Question about who is Croatian

[WFHermans]

I wonder if

1. there are Croatians who are orthodox
2. there are Serbs who are catholic

I would be grateful if a Croatian could answer those questions.

[Slavic Enforcer]

I wonder if

1. there are Croatians who are orthodox

Yes, but that's like Bavarians who are Protestants, IMO.

2. there are Serbs who are catholic

Well, the SPC (Serbian Orthodox Church) says that a Serb who's not an Orthodox Christian, is not a Serb.
But in reality there are some Catholic Serbs, but that's also like in the mentioned example of Bavarians and Protestants, they are rare.

Best Regards.

[Pablo Escobar]

In the last 100-150 years religious identity mostly erradicated original ethnic identity, so Catholic Serbs became Croats, while Orthodox Croats became Serbs. I mostly blame the Serbian Orthodox church for this.

During WW2 many Orthodox Serbs and Croats were forced to convert to Catholicism or die.

How very christian of them, all of them.

[Jebivjetar]

I wonder if

1. there are Croatians who are orthodox

AFAIK, no.

Ethnic groups:
Croat 89.6%, Serb 4.5%, other 5.9% (including Bosniak, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, and Roma) (2001 census)

Religions:
Roman Catholic 87.8%, Orthodox 4.4%, other Christian 0.4%, Muslim 1.3%, other and unspecified 0.9%, none 5.2% (2001 census)

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/hr.html

[Slavic Enforcer]

AFAIK, no.

What's with Dado Prso?

Isn't he Orthodox?

[Ace Rimmer]

I agree with 1st reply of Kid Kash.

I believe Mile Dedaković Jastreb , commander of Vukovar defense is also Orthodox.

[Jebivjetar]

What's with Dado Prso?

Isn't he Orthodox?
I'm not sure.

Anyway, those few exceptions are assimilated Serbs and other minorities.

[Slavic Enforcer]

I believe Mile Dedaković Jastreb , commander of Vukovar defense is also Orthodox.

I don't know if it's true, but I know that the former Croatian Minister of Defence Gojko Susak said on TV (in '91) that the Croatian soldiers in Vukovar are led by the Croatian Serb Mile Dedakovic.
Dedakovic wasn't amused (at least they wrote that in a magazine).

[Ace Rimmer]

Yes I remember, he was simply Orthodox Croatian, nothing to do with Serbhood,
there are negligible number of people who are Croats of Orthodox confession.

[Jebivjetar]

Yes I remember, he was simply Orthodox Croatian, nothing to do with Serbhood,
there are negligible number of people who are Croats of Orthodox confession.
It is quite obvious he has at least some family connection with Serbhood, just look at his name and surname. On the other hand he proved to be far more loyal to his Croatian homeland than many other Croats.

[Watzy]

Orthodox Croat Svetozar Boroević von Bojna:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Boroevic.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetozar_Boroevic_von_Bojna

http://www.geocities.com/veldes1/boroevic.html

[Pablo Escobar]

Borojević??? Hrvat?

Nema šansone.

[Watzy]

Borojević??? Hrvat?

Nema šansone.

"After the war he, as a convinced Croat, decided to become a citizen of the new created SHS-state but he was not welcomed there and so he was forced to return to Austria. Considering his first decision he now received a pension from neither Austria nor from Yugoslavia and had to live in somewhat reduced circumstances. His only income was a honorarium from the chapter of the Military Maria Theresian Order. On the 23rd May 1920 Feldmarschall Svetozar Boroević von Bojna died after an apoplexy in a hospital at Klagenfurt."

http://www.austro-hungarian-army.co.uk/biog/boroevic.htm

"...in early November 1918, Boroevic offered his services to Croat representatives in Belgrade."

http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/boroevic.htm

He advanced quickly through the ranks (corporal in 1872, lieutenant in 1875) and became a commander in the Croatian Home Defense (he regarded himself as an Orthodox Croat).

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Svetozar_Boroevic

Borojević se našao na meti talijanskih propagandista i Jugoslavenskog odbora...

Zbog situacije u kojoj se našao uspoređivan je i s Jelačićem...

...kao uvjereni Hrvat i visoki austrougarski časnik, bio je nepoželjan u jugoslavenskoj državi, te mu je zahtjev odbijen...

http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetozar_Borojevi%C4%87

[Watzy]

Not onlly he was a Croat, but also an anti-Serb like me!

[Pablo Escobar]

Not onlly he was a Croat, but also an anti-Serb like me!

