From the Editor: Looking Back at Thirty Years of Publication
It’s hard to believe we’ve been publishing The Newsletter of The Society Farsarotul on and off for 30 years. We wrote then: “We hope that this first issue of our Newsletter finds you and your loved ones well and prosperous. We want to let you know that the Society Farsarotul, too, is well and prosperous …
From the Editor: The End of an Illusion
Of all the Newsletters we have published in our 24 years, this issue may very well be the most important, because it contains 3 remarkable contemporary documents that show the situation of the Balkan Vlachs today as THEY see it, not as self-styled Vlach leaders in the West see it. Several generations have grown …
The Poetry of Traditional Languages
The Neapolitan linguist-historian Giambattista Vico said in 1744 in his New Science, “We find that the principle of [the] origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters.” This grand discovery enabled Vico to outline the …
Vlach Women and Modernization: A Footnote to Progress
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a paper that was written almost 20 years ago in graduate school and neither intended for publication nor subjected to academic peer review. I include it in this Newsletter not as fact but rather as an unproven thesis that may provoke thought about the trade-offs we make as …
The Vlachs in Albania A Travel Memoir and Oral History
My father left Albania in 1916, but even fifty years later he enjoyed telling me how difficult his journey to the United States had been. By this he meant not the seaward leg of the voyage, as other immigrants might, but the route on land. “Balkan” is Turkish for mountain, and it is notoriously difficult …
“Instant Modernization” in America
A prime concern of modern historians and social scientists has been the huge change in the qualities of human life between what are called “traditional” and “modern” societies. Whereas our relationships were once largely face-to-face and conducted with people whom we knew, nowadays many of the people with whom we come into contact remain anonymous; …
Putting the Record Straight: An Interview with Tom Winnifrith
Following are excerpts from an interview conducted with Dr. Tom Winnifrith on April 15, 1990, during his tour to study Vlach communities in Australia and America. The interview was conducted by Nicholas Balamaci, with additional questions posed by Spiro Macris and George Moran. N.Balamaci: Who are the Vlachs? T.Winnifrith: The Vlachs are a Latin-speaking people …
Resurrecting Aromanian Culture
Whom are we kidding when we speak of preserving Aromanian culture for posterity? There are two ways to preserve a culture for the future: alive, in schools, factories, mass media, government, trade, science, literature, and art; and dead, in a history book or a hermetically-sealed museum display of old colorful costumes. When was the last time you …