THE ENDURING IDENTITY, SOCIAL BEING, AND MATERIAL CULTURE
OF SOUTH-EAST EUROPEAN LATINITY

John Nandris FSA
Institute of Archaeology
University College London

“The Aromani are, by virtue of their habitat, vocations and way of life, among the most polyglot of Balkan peoples. Their home bases are substantial stone villages, which they have constructed in the highlands of the Pindus, Yugoslavia and Albania. They used to range very widely, both seasonally as shepherds, and commercially as muleteers and merchants, over the Pindus, Macedonia and Serbia, into Albania, Dalmatia, Bulgaria and the Dobrogea, and as far north as Vienna And Odessa. Their presence throughout South – East Europe is attested by many toponyms, especially those of mountains; for example in Yugoslavia Durmitor “The Sleeper”, and Visitor
”The Dreamer”; and of regions, e.g., Stari Vlah. Often this is all the remains of their once extensive presence.”

“Under the Ottoman Empire The Aromani were able to flourish under a similar combination of circumstances. They exploited their aboriginal skills and the marked connectivity’s of their highland zone habitat to travel widely both for commerce and pastoralism. They exploited the lowland grazing freed by the deficiencies of the ciftlik system. Under the protection and patronage of the Valide Sultan they were in a position to supply the very specific needs of central markets in the imperial Ottoman system for primary products, such as meat for kebabs, and secondary products such as wool and milk products (ajran, cheese &c.) A secondary outcome of their mobility lay in their virtual monopoly of redistributive and mercantile functions as muleteers along all the inland routes of the Balkans, before the coming of the railway.”

“The mind-set of Macedonian proto-Vlah hill-shepherds, and their capacity both for mobility and to endure hardship, proved admirably adaptable to the military purposes of the young Alexander, who was familiar by birth with their non-Greek culture and language. So too it fitted the purposes of Justinian, native Latin-speaking Emperor of Byzantium in the mid sixth century, when in order to protect the newly-founded monastery of St Katherine on Sinai, he sought the manpower he needed in regions and peoples with which he was familiar, and found them in “a land called Vlah” [Nandris 1990].”

“The Croatian-speaking shepherds of the Velebit Mountains in Dalmatia demonstrably acquired the array of skills necessary to run the stina from the Mediaeval Clahs called Morlachs who preceded them in the area, and they still count their sheep in Latin [Nandris 1988]. The Hellenophone shepherds of Greece have borrowed from the Aromani a range of terminology and pastoral practice, which are a part of a wider technocomplec of Carpathian pastoralism to which they could not otherwise have had access.”

“Hasluck and Morant’s map of villages in Macedonia was drawn up on the basis of anthropological fieldwork, undertaken during the period just after the withdrawal of the Turks from the region. They were engaged in an original study of the physical anthropology of the peoples of the area, combined with a series of interviews, which gave us a valuable record of these peoples’ own cultural self-definition [Hasluck and Morant 1929].

The authors emphasize the very close resemblances between the Greek and Turkish populations in Macedonia which emerged during their first-hand survey work in the field. They stress the fact that “the possession of a common religion or of a common language gives no indication whatever of descent’. We of course no longer rely on “descent” or “continuity” for our definitions of cultural integrity, any more than we rely on skull measurements. As Max Muller [1855 vol.II; 260] put it “The science of language has nothing to do with skulls:.

In connection with Hasluch and Morant’s map it should be noted that while the Aroman villages are dispersed throughout the region, they average some 6.7 times larger that the at first sight apparently more numerous Greek villages. This is the more strking in that all the other peoples ere agriculturalists, an occupation which the Vlahs traditionally disdained. The Aroman populations is thus well under-represented on the map by the number and density of their sites. One Aroman village averages more than five villages added together of each of the other populations.”