You mean, you're a croatized Serb too? :222:

[Watzy]

You mean, you're a croatized Serb too? :222:

Boroevic's ancestors weren't Serbs but Orthodox Vlachs - many of them declared as Croats before the first Yugoslavia - so Boroevic's ancestors weren't necessarily amongst those who declared as Serbs. Serbianism in Croatia is of relatively recent date.

[Pablo Escobar]

We have gone through this 'vlach' theme at least 20 times.

It's a label which has nothing to do with ethnicity... sort of like 'Vikings', 'Tatar' or 'Soviets' is often mistaken for an ethnic label.

In the east of Serbia, a Vlach is an ethnic Romance-speaking person,
in the other areas of the Balkans, 'Vlach' was anyone who was Orthodox.

Similarly there is a people called 'Tatars', but in Europe, the 'Tatars' was a label for all quick horsemen messengers.

Same thing goes for 'Vikings'... all sorts of people around the Baltic and north seas were 'Vikings', some were Germanic, others were Slavic, Finnic, Balts etc.

[Watzy]

...in the other areas of the Balkans, 'Vlach' was anyone who was Orthodox.

Wrong, most of these people came from Bosnia where they constituted recently Slavicized element, and their confession depended upon the Church they attended. Most of Vlacks were Orthodox but some were Catholic (since the pre-Ottoman Bosnia was largely a Catholic country).

Vlachs who were Orthodox came under the influence of Serb Orthodox Church (especially the privileged Serb Patriarchy of Pech during the Ottoman era) and started to identify them selves with Serb nation in more recent times. In contrast, the Catholic Vlachs ('Vlaji' from Dalmatian hinterland) - are declaring them selves as Croatians, and they constitute the most nationalist part of the Croatian nation.

[Banat]

Well, the SPC (Serbian Orthodox Church) says that a Serb who's not an Orthodox Christian, is not a Serb.

so Catholic Serbs became Croats, while Orthodox Croats became Serbs. I mostly blame the Serbian Orthodox church for this.

This is a very popular statement I often run upon that Serbian Orthodox Church once proclaimed that Serbs can only be of Serbian-Orthodox confession, and thus caused melting Roman-Catholic Serbs into Croats, and Moslem Serbs to become a separate nation. I don't think it is true as I have never heard such attitude of the Church, but rather witnessed quite the opposite one.

As for Orthodox Croats, I think they were quite rare after 1054AD, if there were any at all, since the Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox borderline went over Serbian ethnic body, so that they were as numerous as, say, Orthodox Hungarians, or Roman-Catholic Greeks for instance. Serbian Orthodoxy in Croatia was established by Serbian incomers to Military Border, and the only real Orthodox Croats could have been converters from Roman-Catholicism.

[Watzy]

Megallj ! Megallj ! Kutya Szerbia! Lófasz a seggedbe!

[Banat]

We have gone through this 'vlach' theme at least 20 times...

Yeah, it's become quite boring.

Moslems called all Christians 'vlachs'. Orthodoxes called Catholics 'latins', while the Catholics called Orthodoxes 'vlachs' too, and both of them called Moslems 'turks'. Needless to explain, neither of them were ethnic Latins, Vlachs or Turks. Serbs were officially called 'Illyrians' for more than a hundred years in Austria, by Byzantium as 'Tribals', and by Hungarians as 'Raczs'.

'Vlach' is a nomad, a shepherd, and the term is derived from the name of Slavic god of nomads and cattle Veles, Vles or Voloch. The very term 'Vlach' with a capital V is used to describe Romance-speaking minority in Eastern Serbia, and in the past Romanians in general. The mixed use of the term probably originates from the distant past when the only remnants of Romance-speaking peoples of Balkans were 'vlachs', that is - nomads.

Similarly there is a people called 'Tatars', but in Europe, the 'Tatars' was a label for all quick horsemen messengers.

Yes, the term was since recently used to describe messengers.

[Ace Rimmer]

As for Orthodox Croats, I think they were quite rare after 1054AD, if there were any at all, since the Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox borderline went over Serbian ethnic body, so that they were as numerous as, say, Orthodox Hungarians, or Roman-Catholic Greeks for instance.

I believe that in 1054AD none of the discussed nations were fully formed,
on the contrary, they were far from sense of ethnic belonging as we know it today.
So it is wrong to speak of Serb , Croatian or any ethnic body in 1054AD and equally wrong is to speak on borderlines in this period.

