Our Community

 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 and eager to be of service to all members. A new Administrative Council has been installed, and one of its first tasks is to get in touch with the membership through meetings and social events. But since our community has spread itself out and not everyone can come to Bridgeport for meetings, we have decided to issue this Newsletter as a further means of keeping in touch with each other.”

   In hindsight it proved a lucky choice no longer to rely only on dances and dinners to keep our community in touch. Instead, as a new American-born generation took the Society’s reins, we decided also to publish a Newsletter, at first on paper and later online at www.farsarotul.org. Today our children and grandchildren can be found in practically every state, and the best way to reach them and others interested in our Aromanian culture and language is online.

   For many years, we published two issues of the Newsletter each year. In more recent years, we’ve not been able to keep up that pace – but we hope that, even though the quantity of Newsletters is not what it used to be, the quality of their articles will make up for it.

   As we thought about what we might include in this issue, it occurred to us to feature some of the fascinating work being created by people throughout the world who are interested in our people. Once upon a time, the Newsletter was a fairly unique source of information about the Aromanians – today, there is a wealth of great work on the Web and it continues to grow every day.

   So we’d like to use this issue to share with you just a small sampling of that body of work – three articles each by two academics, Spiro Shetuni and Nikola Minov, who happen to be of Aromanian origin – including one article by Minov actually written in Aromanian. (Our thanks to the authors and special thanks to the Macedonian Historical Review for publishing Minov’s work.)

   For me personally, as I look back over the last 30 years, I have to say that it’s been an honor – first, to take over my father’s longtime role as Secretary of the Society just a few years after his passing, and second, to have edited this Newsletter over three decades. I thank our many contributors, readers, and supporters for their encouragement; I thank my wife Caryn for her patience; and most of all I thank my fellow Board members Bill Balamaci, George Fatsy, and Bob Nicola. Bob probably had no idea what an amazing adventure he’d started for me when he sent me a copy of Nomads of the Balkans more than 35 years ago.

   We look upon the work we’ve done not as an end, but rather just a beginning, because it coincided with the rise of the internet, which gave people like you and me the power to share stories that we had not been able to share before. This has already given the Aromanians more visibility than we could have imagined 30 years ago – we hope that in some small way, our work has helped encourage this trend and will continue to do so for many decades to come.