“The manipulation of literary or cartographic evidence is familiar as a political deivce. An analogous manipulation of linguistic evidence by the Russians was seen in Moldova east of the River Prut. This rerritory of preponderantly Romanian language and culture was occupied by Russian troops with almost indecent haste, following the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism, signed in 1940 by Molotov and Riibbentrop. Th Romanian language was thereafter represented, especially for the benefit of any tourists and the more naïve fellow-travellers, as “Modovan”,and was written in cyrillics.

Like the Kurds, the Aromani are a substantial population with their own well-defined history and culture, but they have the misfortune to straddle modern national frontiers, without ever having been permitted to ratify their cultural status, or even assert the rights which are now accorded to every minority. Like the Jews, they are an able entrepreneurial minority dispersed among other populations, and like the Jew or the Palestinians they have the right to exist. The diaspora of the Vlahs is not merely the literal outcome of historical circumstances such as the sacking of the great proto-urban Vlah site of Muschopolje near Korce by Ali Pasha in 1769 & 1788. Their distribution is also a manifestation of their antiquity in the region and of a specific way of life.”

“Some Greek authors, e.g., the notorious Keramopoulos [1939], seeking apparently only to belittle and minimize the notable contributions of the Aromani to Green culture, have put forward rhetorical questions about the non-existence of Vlah laws, literature, inscriptions and other features, which are so irrelevant to the culture and betray such ignorance of modern thinking about traditional societies that they are perhaps best not pursued further. Some Russian authors have performed the same gratuitous service for the Romanians

The Soviet Empire was the first empire in history in which the conquerors stood at a lower cultural level than the conquered. The culture of the peoples of eastern Europe was at least Europeans, and shaped by European history. The Russians had not had the good fortune to benefit from the culture of Rome or Greece, nor the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or indeed any of the great movements which shaped European culture. They appeared to be as blissfully ignorant of the freedoms which stem from democracy or the ownership of private property as they were of the series of facts about economic life represented by capitalism.

South of the Danube there was a much longer period of integration with the Roman military machine and with their civil administration, which makes the enduring Latinity of many peoples as well as the Aromani quite comprehensible . Service in the Legions, and the subsequent re-settlement of veterans, drew together widely disparate elements of the populations of the Empire. Of all European peoples the speech of the Aromani perhaps best epitomizes late Provincial Latin, although adulterated by the admixture of Greek vocabulary.

The Aromani seem to have respected Classical and Byzantine civilization, just as they did that of Greece, and they certainly played an important role in the historical process in south-east Europe. Latin not Green was the official language of Byzantium up to the time of Heraclius, and the native language of some of its Emperors.

Culturally the Vlahs remain today the most Hellenophile of the several Slav, Latin, Albanian, Turkic, Gypsy and other minorities which still exist on Greek territory; as well as being among the most literate. It was the Aromani who possessed printing presses during the Turkish occupation, whether in Vienna or at Moschopolje.

Vlahs made a contribution out of all proportion to their numbers, in almost every domain of modern Greek culture. Before the advent of the railways inland redistribution lay in their hands, or on the backs of their mules. The Vlahs were crucial in the establishment of the Philike Hetairea and in the expulsion of the Turks from Greece, as well as forming along with the Albanians by far the most effective resistance movement among the supine populations within Greece.

The Aromani are unique among Balkan or indeed European peoples, in the degree to which their culture integrates Latinity and Hellenism. It is unfortunate that this Hellenism has tended to overvalue its own literacy and hence to misunderstand and undervalue other traditional Balkan cultures of equal or even greater antiquity.

ORIGINS of LATINITY

The origin of Aroman and Romanian culture lie generically within the broad category of Thracians. The Dacians and Getae were one branch of the Thracian peoples, speaking the same language. Cultural distinctions in antiquity were seldom clear-cut, as we see in the case of the Macedonian tribesman of Alexander and Philip. It is not surprising that modern scholarship cannot always tidily resolve some of the problems involved. It would be as foolish to seek to derive every aspect of these cultures from Latin antiquity without admixture as it would be e.g., to claim direct descent for the culture of modern Green from the classical period.