As for Orthodox Croats, I think they were quite rare after 1054AD, if there were any at all,

We see from USA immigration documents that they were represented even in 20's from previous century.

Serbian Orthodoxy in Croatia was established by Serbian incomers to Military Border, and the only real Orthodox Croats could have been converters from Roman-Catholicism.

It is believed that Serbian identity of Orthodox military border settlers
is of much recent date.

[WFHermans]

Thanks for all your useful information, this has been very helpful to me.

In English and German, the term Vlach only means the language, and the people that speak the language, as far as I know. I never read the word in another meaning than that of language.

[Banat]

I believe that in 1054AD none of the discussed nations were fully formed,
on the contrary, they were far from sense of ethnic belonging as we know it today.
So it is wrong to speak of Serb , Croatian or any ethnic body in 1054AD and equally wrong is to speak on borderlines in this period.

Well, I mentioned the year 1054AD only because prior to the Great Schism there weren't the two churches, but only "Greek" and "Latin" rites. The 'borderline' I mentioned wasn't a clear line or a border in modern sense, of course, but more the belt in which going from one side to the other the presence of one church increased, and the presence of the other diminished to extinction, and the other way around.

[Pablo Escobar]

I believe that in 1054AD none of the discussed nations were fully formed,
on the contrary, they were far from sense of ethnic belonging as we know it today.

Actually, back in medieval times the ethnic identity was a bit closer to what it is today. The decline of these ethnic identities happened during foreign rule over Balkan peoples.


So it is wrong to speak of Serb , Croatian or any ethnic body in 1054AD and equally wrong is to speak on borderlines in this period.

Not really. It depends from area to area. Croats were conquered and held by Hungarians from X-XIX centuries, while Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Greeks etc. were under Turkish rule mostly from XVI-XIX centuries.

That's the time when religious and tribal identity became more important than the previous identities which were closely connected to the rulling Serb, Greek, Bulgarian etc. monarchs.

[Pablo Escobar]

Thanks for all your useful information, this has been very helpful to me.

In English and German, the term Vlach only means the language, and the people that speak the language, as far as I know. I never read the word in another meaning than that of language.

Well, that's a matter of common ignorance.
In a similar way, people outside Britain have no clue who are the Welsh people,
most people think Germans and Austrians are two completely different people.
Heck, I've even seen official documents mentioning a 'brazillian' language.

[Watzy]

We have gone through this 'vlach' theme at least 20 times.

As long as Serbs will negate non-Serbian origin of the Orthodox dwellers of Croatia and Bosnia, the Vlach theme shall have to be repeated over and over again - that means forever.

[Pablo Escobar]

As long as Serbs will negate non-Serbian origin of the Orthodox dwellers of Croatia and Bosnia, the Vlach theme shall have to be repeated over and over again - that means forever.

Yeah, I noticed you dislike truth and tend to repeat lies
for mere propaganda purposes. Too bad for you nobody is listening.

To whom it may concern, they already know better,
to those who don't care, your little propaganda pieces are worthless text.

[Watzy]

It is believed that Serbian identity of Orthodox military border settlers is of much recent date.

One of the characteristics of the Eastern or Orthodox Church is religious exclusivism. These distinctions relate to the Serbian Orthodox Church. From the 12th century, since the founder St. Sava, its first and last ideologist, persecutes and endeavors to destroy other faiths, principally the Catholic faith and Islam from the 19th century. The fundamental characteristics of the teachings of St. Sava, include: equalization and a narrow tie between the Serbian State and Church, national and religious exclusivism, destruction of all members of other nations and faiths, the stealing of pocessions and conquering of territories all resulting in religious, national, and political exclusivism and intolerance. The Serbian Orthodox Church utilized such politics by transferring Catholic Montenegro into Orthodoxism and by settling Bosnia, Herzegovina and part of Croatia with Orthodox Vlachs (cattle-ranchers with non Slavic roots or Roman or Illyrian origin and later transforming them into Serbians as a nation in the 19th and 20th centuries).

The Vlachs, as servants to the Turkish Ottomans, aided in conquering Bosnia, Herzegovina, parts of Croatia, and southern Hungary. When the Turks grew weaker at the end of the 15th century, they crossed over to serve Austria demanding special rights, religious freedom, land, and the right to loot and persecute surrounding nations. Thus, it is mentioned already in 1630 that the Orthodox Vlachs took advantage of the privileges of the Austrian authority in Croatia and began to banish native Catholics, claiming that the King gave land only to the Vlachs.

