Romanians in Bulgaria

The Romanian minority in Bulgaria (Români or Rumâni in Romanian; Vlasi or Rumuni in Bulgarian) is concentrated in the northwestern part of the country, in Vidin Province, Vratsa Province and Pleven Province. They speak the Oltenian variety of the Romanian language. The Romanians from the Vidin Province are separated into 2 main groups: the "Dunăreni" (who live around the Danube river) and the "Pădureni" (who lived in the higher placed regions with many woods). In southwestern Bulgaria lives also a very small Aromanian population, such as in the village Peshtera (English: The Cave). The territory where the Romanians from Bulgaria live never belonged to Romania and most of them declare themselves Vlasi (= Vlachs) when asked in Bulgarian (e.g. on the census), though they use the self-designation "Rumân" (= Rumanians) in their language. The Romanians in Bulgaria are not recognized as a national minority, but as en ethnic group and they don't enjoy ethnic rights in schools and churches since the Interwar period. The 2001 census shows 10,566 Vlachs. Most of the Vlachs (Romanians) are Romanian-speakers, but the figure includes some Aromanian-speakers as well.


It has been suggested that south of the Danube the Vlachs were once more numerous and occupied a much greater area than now. The region between the Serbians and Bulgarians has place names with continued Latin origins, whereas those further into Serbia area have no Latin base. This area of modern east Serbia was mostly associated with the Bulgarians until the expansion of Serbia just before the Ottoman times. The Vlachs provided a separation of the southern Slavs which may have lead to the separate Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat languages.


The first record of a Balkan Romanic presence in the Byzantine period can be found in the writings of Procopius, in the 5th century. The writings mention forts with names such as Skeptekasas (Seven Houses), Burgulatu (Broad City), Loupofantana (Wolf's Well) and Gemellomountes (Twin Mountains). A Byzantine chronicle of 586 about an incursion against the Avars in the eastern Balkans may contain one of the earliest references to Vlachs. The account states that when the baggage carried by a mule slipped, the muleteer shouted, "Torna, torna, fratre!" ("Return, return, brother!"). However the account might just be a recording of one of the last appearances of Latin (Vulgar Latin). Blachernae, the suburb of Constantinople, was named after a certain Duke from Scythia named "Blachernos". His name may be linked with the name "Blachs" (Vlachs).


In 1185, two Vlach noble brothers from Tarnovo named Peter and Asen led a Bulgarian revolt against Byzantine Greek rule and declared Tsar Peter II (also known as Theodore Peter) as king of the reborn state. The following year, the Byzantines were forced to recognize Bulgaria's independence and the Second Bulgarian Empire was established. Peter styled himself "Tsar of the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Vlachs", though the reference to Vlachs in the style fell out by the early 13th century.


The first Bulgaria’s census (in 1881) recorded circa 50,000 of those who declared themselves as Vlachs (what was 2,5% of total Bulgaria’s population). Half of them lived in the district of Vidin. According to Bulgaria’s census of 1891 there were 2,300 those who have been of Aromanian identity. However, it is believed by the scholars that at that time have been circa 5000 of them, while in the first decade of the next century Bulgaria had around 7000 Aromanians including and those who came to Bulgaria in summer time. The census of 1910 showed 96,502 native Romanian speakers of whom there were 80,000 Romanians. The number of Aromanians/Vlachs among them is not known. It is estimated that after 1913 there were 16,000 Aromanians in Bulgaria. Census of 1926 recorded only 1,550 Vlachs and 10,648 Aromanians, out of 83,747 Romanian native speakers. According to the census of 1992, there were 5,159 citizens of Vlach minority group, but also 6,715 those whose mother tongue was Vlach/Aromanian out of 8,487,317 Bulgaria’s citizens.


As a result of democratic orientation of Bulgarian minority policy after 1989, two neo-Latin speaking groups (Aromanians and Romanians) who composed one legal minority group in Bulgaria (the Vlachs) became more active in establishing their own cultural (but still not political) organizations. Consequently, today there is no Vlach political party in Bulgaria, but only cultural-educational Association of Vlachs in Bulgaria (registered in 1992) with the main task to slow down Vlach assimilation by promotion of Vlach ethno-cultural characteristics.

