evacuation. ‘The Slavs colonized the Balkans between the fourth and seventh cen- turies, They found two large and related tribal groups already established in the region—the Dacians north of the Danube River, and the Thracians south of the river. Both groups had adopted the Latin culture and spoke a Latin patois. North of the river, the Dacians absorbed the invading Slavs, but in the south the Thracians were either absorbed or pushed into the less accessible mountains. The Aromanian mountaineers were well known to the Byzantine military, who regarded the independent people as an unmitigated nuisance. The Aromanians were instrumental in the formation of the Second Bul- garian Empire, also known as the Empire of the Vlachs and Bulgars, in 1184. In 1186 they rebelled against a tax increase imposed by the Byzantine emperor. In 1204, after the temporary collapse of Byzantine power, the Aromanians created their own kingdom, called Great Wallachia, in Thes- saly and parts of Macedonia. They later established another state, Little Wallachia, in present northwestern Greece. The Aromanian heartland in Thessaly was later absorbed by the Greek Despotate of Epirus, overrun by Serbs, and, with the coming of the Turks in 1393, incorporated into the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Aromanian car- avans, made up of hundreds of packhorses, traveled freely across the Ottoman-ruled peninsula, and Aromanian traders established prosperous mercantile houses in the larger towns and as far away as Budapest and Vienna. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Aromanians all but controlled trade in the Ottomans’ European territories. Around 1700 an urban Aromanian culture formed in the Pindus Moun- tains, centered on the city of Gramostea, which boasted an Aromanianpopulation of some 40,000. In the middle of the eighteenth century the Aromanians of Turkish Epirus, in present Albania, established a large ur- ban population at Moscopole (Voskopoje) south of Lake Ohrid. At its height the walled city had up to 60,000 inhabitants, its own printing house, and a famous academy of learning. The city became the center of the Aromanian national and cultural revival and didactic literature. The first known inscription in Aromanian is dated 1731; it was found in the region in 1952. The destruction of the city by Albanian mercenaries in the pay of feuding beys in 1769 and again in 1788 dispersed its inhabitants as refugees and emigrants across the Balkans. In the early nineteenth century, as nationalist ideas began to form in Europe, a small, educated minority began to see the Aromanians as a sep- arate nation—not Greek, Romanian, Slav, or Albanian. A national move- ment began among wealthy Aromanian merchants in Vienna and Budapest, but the new Romanian state soon co-opted Aromanian nationalism, claim- ing the small south Balkan nation as long-lost kin and investing large sums in schools and churches that perpetuated Romanian but not Aromanian culture. The Greek state, which became independent from the Ottoman ‘Turks in 1821, opposed the Romanian movement, and the Aromanians were soon divided into pro-Greck and pro-Romanian factions. The development of a purely Aromanian national consciousness was hindered by the fact that Aromanians lacked a written language and had been taught to use the alphabets—Greek, Roman, or Cyrillic—of the countries in which they lived. In the mid-nineteenth century, with the support of the Romanian gov- ernment, the Aromanians of the Balkans began to define their national identity. The first cultural organization, the Macedo-Romanian Commit- tee, based in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, from 1860, was able to open the first Aromanian school in Greece in 1867, with almost 100 schools operating in Greece, Macedonia, and Albania by the turn of the century. The Aromanians, with no written language and no national myth, were slow to develop a national consciousness in the late nineteenth century. The cession of Thessaly by the Ottoman Turks to Greece in 1881, however, fueled Aromanian sentiment. A large number joined to petition the Ottoman sultan in protest, citing their fears of Greek assimilationist policy and the fact that the new border would cut across the traditional migration routes of the Aromanian herds. In 1905 the Ottoman Turkish government finally recognized the Aromanians as a separate community and allowed them to establish their own Orthodox church, but the church established by the nationalist Apostol Margarit was not successful, as most Aromanians had already adopted Greek identity. The scattered Aromanians suffered dreadfully during the Balkan Wars from 1911 to 1913, when they and their herds were massacred by armed ‘Aromanians 177Aromanians 178 bands of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs. Following