In the second half of the 19th century, there existed the calculated and organized politics of the Serbian government and Orthodox Church to transform the non-Slav, Orthodox Vlachs into aggressive, national, conscious Serbs. The Vlachs were peaceful peasant cattle-farmers who had considered Croatia their homeland and called themselves Orthodox Croatians. In Pakrac, in Slavonia, an area settled by a great number of Vlachs, called "Little Vlaska", in 1876 there existed a Serbian conspiracy to liquidate all Croatian Catholics.8

When Serbia and Montenegro gained independence at the Berlin Congress in 1878, they were forced to disclaim Bosnia and Herzegovina which was occupied by Austria-Hungary. The territory of the former Croatian Military Border, part of Croatia until Austria occupied it with Vlachs, was returned to Croatia in 1881. Given that quite a number of Vlachs resided in these lands and began to consider themselves Serbians, Serbia began a specific task of Serbianizing the surrounding non-Serbian lands and then by joining the lands with the expanded Serbian state.

At the Croatian Parliament in 1861, Serbians requested equality for their language, a separate script- Cyrillic, 29 and separate religious schools through cultural autonomy. They were granted all of this 1887. However, at the end of the century, when the process of transforming the Orthodox Vlachs into nationally conscious Serbians, more and more demands for political autonomy and the separation of territory for the emigrated Serbians were emphasized.

http://www.hic.hr/books/seeurope/005e-pavlicevic.htm

[Watzy]

The Vlachs in Bosnia

by Noel Malcolm

Although there are many recorded cases of Catholics being converted to Orthodoxy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bosnia, it is clear that this spread of the Orthodox Church did not happen by conversion alone. In the areas where Orthodoxy made its most striking gains, especially in northern Bosnia, the same period saw a large influx of settlers from Orthodox lands. It was evidently deliberate policy on the part of the Ottomans to fill up territory which had been depopulated, either by war or by plague. There are signs in the earliest defters (Turkish tax records) of groups of Christian herdsman, identifiable as Vlachs, being settled in devasted areas of eastern Hercegovinia.

In the defters of the 1470s and 1480s they can be seen spreading into central and north-central Bosnia, in the regions round Visoko and Maglaj: soon after 1476, for example, roughly 800 Vlach families were settled in the Maglaj district, accompanied by two Orthodox priests. The number of Vlachs in north-central and north-east Bosnia continued to grow over the next fifty years, and they began to spread into north-west Bosnia too.

During the wars of the early sixteenth century more areas of northern Bosnia became depopulated as Catholics fled into Hapsburg territory. Since it was particularly important for the Ottomans not to leave land empty close to the military border, there were large new influxes of Vlach settlers from Hercegovina and Serbia. Further movements into this area took place throughout the sixteenth century; plague, as well as war, left demographic gaps which needed to be filled.

As early as 1530, when the Habsburg official Benedict Kuripe?ic travelled through Bosnia, he was able to report that the country was inhabited by three peoples, One was the Turks, who ruled "with great tyranny" over the Christians. Another was "the old Bosnians, who are of the Roman Catholic faith." And the third were "Serbs, who call themselves Vlachs . . . They came from Smederovo and Belgrade." So important was the Vlach element in the creation of this Bosnian Orthodox population that, three centuries later, the term "Vlach" was still being used in Bosnia to mean "member of the Orthodox Church."

Of course, non-Vlach Serbians and Hercegovinans also took part in this process of settlement. The problem of distinguishing them, and of saying what the term "Vlach" meant during this period, will be discussed below. But it is clear that Vlachs, as a distinctive ethnic and cultural group, played a major role. The Vlachs were particularly suitable for the Ottoman government's purposes, not only because they were mobile (their typical occupations were shepherding, horse-breeding and organizing transport for traders), but also because they had a strong military tradition. Special arrangements were made to induce them to move to the Ottoman-Habsburg border: the tax on sheep was reduced for those living in the border region, and their leaders were granted large timars (land holdings). Although they received no military salary, they were entitled to carry arms and expected to fulfil a military role; in place of a salary, they were permitted to plunder enemy territory. Known by the terms "martolos" or "vojnuk", they became the most feared element in the Ottoman military machine.

