The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus/Chapter I
THE NOMADS OF THE BALKANS
CHAPTER I
MAINLY INTRODUCTORY
Viniră di t alte lokuri
Tră z veadă anoastre tropuri.
They came from other places to see our customs.
OF the various races that inhabit the Balkan peninsula the Vlachs are in many ways one of the least known. Though at one time of sufficient importance to give their name to the greater part of Northern Greece, during the last few centuries their existence as a separate people has almost been forgotten. At the present day they are to be found widely scattered over the more mountainous and remote parts of the peninsula from Acarnania in the south to as far north as the mountains of Bulgaria and Servia. Their settlements are all small, there is no such thing as an exclusively Vlach town and nowhere do they occupy any large continuous tract of country. One of their chief districts in the south is along the wooded slopes of Northern Pindus between Epirus and Southwestern Macedonia. The higher of the villages on Pindus are under snow each winter and each year as soon as summer ends most of the inhabitants move down to the plains with their flocks and herds, taking with them whatever is needed to carry on their trade. Thus for the six winter months there is a large Vlach population living in the plains of Thessaly and Macedonia ; Velestinos for the time being becomes almost a Vlach town, and numerous Vlach families take up their abode in Trikkala, Larissa, Elassona and the other towns and villages near by. The villages in the hills however are always regarded by the Vlachs as being their real home ; they are essentially a mountain people and as soon as they begin to settle permanently in the plains, as many have done in the past, far away from their native hills and woods and streams they lose their national characteristics and rapidly become merged into the surrounding races. Their language both in its vocabulary and structure is clearly descended from Latin—so much so that a Latin grammar solves many of the difficulties—and is closely allied to Roumanian, of which it is in fact a dialect. But like all the Balkan languages in their common spoken forms Vlach contains a large number of foreign words and phrases, borrowed from Greek, Slavonic, Turkish and Albanian, the proportion from each varying in the different districts. The earliest record of spoken Vlach goes back to the sixth century a.d., but it seems not to have been written till the eighteenth century when a Greek script was employed. Since the beginning of the national movement about the middle of last century the Roumanian alphabet has been adopted.
Excepting some of the women in certain of the more remote villages all the Vlachs of both sexes know in addition to their native language at least one other tongue, either Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian or Serb. In the case of the women however this is largely a modern development for only fifty years ago in an accessible village like Metsovo few knew any other language but Vlach ; the men on the other hand owing to the necessities of trade have almost certainly been bilingual for many generations. The Vlachs call themselves ‘Romans,’ or in their own dialect Arumāni, which is really the same word, just as the Greeks still commonly call themselves ‘Romei’ and their language ‘Romeika.’ By the Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians the Vlachs are known as Tsintsars which is a nickname derived from the numerous hissing sounds in Vlach suggestive of mosquitoes. Thus the Roumanian cinci (five) is in Vlach tsintsi.
By the Greeks the Vlachs are known as Vlakhi or more accurately as Kutsovlakhi. The name Vlach which is a shortened form of Wallach occurs in many languages and is perhaps in origin connected with the name Welsh. In Greek it is now and has been for some time past often applied to all wandering shepherds without denoting any particular race, so that its meaning is not always clear. We have nevertheless used it throughout, but always with a racial meaning as it is the most familiar name in Western Europe. The origin of the name Kutsovlach, which invariably has a racial significance, has been disputed. According to one theory the first part of the word comes from the Turkish kuchuk little, and in this case the Kutsovlachs would be the little Vlachs of the Balkans as opposed to their more numerous kinsmen north of the Danube. A second theory which finds more favour with philologists derives it from the Greek κουτσός a word originally meaning 'lame' or 'halting' which occurs in many compounds often with a depreciatory sense. Thus κουτσοπατάτα 'a poor sort of potato' we have heard applied to the bulb of the Cyclamen; and similarly means κουτσοδύσκαλος 'an ignorant schoolmaster.' In other cases the original meaning of 'lame' is more clearly preserved; February for example is called κουτσύς or 'halting February.' On this theory the Kutsovlachs would be the halting or lame Vlachs again in contrast with those further north; the allusion being to the same peculiarity of speech that has won them the name of Tsintsar among the Slavs.