the wars, in which the last Ottoman territories in Europe were lost, the Aromanians found them- selves living in four different states—Albania, Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria. ‘Their centuries-old migration and trade routes were severed by the bor= ders and customhouses of the new Balkan countries. The increasingly hostile policies of the Greek state, which had to ac commodate millions of displaced Greeks from Asia Minor, led to the dis- location of many Aromanian communities. Thousands of Greek Aromanians emigrated to Romania or abroad between 1923 and 1926. In 1925, not long after the Dobrudja was incorporated into Romania, the government gave land to immigrant Aromanians in which to settle. They have survived as a distinct community there despite their close cultural and linguistic ties to the neighboring Romanians. In Greece, during the Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship of 1936-41, the Aro- manians were forced to attend Greek-language night schools, and the Aro- manian language was banned from public use. During World War II and the civil war that followed in Greece, Aromanian territory was fought over by several armies and guerrilla groups. During the war, Italian forces in ‘Thessaly formed pro-fascist Aromanians into a “Roman Legion” and sup- ported the creation of a separate Aromanian state. The autonomous “Prin- cipality of the Pindus,” led by an extremist, Alcibiades Diamandi, faded with the withdrawal of the Italian fascists. The Romanian communist government after the war had less interest in the Aromanians and ended its support. In 1951 the Greek census counted only 39,855 Aromanians; later they were left out of official statis- tics entirely. In 1952 the Greek government closed the last Aromanian churches and schools, centers of community life and culture. Aromanian assimilation was extensive and usually “voluntary,” and it seemed that the Aromanians’ disappearance as a distinct national group was imminent. The new communist governments of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia often branded the Aromanians “vagrants” and forced them to settle in towns and villages. Under the rule of the Greek “colonels” in the 1960s and 1970s, Aro- manians risked imprisonment for speaking their language even casually. ‘The overthrow of the military regime in 1974 somewhat eased conditions, although they are today still not recognized as a national minority. The Greek government does not acknowledge the existence of national minor- ities within its borders, only religious minorities. The simple mention of Aromanian nationality is forbidden in a country that promotes a self-image as an ethnically pure and unique “Hellenic” state, As recently as August 1998, the speaker of the Greek parliament openly urged the homogeni- zation of Greece’s ethnic minorities. ‘The Romanian government's new interest in the Aromanians and Meg- lens in Greece recalls the controversy of the end of the nineteenth century.Any intervention by outsiders in favor of the preservation of the Aroman- ian cultural and linguistic identity is viewed with great suspicion in Greece. “The situation of the Aromanian population in the other Balkan countries is also serious. In Albania the Aromanians are not counted as a separate ethnic group but are included in the Greek Orthodox minority. The Aro- manians of the Timok Valley in Serbia are not recognized as an ethnic community but are regarded as Romanized Slavs. The 1991 Macedonian constitution officially recognized the Vlachs as a national minority, but the Macedonian language must be used in contacts with the government, Fur- ther, the government has refused to register the Aromanian Orthodox ‘Church, on the grounds that there is already one Orthodox Church in the country, In 1995 the Aromanians were granted permission to teach op- tional courses in their language in Aromanian areas of Macedonia. In Bul- garia they enjoy few political or cultural rights, the legacy of the former communist government, which actively promoted the assimilation of ma- tional minorities. Although Romania is not one of the original areas in- habited by Aromanians, it now has an important community. The Aromanians in Romania are mostly descendants from émigrés of the first half of the twentieth century. They are considered by the Romanian state as constituting a linguistic and cultural community rather than an official minority. Romania, since the fall of communist governments in the Bal- kans, has reassumed to some extent the role of protector of the Aroman- ians. In the early 1980s the Aromanians were thought to be on the verge of extinction, but during the international ethnic revival of the late 1980s their situation began to change. Emigré communities in Western Europe