At the same time, Vlachs and Serbs who had fled northwards from the Ottoman advance in the fifteenth century, and who had similar military traditions, began to be organized by the Habsburgs on the other side of this fluid and shifting border. Vlachs from inside Bosnia also crossed the border to join them; the three reasons given by Benedict Kuripesic for the depopulation of Bosnia in the early sixteenth century were plague, the devshirme (collection of male Christian children), and the flight of the Serb-Vlach martolosi across the border. In 1527, after his election as King of Hungary and Croatia, Ferdinand I of Austria established a formal system of land-holdings and military duties for them. They were free of feudal obligations, permitted a share of booty, allowed to elect their own captains (vojvode) and magistrates (knezovi), and free to practise Orthodox Christianity. In this way, a special system of land tenure and military organization grew up under the Habsburgs, the so-called Militargrenze or vojna krajina (military border), which was eventually to involve a strip of territory twenty to sixty miles wide and a thousand miles long. The borderers or Grenzer on the north and north-western frontier of Bosnia, equally renowned for their military prowess and ferocity, were known as "Vlachs" or "Morlachs", and in 1630 their privileges were re-established by Ferdinand II in a document known as the "Law of the Vlachs" -- "Statuta Valachorum". Apart from the big set-piece compaigns, the military struggle between Ottoman and Habsburg on this border consisted mainly, year in, year out, of Vlachs fighting Vlachs.

Who were the Vlachs, and where, originally, did they come from? This is one of the most vexed questions in Balkan history. Vlachs are found today scattered over many parts of the Balkans; the biggest concentration is in the Pindus mountains of northern Greece, but there are also Vlachs in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Serbia, as well as the remnants of a Vlach population in the Istrian peninsula. Tradtionally they were herdsmen and shepherds practising a form of semi-nomadism called transhumance, in which flocks are moved, sometimes over great distances, between a regular summer pasture in the mountains and a regular winter pasture elsewhere. Some grew rich from the products of their pastoral life: wool, cheese and livestock. Many also became well known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as merchants and international traders.

These occupations have changed very little over the centuries; one twelfth-century Byzantine poem refers to Vlach cheese, which was famous in Constantinople, and to a Vlach cloak, the large black sleeveless cape (talagan or tambari) which can still be seen on the shoulders of Balkan shepherds. Other Byzantine writers refer to to the transhumance of the Vlachs, and medieval Serbian documents refer to them as shepherds and kjelatori -- a version of the Latin calator, "packhorse-leader", surviving in modern Vlach as calator, "traveller". Their only other distinctive occupation at that period was fighting: as hardy mountain-dwellers they were valued for their stamina, and their supply of horses made them useful adjuncts to any military campaign. The Byzantine authorities seem not to have trusted them very much, and generally used them as auxiliaries; sometimes they functioned as quite independent irregular troops. But there are also references to an entire regiment of Vlach infantry in an early fourteenth-century Byzantine army.

In the early records the Vlachs are often a rather shadowy, passing presense. They moved from area to area, speaking the local language and merging into the local population: there are references in late Byzantine documents to "Bulgaro-Albano-Vlachs" and even "Serbo-Albano-Bulgaro-Vlacs". Other names for them include the Byzantine Greek "Mavrovlachos", "black Vlach", from which "Morlach" was derived, and the modern Greek "Koutsovlachos", literally "limping Vlach", which may be a folk-etymologized version ot the Turkish kucuk eflak, "little Vlach". the word "Vlach" itself comes from a term used by the early Slavs for those peoples they encountered who spoke Latin or Latinate languages: hence also "Wallachian", "Walloon" and and (by a more roundabout application) "Welsh".

There is no definite historical record of the Vlachs before the late tenth century. Before that, the only evidence which can be drawn on is linguistic. The Vlach language is a Latin language, very closely related to Romanian: linguists call it "Macedo-Romanian", and the Romanian of Romania "Daco-Romanian". Obviously it was the product of the Roman colonization of the Balkans, and had a continuous existence there, being encountered by the Slavs on their arrival in the sixth and seventh centuries. But the Roman empire in the Balkans covered a wide area, and this has given plenty of scope for modern nationalist historians to locate the origins of the Vlachs in whichever area they prefer: thus Greeks claim that the Vlachs are Romanized Greeks, Bulgarians say they are Romanized Dacians (and/or descendants of Roman legionaries in Dacia: it does not matter which, so long as they were there before the arrival of the Hungarians).