The position of the Vlach villages high up in the hills of Macedonia, in districts rarely visited, the departure of the Vlachs from the plains in early spring before the time when travelling is most common, their use of a second language in all intercourse with the outer world and lastly the double meaning of the name Vlach in Modern Greek have all helped to restrict and confuse outside knowledge of their life and conditions.
Our own acquaintance with the Vlachs began quite by chance. In the winter of 1909–10 we were travelling in Southern Thessaly in the district between Almiros and Mt. Othrys in search of inscriptions and other antiquities. In Almiros itself and in one or two of the villages to the west are a number of Farsherots or Albanian Vlachs who formerly came from Pleasa. We happened to employ one of these as muleteer and from him began to learn a few words of Vlach. Though a resident in Thessaly our informant possessed a detailed knowledge of the Macedonian hills, as he had more than once been employed in Greek bands and failing these had made expeditions of his own. A few weeks later while looking for inscriptions in the plain of Elassona we spent the night at Vlakhoyianni a winter village of the Pindus Vlachs and there heard more details of Samarina and the other villages on Pindus. The tales told proved of interest, so that a few days later we employed another Vlach muleteer, this time a native of Samarina, and plied him with various questions as to Vlach life in general. He told us of mountains covered with grass and pasture for large flocks of sheep, of forests of oak and beech and pine and of innumerable mountain streams that never failed in summer and were almost too cold to drink. How every one at Samarina ate meat every day and wine was brought up from Shatishta three days’ journey with mules. We had spent the previous July excavating in the Thessalian plains amid heat, mosquitoes and dust, so these tales of woods and streams proved all the more enticing. There were other attractions also of a less material kind, a church wdth a miraculous pine tree growing on the roof (Plate XIV 1) ; a festival (Plate IV 2) at which all the marriages for the year were celebrated, and all wore their best clothes (Plate XIX) and danced for five consecutive days. Further God Almighty, when he made the world, dropped one of his four sacks of lies at Samarina. These either–the excuses vary–ran down hill to other parts of the globe or else being merely masculine became extinct. The attractions proved too strong and we determined to visit the Pindus villages the following summer. The obvious course was to travel up with the Vlach families who leave for the hills each year about the same day. We found the muleteer and his family willing to have an addition to their party ; and so agreed to meet at Timavos in time to start with them. Our first visit to Samarina and the villages on Pindus in 1910 has led to others since and we have also seen many of the Vlach communities elsewhere. Thus in 1911 on our way from Salonica to Samarina we went to the villages around Verria and also to Neveska and Klisura ; in the following year we visited Monastir and the Vlach communities between it and Resna, Okhridha, Muskopol'e and Kortsha. Apart from these and similar journeys made mainly to study the distribution and customs of the Vlachs while travelling in the Balkan peninsula for archæological reasons we have endeavoured to see as much as possible of Vlach life and there are few towns in Southern Macedonia where we have not some Vlach acquaintances. Outside Macedonia and Thessaly there are still several gaps in our knowledge ; of the Vlach villages in Acarnania we have visited only one ; Albania north of Konitsa and west of Muskopol'e is unknown to us, and the Farsherots or Albanian Vlachs we have met have been mostly those settled in Macedonia and Greece. When in Bulgaria we were fortunate in having introductions to the Vlach colony at Sofia, which is of Macedonian origin, but of the other Vlach communities in Bulgaria we have no personal knowledge. Lastly in Macedonia itself we have never been to the Meglen though we have met several natives of that district in other parts of the country. This book therefore can have no claim to be a complete account of all the Vlach settlements ; its aim is rather to give a detailed description of Samarina and the adjacent villages on Pindus together with some account of the Balkan Vlachs as a whole.
The recent history of the Vlachs has been complicated by political troubles, which cannot quite be ignored though it seems needless to discuss them in detail. We have therefore noted only the main effects on certain of the villages, and give here a brief account of the circumstances under which the dispute arose.