The Vlachs of Serbia

The Vlachs of Serbia (endonym: Rumâni, Serbian: Vlasi) are an ethnic minority of Serbia, culturally and linguistically related to Romanians. Vlachs mostly live in eastern Serbia, mainly in Timočka Krajina region (roughly corresponding to Bor and Zaječar districts), but also in Braničevo and Pomoravlje districts. Also a small Vlach population exists in Smederevo and Velika Plana (Podunavlje District), and in the municipalities of Aleksinac and Kruševac (Rasina District), as well as in the South Banat District in Vojvodina.


As Romance-speakers the Vlachs can relate to the Roman ruins (forts, roads, palaces, graves, baths, aqueducts, mines, half-buried cities, etc.) that are scattered in NE Serbia, as indeed they are throughout the entire Balkan Peninsula. Following Roman withdrawal from Dacia in the third century, much of what is now Serbia and Bulgaria was renamed Dacia Aureliana (later Dacia Ripensis), and an undetermined number of Romanized Dacians was settled there. Strong Roman presence in the region persisted through the end of Justinian's reign in the 6th century. The Vlach region of NE Serbia was part of the 12th-13th century Bulgaro-Vlach empire of the Assens, who were themselves Vlach. The chroniclers of the Crusaders describe meeting with Vlachs in the 12th and 13th century in various parts of what is now Serbia. Serbian documents from the 13th and 14th century mention Vlachs, including Tsar Dushan's famous prohibition of intermarriage between Serbs and Vlachs. Fourteenth and fifteenth century Romanian (Valachian) rulers built churches in NE Serbia. Fifteenth century Turkish tax records (defters) list Vlachs in the region of Branicevo in NE Serbia, near the ancient Roman municipium and colonia of Viminacium. The 16th-17th century warlord Baba Novac (Starina Novak), who served as Michael the Brave's general, was born in NE Serbia. Thus the modern descendants of all these people can be held to originate south of the Danube. Starting in the early 18th century NE Serbia was settled by Romanians (then known by their international exonym as Vlachs) from Banat, parts of Transylvania, and Oltenia (Lesser Walachia).


The Vlach language spoken by the Vlachs is made out of dialects similar to the Romanian dialects from the adjunct regions of Romania: one major group of Vlachs speaks the Oltenian dialect, while that of the other major group speaks a dialect similar to the Romanian dialect of Banat. Vlachs are divided into many groups, each speaking their own variant:
* the Ţărani (Serbian: Carani)
* the Ungureni or Ungureani (Serbian: Ungurjani)
* Ungureni Munteni (Serbian: Ungurjani-Munćani), meaning: "the Ungureni from the mountains"
* Bufani - immigrants from Lesser Walachia (Oltenia)


In the 2002 census 40,054 people in Serbia declared themselves ethnic Vlachs, and 54,818 people declared themselves speakers of the Vlach language. The Vlachs of Serbia are recognized as a minority, like the Romanians of Serbia, which number 34,576 according to the 2002 census. Despite their recognition as a separate ethnic group by the Serbian government, Vlachs are cognate to Romanians in the cultural and linguistic sense. Some Romanians, as well as international linguists and anthropologists, consider Serbia's Vlachs to be a subgroup of Romanians.

The Aromanians

The Aromanians (Macedo-Romanians or Macedo-Rumans; in Aromanian they call themselves Armãnji, Armin, Rrãmãnji, Arumâni, Armâni, or Vlaçi; Romanian: Aromâni) are a people living throughout the southern Balkans, especially in northern Greece, Albania, Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria, and as an emigrant community in Romania (Dobruja). They are the second most populous group of Vlachs, behind modern-day Romanians (Vlachs was a term used in the Medieval Balkans, as an exonym for all the Romanic people of the region, but nowadays, it is commonly used only for the Aromanians and Meglenites, the Romanians being named Vlachs only in historical context). They speak the Aromanian language, a Romance language typically classed as distinct from Romanian proper, or Daco-Romanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own. Due to the common language foundations, dating from the times of Latin language, historians believe that the language link with Romanian was interrupted between the 7th and 9th centuries.


Nominated according to the geographic area, Aromanians are grouped into several "branches": "Pindians" (Aromanian "Pindenji" concentrated in and around the Pindus Mountains of Northern and Central Greece, Western region of Macedonia, and Southern Albania) "Gramustians" (Aromanian "Yrãmushcianji" from Gramos Mountains, an isolated area in the westernmost region of the Greek province of Macedonia near the borders with Epirus), "Muzachiars" (Aromanian "Muzachirenji" from Muzachia) "Farsherots" (Aromanian "Fãrsherotii" from Pharsala, concentrated in Epirus), "Moscopolitans" (Aromanian "Moscopoleanji" from the City of Moscopole; once an important urban center of the Balkans).