By far the most picturesque -- and preposterous -- theory is the one put forward by the distinguished Croat historian Father Mandic, who, investigating the origins of the Vlach-Serbs of Bosnia, has concluded that they were originally from Morocco. This, he thinks, would explain the Byzantine Greek word "Mavrovlachos" or "black Vlach": a reference to their dark, Moorish faces. His theory is that they are the descendants of Roman legionaries from Mauretania (modern Morocco) who were stationed in the Balkans. It is true that large numbers of legionaries were settled there by the Romans; but they included, as we have seen, people from all over the Empire. Of the only two military colonies of Mauretanians mentioned by Mandic, one was near the Black Sea in Bessarabia, and the other was on the river Inn, near Vienna. That is hardly a sufficient starting-point for an entire population in the southern Balkans. Though it will of course delight modern anti-Serb nationalists in Bosnia to learn that the Bosnian Serbs are really Africans (and it certainly trumps the modern Serb prejudice towards Albanians, which tends to treat them as if they were dark-faced people from the Third World), the theory cannot possibly be correct.

The true origin of the Vlachs can be worked out, however, from the linguistic evidence. The Vlach-Romanian language (which was a single language until the two main forms of it began to diverge in the early middle ages) has a large number of special features in common with Albanian. These include fundamental matters of grammar and syntax, a number of special idioms, and a core vocabulary of words connected with pastoral life. Albanian, the one survivor of the languages of the Illyrian tribes, also contains a huge number of words borrowed from Latin, indicating close contact with a Latinized population throughout the Roman period. A combination of historical linguistics, the study of place-names and the history of the Roman Empire yields the fairly certain conclusion that the heartland where both these languages developed was an area stretching from northern Albania through Kosovo and south-central Serbia: it may also have included parts of northern Macedonia and western Bulgaria. Most of the Romanized and Latin-speaking population of this area (whose version of Latin was influenced by their own language, Illyrian) was dispersed, destroyed or assimilated by the invasions of the dark ages, especially those of the Slavs. A remnant which practised pastoralism was able to survive in the mountains, unaffected by the Slavs' takeover of settled agriculture; and in the more remote mountains (especially those of northern Albania) it was also in close contact with an even earlier remnant, which still spoke the Illyrian language, albeit a version of Illyrian which had become heavily infused with Latin after centuries of contact. That is the explanation accepted by nearly all the independent scholars who have studied this question; unfortunately the issue has been bedevilled by misplaced national pride on the part of Romanian writers, who cannot accept that the first speakers of Romanian came from south of the Danube.

Since this northern Albanian and southern Serbian region was the original heartland of the Vlachs, it is not surprising that they should have spread out into the nearby uplands of Hercegovina from an early period. From there they moved northwards through the mountainous Dalmatian hinterland, where they are found tending flocks (and bringing them down to the coastal lands in the winter) as early as the twelfth century. There are many references to them in the records of Ragusa and Zadar from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Some of these pastoral Vlachs also penetrated as far as central Bosnia, where medieval place-names in the regions of Sarajevo and Travnik indicate their presence: Vlahinja, Vlaskovo, Vlasic. And many Vlach words connected with pastoral life were absorbed into Bosnian dialects of Serbo-Croat: trze, a late-born lamb, from the Vlach tirdziu, for example, or zarica, a type of cheese, from the Vlach zara. This last word is in fact a version of the Albanian word dhalle, "buttermilk" -- one of many details pointing to the pastoral symbiosis between Vlachs and Albanians, which continued to operate over a long period.

Most of these early Dalmatian and Bosnian Vlachs seem to have led quiet, secluded lives in the mountains. But in Hercegovina itself, where there was a large concentration of Vlachs, a more military and aggressive tradition developed. There are many complaints in Ragusan records of raids by these neighboring Vlachs during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Vlachs of Hercegovina were horse-breeders and caravan-leaders who, when they were not engaged in plunder, grew rich out of the trade between Ragusa and mines of Bosnia; some of them were probably responsible for commissioning the imposing Bosnian stone tombstones or stecci decorated with carvings of horsemen. Their trading links to the east must have brought them more into contact with the Vlach peoples of Serbia and Bulgaria, who had long traditions of military activity in the armies of the Byzantine emperors and Serbian kings.