At the time when the whole peninsula was under Turkish rule in accordance with Turkish custom religion alone was recognized as the basis of nationality, so that the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople was the head and representative of all the orthodox Christians before the Sublime Porte. In 1821 came the revolt in the south which ended in the establishment of an independent Hellenic kingdom. The revolt however was far from being coextensive with the Greek race, and also was not exclusively Greek for the other Christians in the south Albanians and Vlachs too helped and became part of the newly liberated population. Thus there is in Greece to-day a considerable number of Albanians who have been from the first loyal Hellenic subjects. The Christians left outside Greece and still under Turkish rule naturally looked towards the new kingdom, and many moved southwards to come under Greek rule. Among these were numbers of Vlachs who previously partly hellenized soon became in every way Hellenic. This tendency towards Hellenism was all the greater because Greek was then not only the sole language of the church, but almost the only native language in the peninsula that was commonly written. The value of Greek at that time or slightly earlier can perhaps best be seen from a Greek reading book written by a Vlach priest of Muskopol'e in 1802. It begins with a preface in verse, the first lines of which without maligning the original may be rendered thus :—
Albanians, Bulgars, Vlachs and all who now do speak
An alien tongue rejoice, prepare to make you Greek,
Change your barbaric tongue, your customs rude forgo.
So that as byegone myths your children may them know.
Then follow a tetragloss exercise in Greek, Vlach, Albanian and Bulgarian, all in Greek script ; a dissertation on the value of learning in general and on the special advantages of the book in question ; instruction in the elements of Christian knowledge and natural physics ; a complete letter writer with model examples of letters to dignitaries of the church, parents, relations, friends, schoolmasters, rich Beys and great Pashas ; lessons in the four rules of arithmetic ; and at the end is a calendar showing the chief feasts of the Orthodox Church. By about the middle of the nineteenth century or somewhat later the other subject Christian races followed the example of Greece. Servia, Bulgaria and Roumania became independent states and their nationals left under Turkish rule demanded or had demanded for them by others churches and schools of their own. It hardly perhaps need be said that one and all of these movements were most disconcerting for the Greeks and in particular for the Greek Patriarchate which ever since 1767, when it suppressed the Bulgarian Patriarchate at Okhridha in Macedonia, has fought tooth and nail against all attempts at religious or educational freedom. Among the Vlachs the national movement began in the Pindus villages about 1867 ; it was originated by natives of Macedonia, but help was soon procured from Bucharest which became the centre of the movement. Roumanian elementary schools were founded in several of the Vlach villages and afterwards higher grade schools were started in Yannina, Salonica, and Monastir. Eventually in 1905 the Vlachs were recognized by the Turks as forming a separate ‘ millet ’ or nationality. This however brought no real unity as the Vlach villages are widely scattered and many from their position alone are too closely connected with Greece to wish to take a course of their own. The movement however in the first instance was of an educational kind, and the purely political aspect it has at times assumed has been produced almost entirely by the opposition with which it was met.
Greek opposition at first was confined to exerting pressure by means of the church, but in 1881 when Thessaly and a considerable Vlach population came under Greek rule Roumanian education had to retire northwards and the situation became more acute. The theory had by that time been devised in Greece that the Vlachs were Vlachophone Hellenes, that is to say racially Greeks who had leamt Vlach. The arguments then and since brought against the Roumanian schools were curiously inept ; it was urged that they taught a foreign language, and were financed and staffed by Roumanians and not Vlachs. As far as language is concerned Roumanian has a close connection with Vlach while Greek has none, and in the lower forms of the Roumanian schools the Vlach dialect is used to some extent. Both schools equally in most of the Vlach villages were financed from outside and in recent years at least most if not all the schoolmasters employed in the Roumanian schools have been Vlachs and not Roumanians. It is interesting to note that the perfectly valid argument that the Vlachs had rapidly been becoming hellenized was not used at all.
