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 …
The War of Numbers and its First Victim: The Aromanians in Macedonia (End of 19th – Beginning of 20th century)
Our long-time responsibility has been to count ourselves, to know how many of us there are. –N. Batzaria At present, we know that the latest battles for conquering Ottoman Macedonia in 1912/13 were led with heavy artillery and that weapon power had the final say in the allocation of the Ottoman heritage in Europe. However, …
The Aromanians and Imro
The Macedonian revolutionary national-liberation movement, organized and led by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) has long provoked the interest of contemporaries and scholars of the modern Macedonian history. The interest shown by the numerous diplomats, historians, journalists and analysts has produced an enormous historiographic work which examines IMRO and the Macedonian revolutionary movement from …
My Immigration to America
To be or not to be an Aromanian?! To hide or to openly declare your Aromanian nationality?! To help a little bit for the recognition of nationality, heritage, history, language, religion, traditions, and other ethno-cultural aspects of Aromanian people, or to go out unnoticed?! To work that the arumanism, as an important principle of Aromanians, …
Romanian Parliament: Vlachs Are Romanians, Not Vlachs
In April 2005, the Aromanian Community in Romania (ACR) started the procedure for obtaining the status of a national minority for the Aromanians in Romania. After three years of administrative red tape, the ACR decided to file suit against the Romanian Government for cancelling parts of Government Resolution no. 589/2001 concerning the founding of the …
Community News
Just as we were going to press, we learned that Aromanian tennis prodigy Simona Halep, ranked number 19 in the world, who recently won the Open in New Haven and held on till the fourth round in the US Open, had been defeated by the Italian Flavia Pennetta. Halep is from Constantsa, Romania, and is …
The Recent History of the Aromanians in Romania
EDITOR’S NOTE: 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… (see Editor’s Note) The request …
The Recent History of the Aromanians in Southeast Europe
The aim of this article is to draw an identification “map” of the Aromanians in Southeast Europe. In so doing, we have tried to take an anthropological approach by assuming the analyzed person’s perspective, to understand his or her options and motivations as much as possible. Irina Nicolau (1993) highlighted the difficulty in identifying the …
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 …
Community News
We continue to receive interesting materials for our archives from our members. Recently Pete Costulas mailed us a letter that the Society Farsarotul sent out in December 1943 to all young men serving in the U.S. military during the war, which we reproduce here: “To our boys—wherever you may be: With pride we extend our …
Panhellenic Federation of Cultural Associations of Vlachs: Letter of Information to the Council of Europe
PANHELLENIC FEDERATION OF CULTURAL ASSOCIATIONS OF VLACHS FOUNDED IN 1985 http://www.vlachs-popsv.gr/ e-mail: panhellenicfeder.vlachon@gmail.com Larisa 16 November 2009 Ref. No.:44 LETTER OF INFORMATION TO THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE To: The Council of Europe The Honourable Secretary-General Cc.: The Honourable President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers’ Deputies of the …
Haunted by the “Enemy” Within: Brigandage, Vlachian / Albanian Greekness, Turkish “Contamination,” and Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi / Marathon Affair (1870)
[Reprinted, with minor line editing changes, from the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 1 (2002): 47-74, with permission of the author and the Johns Hopkins University Press. © 2002, 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press] Abstract This essay explores Greek and British observations on the phenomenon of brigandage in Greece following a major Anglo-Greek …
Community News
Efforts to preserve or at least record some of the world’s endangered languages continue to capture media attention. In a March 16, 2009 article entitled, “Preserving Languages Is About More Thank Words,” The Washington Post noted that the Irish language (also called Gaelic) was spoken by about 250,000 people when the country was founded in …
Aspects of Language and Identity in the Greek Peninsula since the Eighteenth Century
My aim in this paper is to comment on certain texts written in Greek around the years 1800 and 2000 on the subject of the populations and languages that make up the cultural mosaic of the south Balkan peninsula. The introduction to a work by Asterios Koukoudis entitled Studies on the Vlachs, first published in …
Community News
We’ve heard of members of our community achieving distinction in the arts, such as Tony Award nominee David Pittu on the Broadway stage. We learned of some recent successes by a few others: Saviana Stanescu, a playwright who is on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, recently had her play, …
Creating a Virtual Museum and Cultural Center: kythera-family.net
www.kythera-family.net Imagine if a huge museum and cultural centre for the Aromanians were to be built, with room for thousands of heritage documents from Vlachs living in the region and those of Vlach descent in the Diaspora. Where all things relating to the community — interviews, important historical documents, family names, vintage family photo collections, old maps, family …
An Istrian in New York
The moment I saw the familiar sadness in my mother’s eyes as she looked out over the land she helped her grandfather farm, my experience of being a daughter of Istrians—and more specifically, Istro-Romanians—crystallized. Tears came to her eyes as she looked upon the topola (poplar) trees her grandfather had planted with his son when he was …
Community News
We are pleased to welcome the following new members: Elena Profesta Brooklyn, NY Christie Vieira Trumbull, CT An interesting article “In search of my other Greek roots” appeared in the September/October 2006 issue of Odyssey, a leading Greek magazine written in English. Writer Elena Polyzos was raised in a trilingual (Greek-Vlach-English) family in Sydney, Australia, that …
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 …
Aromanians in Greece: Minority or Vlach-speaking Greeks?
Abstract At the latest since the existence of the so-called “Aromanian question” are the Aromanians split into different factions concerning their identity, i.e. those who consider themselves as being Romanian, those who consider themselves as being Greek and those who consider themselves as being “purely” Aromanian. Due to increasing contacts to the Greek language as …