One of the still unsolved mysteries of this story is the exact significance of the term "Morlach" ("Mavrovlachos", "black Vlach"), and how it came to be used in Hercegovina and Dalmatia. The obvious original meaning was a reference to the black cloaks worn by the Vlachs of the central Balkans (Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, northern Greece): they were also known at various times as "Karagounides" and "Crnogunjci", which literally mean "black-cloaks" in Turco-Greek and Serbian. Possibly a distinct wave of these Vlachs entered Hercegovina and Dalmatia, bringing the name (which they must have acquired in a Greek-speaking area) with them. It was quickly altered by Slav folk-etymology into "Morovlah", meaning "sea-Vlach" (i.e. coastal Vlach). From its use in Dalmatia the term later spread to the Vlachs in Croatia who filled the military border-zone or "krajina" round the north-western shoulder of Bosnia. "Morlacchi" became the standard Venetian name for these people, and region appears as "Morlacchia" on many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps. Because of their fearsome methods of irregular warfare the Morlachs acquired an evil reputation, and were regarded as primitive and brutal people. But all changed in the late eighteenth century when they were visited by an Italian priest, the Abbe Fortis. Inspired by the poetry of Ossian, and accompanied by another enthusiast for heroic poetry and folklore, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Fortis travelled among the Morlachs of the Dalmatian hinterland in search of poetry and primitive virtue. He found both: "The sincerity, trust, and honesty of these poor people...in all the ordinary actions of their life, would be called simplicity and weakness among us," he declared. He also heard plenty of poetry, noting that "A Morlacco travels along the desert mountains singing, especially in the night time, the actions of ancient Slavi Kings, and barons, or some tragic event"; and he observed that "the Bosnian dialect, spoken by the inland Morlacchi, is more harmonious, in my opinion, that the littoral Illyrian". The poem he printed in translation, Hasanaganica ("The Wife of Hasan Aga"), was in fact a Bosnian Muslim song; a short tale of tragic love and misunderstanding, it became one of the most popular specimens of folk poetry in the whole of Europe, and was translated by Goethe, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Mérimée, Pushkin and Lermontov.

Inside Bosnia, the term Morlach was not so much used for the martial Vlachs who went to fill the border areas under the Ottomans. These Vlachs, who came from both Hercegovina and Serbia, were called either Vlachs or martolosi. The latter word referred to their military status, and so could include non-Vlachs too: it was a version of the Greek word for an armed man, armatolos. The Vlachs of Bosnia and Hercegovina had their own system of social and military organization, which is clearly defined in the early Ottoman documents: at the top of each local community was a magistrate or knez (an old Slav term); under him was a mayor or primikur (from the Greek, primikerios); below him was a lagator (from the Greek alagator, the head of a military detachment), and the basic military group was a gonder (from the Greek kontarion, or lance.) As these terms show, the Ottomans simply inherited a system which had been established to serve the armies of the Byzantine Empire. Like the Byzantine and Serbian rulers before them, they gave the Vlachs special tax privileges in return for their military services: the leaders of the Vlachs were given timars and treated virtually as spahis (Turkish cavalrymen), and their people were freed from the basic tax on non-Muslims, the haraç. The Vlachs did, however, pay a special "Vlach tax" -- rusum-i eflak -- consisting mainly of a sheep and a lamb from every household on St. George's day each year. Since they were taxed differently, they were listed differently in the Turkish defters. This enables us to see that in the late fifteenth century there were at least 35,000 Vlachs in Hercegovina, and in the sixteenth century as many as 82,692 mainly Vlach households (including some non-Vlach martolosi, with similar privileges) in the Smederovo region to the south of Belgrade. (Many of the Vlachs in the eastern part of Hercegovina had themselves been moved there by the Turks to repopulate areas devasted by fighting in the 1460s.) These were the main reservoirs of population from which the depopulated lands of northern Bosnia were filled. And because, living in Hercegovina and Serbia, they had long been members of the Orthodox Church, they established the Orthodox presence in that part of Bosnia which has lasted ever since.

How distinct were these Vlachs from the surrounding Slavs? Clearly they had a different status and a different social-military organization. Those who had moved into northern Bosnia could not practise the tradition of long-distance transhumance, and the evidence of sixteenth-century Ottoman decrees on the Vlachs of Bosnia and Hercegovina indicates that the majority of Vlachs were now sedentary; but their way of life still centred on stock-breeding and shepherding. Giovanni Lovrich noted in the 1770s that the Croatian Morlachs all had flocks of 200, 300 or 600 sheep, and when he asked why they were so reluctant to till the soil, they replied: "Our ancestors didn't do it, so neither shall we." Some writers, especially Serbian ones, have argued that the term "Vlach" was used just to mean "shepherd" and did not imply any ethnic or linguistic difference -- so that most of these people were really just Serbs with sheep. This view is rejected by the leading modern expert on Vlachs in the early Ottoman Balkans, who insists that they were regarded as distinct population.