and North America took a new interest in their culture and language and encouraged their compatriots in the Balkans to do the same. Communities in the Balkans, along with groups in France, Germany, North America, and Greece, for the first time began to claim Aromanian identity. As re- newed interest grew, the Iron Curtain collapsed, and many forgotten eth- nic groups resurfaced. The Greek claim that all Aromanians in the Balkans are ethnic Greeks was set back by the emergence of large Aromanian pop- ulations in Albania and Macedonia speaking little or no Greek. Many Aro- manians learned of their heritage only after the collapse of communism in the region. The ethnic pride of the 1980s, however, gave way to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the early 1990s, The crisis between Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia fueled nationalist sentiment on both sides. In Greece the Macedonian problem made the assertion of a non-Greek identity almost impossible. Both the Greeks and the Macedo- nians made claims to the Aromanians’ loyalty. A second blow to the new Aromanian identity came when relations between Greece and Albania de- teriorated sharply in 1994 over the state of the Greek Epirotes* in southern Aromanians 179Aromanians 180 Albania, The Greeks set themselves up as protectors of the entire Ortho- dox population of the region, pitting the Christian population, Greek or not, against the Muslim Albanian majority. However, throughout history the Aromanians, like chameleons, have disappeared only to reappear later with their language, culture, and traditions intact. A key element in their survival has been their ability to adopt social and cultural patterns of other national groups when their own survival has been threatened. The strategy of revealing Aromanian identity only when verifiably safe to do ensured the Aromanians’ remarkable sur- vival of the turbulent twentieth century in the Balkans, but it makes it extremely difficult to estimate the population of the Aromanian nation in the region, Traditionally, by melting into their host nations, the Aroman- ians became the “best Greeks,” the “best Macedonians,” and the “best Albanians.” Until the 1980s, even many Aromanian leaders were di their best to convince the members of the small nation that they were either Greek or Romanian, but now most acknowledge that they are a unique nation of their own. Since the collapse of totalitarian regimes in the Balkans in the early 1990s, and the establishment of more democratic regimes across the re- gion, the situation of the Aromanians has improved considerably, except in Greece. Renewed ties to the diaspora has helped fuel a cultural and linguistic revival, especially among younger Aromanians. The Macedonian government has gone the farthest in supporting the preservation of the Tanguage and culture, but other regional governments have also begun to accede to Aromanian demands for protection of their unique culture and history. The national movement remains divided into rival groups, pro- Greek and pro-Romanian, while a growing number wish only to be Aro- manian and to be recognized as a separate Balkan national group. In 1991 the Albanian government recognized the Aromanians as a “cul- tural group,” the second largest in the country after the Albanians, but refused them national-minority status. The first congress of the Aromanian nation was held soon after in Albania, with participants from the Balkan countries and the Aromanian diaspora. ‘The congress is seen as marking the rebirth of the Aromanian national movement. The figure of 200,000 Aromanians in Albania seems to fill the huge gap between the figures concerning the Greek minority in Albania, given by the Albanian govern- ment as about 60,000, and Greek official statistics of “Greeks” in Albania at 300,000-400,000, In the Balkans, to claim to be Aromanian and nothing else—neither Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, or Yugoslav—is tantamount to bomb throwing. But for many younger Aromanians, bomb throwing is a step up from the indifference of their parents, who were considered safely assimilated. In Macedonia there was pressure even in the 1995 census to declare oneself as Macedonian for reasons of political correctness. How-Aromanians ever, Aromanian activists in 1997 succeeded in convincing the parliamen- tary Assembly of the Council of Europe, without Greek participation, to recommend protection of the Aromanian culture and language in all their host countries. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Murvar, Vatro. The Balkan Vlachs; A Typological Study. 1978. Poulton, H. The Batkans: Slavs and Minorities in Conflict. 1994. Winnifrith, Tom. The Viachs: The History of a Balkan People. 1987. . Shattered Eagles/Balkan Fragments. 1995. 181