MACEDONIAN TRIBAL SOCIETY and the CELNIKS

The case of the Macedonians during the last few centuries b.c. is of some interest in relation to Aroman studies. The Macedonian monarchy had, as Borza [1990] reminds us, adopted some orientalizing elements which may have acted as a pre-adaptation for forms of government adopted by Alexander after his Asian conquests, just as they had adopted elements of display from Greek culture. By Classical times the dispute as to whether the Macedonians were “Greeks” or not begins to recall the case of the Aromani. The surviving literary evidence is derived almost entirely from Hellenic sources and perhaps too much attention has been paid to manipulating and re-working limited sources. “As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, the Macedonians were not Greeks” [Borza 1990], but the question whether they were or not is probably a bad question. There seems to be no real evidence that they aspired to be, but much hangs on the definition of a Greek.

The mountaineers, whom Alexander was at one stage driven to rebuke in their own language [which was not Greek] were shepherds and soldiers essentially not unlike the Vlahs. The male-dominated institutions of the celnik or tselingata among the Aromani and Albanians, with their patterns of honour, family and patronage, more closely mirror Macedonian society than Greek. In retrospect it seems to matter very little whether the Macedonians were northerly Greeks or southerly Thracians.

PATTERNS of BEHAVIOUR

The Aroman village of Samarina, at 1700 metres on Mount Smolikas, is certainly among the highest in the Balkans. The muleteer or kiradji Costas Tahikas is a respected senior figure in the village, and repository of a wealth of knowledge about its traditions, and about the way of life so ably recorded there by Wace and Thompson [1914], all of which will die with him and never be revived.

Costas has often provided me not merely with the mule transport to enable me to establish camp on the pastures of Smolikas, but with that total care for the traveler which lies in the ancient traditions of the kiradji or dragonman, unfolding as we rolde the ecology of the Pindus and the uses of its plants, pointing out the lairs and habits of its animals, its bears, wild pig and wolves and the routes on foot and on horseback through it, guiding the horses calmly through the territorial attacks of the sheep dogs; and finally setting up camp at the end of the day in localities which could not have been better chosen by a Roman Centurion. Even if it rained he slept out, wrapped in the woolen kappa cloak, woven for him by his wife and felted in the water mills of Samarina. It was men like this who carried Alexander to fame in Asia, whom Justinian chose for service in the granite desert of Sinai. As a Greek General once confided to me, he chose the Vlahs in preference for paratroops in the Greek army, men able to march over mountains, sleep on the ground and eat anything.

The revolutionary literature of Rhigas of Velestinon, who was himself Vlah, issued from the Vlah-owned printing presses of the Pugliu brothers of Vienna. There were probably several printing presses in the Aroman town of Moschoplje when it attracted the jealous attention of Ali Pasha and was destroyed in 1769 and again in 1788, putting a violent end to incipient urbanism among the Balkan Vlahs.

CONCLUSION

As a basis for the definition of enduring cultural identity in the human group, stylistic criteria both in social being and material culture are neither unimportant no unscientific. The definition is polythetic, but depends in the final resort on behaviour as if the member belongs to the group. As the great eighteenth century art historian Winckelman said “Not everything is possible at any one time”. This encapsulates some of the stylistic principles which enable archaeology to define its epochs and study long-term changes in human behaviour.

The motto of Britain’s oldest learned society, the Royal Society, is “Nullius in Verba”, so that we have to try and substantiate our claims with more than words. We should honour the work of those such as Gustave Wigand, the centenary of whose 1894-95 work is upon us; or Wace and Thompson [1914], Beurmann [1967], Hadrian Daicoviviu [1972], Parinte Matasa [1946], and may others. Such men did not put their trust in words, but took their methodologies out to test them in the field and brought back the original data and first-hand experience upon which all theoretical pronouncements depend. Their work should inspire us to renew the tradition of original fieldwork, not to perpetuate the repetitive manipulation of literary sources, or accept uncritically the stale reiteration of old-fashioned nationalistic dogmas.

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