In Greece, Aromanians are not regarded as an ethnic minority, since they do not proclaim a non-Hellenic national identity, instead being considered Latin-speaking Greeks. Their origins are disputed. The Romanian hypothesis contends that Aromanians came to northern Greece from the Danube region; the opposing Greco-Aromanian theory is that they descend from the Romanised, local Greek population. Other theories on the possible origins of Greco-Aromanians describe them as:
* The descendants of Roman colonizers and soldiers, who would receive agricultural lands as payments for their services,
* A branch of Daco-Romanian,
* Descendants of ancient Thracians or Illyrians,
* Latinised Greeks as mercenary soldiers of the Roman legions.

It is however clear that until the 7th - 9th century, Romanians and Aromanians spoke the same eastern variant of Vulgar Latin, often known as Proto-Romanian.


In the Middle Ages, Aromanians created semi-autonomous states on the territory of modern Greece, such as Great Wallachia, Small Wallachia and Upper Wallachia. Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish Jew who travelled through south-eastern Europe and the Middle East between 1159 and 1173, alludes to the Vlachs in The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. He claimed that they enjoyed some measure of independence on their Valachian mountain tops. Aromanians played an important role in the independence wars of various Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Albania and Greece, against the Ottoman Empire. But also in 1905 the Aromanians were acknowledged as a separate nation (millet) of the Ottoman Empire, allowing them to have their own schools and liturgy in their own Aromanian language. This happened during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second, when the Aromanians even got their own representatives in the Great Porte. The day of the signing of the so-called Aromanian Iradeo or Turkish Irade, 23 of May is celebrated as the National Day of the Aromanians from the whole world and is celebrated as an official holiday in Macedonia. In 1941, after the Nazi occupation of Greece, some Aromanian nationalists created an autonomous Vlach state under Fascist Italian control: the Principality of Pindus and Voivodship of Macedonia. After the fall of Communism, the Aromanian nation formed its own cultural and political societies in the Balkans and started its new national re-awakening.


Aromanian Flag
In Greece, Aromanians are not regarded as an ethnic but as a linguistic -albeit unrecognized officially- minority, since most of them express an ethnic Greek identity. Generally, the use of the minority languages has been discouraged, although recently, there have been efforts from the Greek presidency to preserve endangered languages (including Aromanian). It is difficult to estimate the exact number of Aromanians, as no Greek census has recorded mother tongue statistics since 1951. Estimates on the number of Aromanians in Greece range between 40,000 to 200,000.

The second largest Aromanian community lives in Albania, counting between 100,000 and 200,000 people. There are currently timid attempts to establish education in their native language in the town of Divjaka. The Aromanians, under the name "Vlachs", are a recognised national minority in the Albanian constitution.


Spread of Aromanians in Albania:
* (Red) Aromanians are the exclusive population in the settelement
* (Yellow) Aromanians form a majority or a substantial minority in the settlement

According to official government figures, there are 8,467 Aromanians in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, even though other sources estimate their numbers as high as 20,000 or even more than 100.000 according to their associations' and other estimates. The Aromanians are recognized as an ethnic minority, and are hence represented in parliament and enjoy ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious rights and the right to education in their language.


Spread of Aromanians in the Republic of Macedonia:
* (Green) Localities where Aromanians are an officially recognized minority group
* (Blue) Other localities with an Aromanian population
* (Yellow) Areas where Megleno-Romanians are concentrated

Since the Middle Ages, due to the Turkish occupation and the destruction of their cities, such as Moscopole, many Aromanians fled their homeland in the Balkans to settle the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which had a similar language and a certain degree of autonomy from the Turks. These immigrant Aromanians were assimilated into the Romanian population. In 1860, the Romanian government opened almost 100 schools in Greece and the Ottoman territories of Macedonia and Albania in an attempt to inculcate a sense of modern Romanian national identity in a population which historically identified with the Byzantine tradition. In 1925, 47 years after Dobruja was incorporated into Romania, the Romanian King gave the Aromanians land to settle in this region, which resulted in a significant migration of Aromanians into Romania. There are currently between 25,000 and 50,000 Aromanians in Romania, most of which are concentrated in Dobruja. Due to their cultural closeness to ethnic Romanians, most of them do not consider themselves to be a distinct ethnic minority but rather a "cultural minority".