In 1903 the Bulgarians in Macedonia revolted against the Turks ; the fighting was fiercest between Klisura and Krushevo, districts now allotted to Greece and Servia, and the revolt was only suppressed with fire and sword and wholesale brutality. One result of this rising was to show the Greeks how much Hellenism had declined and Bulgarian propaganda increased since the beginning of the Bulgarian church and schools some thirty years before. Consequently with the approval of the church a committee was formed in Athens to hire bands to send into Macedonia to enforce the claims of Hellenism and destroy Bulgarian schools and churches. These bands were largely composed of Cretans and often led by regular officers, but any ex-brigand was sure of a ready welcome. Similar bands meanwhile had been dispatched from Sofia to gather all Bulgarian villages into the fold of the Bulgarian church and nationalism. In the bitter and bloody struggle that followed the Vlachs were soon involved, for the Greek bands were ordered to turn their attention to the Roumanian schools as well. Threats soon reduced the numbers of the Roumanian party, several of their schools were burnt, many of their more staunch advocates were murdered and their homes and property destroyed. One result of this was that Vlach bands soon appeared on the opposite side, but from their numbers and position were compelled to act mainly on the defensive. In July 1908 with the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution this campaign ended and comparative peace followed. One result of the recent wars has been that Roumania has secured from all the Balkan states educational and religious freedom for the Vlachs and the continuance of Roumanian schools where they are desired. This should put an end for ever to the peculiarly mean squabble in which the Vlachs have been concerned. Owing to this deplorable dispute it has been extremely hard for any one to acquire accurate information about the Vlach villages. As Weigand found many years ago when the quarrel was in its infancy and no blood had been spilt any one enquiring into Vlach dialects was viewed with the utmost suspicion and liable to be told the most fantastic tales. Thus on one occasion we overheard the school children being ordered to talk only Greek as long as we were present; in another village which we were assured spoke only Greek, Vlach proved to be the common tongue. Nearly all modern Greek books and pamphlets on the Vlachs which might other¬ wise be of extreme interest and value, are owing to their political theories almost entirely worthless. Political philology has shown that Kutsovlach means ‘ little Vlach ’ and that ‘ a little Vlach ’ means one who is mostly a Hellene. This result is apparently reached by deriving the word first from kuchuk and confounding it with the meaning of κουτσός. Another work purporting to be a sober historical enquiry ends with the wish that our foes may hate us or better still fear us. Such literature can hardly be taken seriously, but at the same time its authors, often hellenized Vlachs, possess a knowledge of the country that no stranger can hope to acquire. Roumanian books on the Vlachs like the Greek are not impartial witnesses. From the nature of the case however they are less liable to fantastic theories; as regards the language they often minimize the number of Greek loan words in common use, in history and in folklore Rome plays a larger part at times than is either likely or possible and the numbers in the Vlach communities are calculated on a liberal basis. Estimates of population are all exceedingly doubtful; the Turkish figures take no account of race and are only concerned with religion, so that a Greek may mean a Bulgarian, Vlach or Albanian member of the Patriarchist Church. Nationality too in the Balkans is still in a state of flux; and classifications according to descent, language or political feeling would lead to different results. To take a simple case from Greece itself; by descent nearly all the Attic villagers are Albanians, a linguistic test would still give a large number of Albanians, for comparatively few have entirely adopted Greek. Yet if they were asked to what nation they belonged the large majority would probably answer Greek, and all would be Greek in politics and ideals.
A Greek estimate made before political troubles began put the total number of Vlachs at 600,000 ; later Greek estimates give usually a much lower figure. An enthusiastic Roumanian has proposed 2,800,000, but other Roumanian estimates are from about 850,000 upwards. Weigand who has paid more attention to the subject than any other traveller puts the total of Vlachs in the whole peninsula at 373,520. This seems to us to err on the side of moderation, for it is based largely on the calculation of five persons to a house, which from our own experience of Vlach villages is well below the average. Including as Vlachs all those who learnt Vlach as their mother tongue we should estimate the total at not less than half a million. Of these however some will now be using Greek and others Bulgarian in everyday life and their children will not know Vlach at all. Quite apart from questions which involve politics, information of any kind is difficult to acquire. At times courtesy towards the stranger which especially in the villages as we have good reason to know is very real indeed, demands that all answers given should be adapted to the questioner’s assumed desires ; on the other hand there is a deep-rooted belief, by no means confined to the villages, that all strangers being credulous the most fantastic answers will suffice. Once in the early days when our knowledge of Vlach was small we arrived at a Vlach village which had just reunited after a winter in the plains. All around were talking Vlach ; we were welcomed kindly by the schoolmaster who spoke to us in Greek. “We only talk Vlach when we first meet again after the winter” were almost his first words. It was not till a month later that we heard another word of Greek.
It is perhaps necessary to add that no dragoman or interpreter has ever been with us on our journeys; most of our wanderings have been made alone and of those many on foot.