Vlachs have always been bilingual, and since they were never the administrators, the language which has survived in the records is never their own one. But we do have some evidence of its use, apart from the appearance in the records of Vlach personal names such as Ursul and Sarban. Vlachs who moved to an Adriatic island in the fifteenth century were still speaking Vlach there four hundred years later. One sixteenth-century Venetian writer described the Vlachs of the Dalmatian hinterland as speaking "Latin, though in a corrupted form"; shepherds in those mountains were still using Vlach counting-words as recently as 1985. There is other evidence of bilingualism in the seventeenth century, even though the writer Ioannes Lucius (Ivan Lukic) stated that the language had disappeared by then. But of course, having lived for centuries among the Slavs of Hercegovina and Serbia, these Vlachs could be outwardly indistinguishable (in speech and dress) from the ordinary Slavs of those regions. The suggestion that they must have been monoglot Vlachs, because they did not bring the Serbian ekavian dialect when they came from Serbia into northern Bosnia, is certainly false. They spoke whatever the Slavs around them spoke, which may have changed over time in an area as subject to demographic flux as northern Bosnia; and the Vlachs from Hercegovina would have spoken jekavian anyway.

Some attempts have been made to prove that there was still a Vlach-speaking population in Bosnia as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century. Sixteen "Romanian-speaking" villages were mentioned in the 1910 census for Bosnia, and in 1906 an enthusiastic Romanian Vlachophile published an entire about the "Romanian colonies" which he had found there. When the leading German expert on the Vlachs, Professor Weigand, went to check these claims in the following year, he found that the only Vlach villages consisted of people who had migrated from Macedonia in the eighteenth century and had since lost the use of their language. The "Romanian-speaking" villagers, known locally as "Karavlasi" or "black Vlachs", were indeed speaking Romanian; this was because they were not Vlachs at all, but Romanian gypsies from Transylvania.

Finally, it is necessary to point out that there is little sense today in saying that the Bosnian Serbs are "really" Vlachs. Over the centuries many ordinary members of the Serbian Orthodox Church would have crossed the Drina into Bosnia or moved north from Hercegovina; a Serb merchant class also became important in Bosnian towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not all the people who were sent to populate northern Bosnia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Vlach, and since then there have been so many influxes and exoduses in Bosnian history that we cannot possibly calculate precise percentages for the "Vlach" ancestry of the Bosnian Serbs. Nor did the Vlachs contribute only to the Serb population; some (mainly in Croatia) became Catholics, and quite a few were Islamicized in Bosnia. To call someone a Serb today is to use a concept constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries out of a combination of religion, language, history and the person's own sense of identification: modern Bosnian Serbs can properly describe themselves as such, regardless of Vlach ancestry. But it is still slightly piquant to think, when one hears so-called right-wing Russian politicians talking about the need to defend their ancient Slav brothers in Bosnia, that the one component of the Bosnian population which has a large and identifiable element of non-Slav ancestry is the Bosnian Serbs.


http://www.farsarotul.org/nl16_1.htm

[Ace Rimmer]

Actually, back in medieval times the ethnic identity was a bit closer to what it is today. The decline of these ethnic identities happened during foreign rule over Balkan peoples.

How?
I fail to see how some peasant or herdsman at this time with no media, TV or newspapers,
not just that but being illiterate himself, could have been aware of common ethnic belonging
and shared ancestry of any people from Danube to Adriatic sea.

All they knew is which lord is to collect the goods from them.

It was also case that lords and later gentry didn't allow peasantry to carry the name of their masters.

[Watzy]

The feudal elite was the bearer of the political identity while the peasants tied to the land of feudal masters identified them selves as their masters did.

The Vlachs on the other hand were nomads - orthodox savages without identity.

[Boza]

by Byzantium as 'Tribals'



Can you give more information about that 'tribals' thing.

[Pablo Escobar]

Can you give more information about that 'tribals' thing.

The Tribali were a supposedly Illyrian people.

[vojvoda]

The Tribali were a supposedly Illyrian people.

I thought they were Celto-Thracian according to Roman sources. The memory of the Tribali as a once great and powerful tribe continued, even being applied to the later Serb peoples.

[Banat]

Can you give more information about that 'tribals' thing.

Start a question in Serbian section, it's kind of off-topic here and might be interesting. Until 15th century, Serbs were often called by Byzantium chroniclers as 'Trivaloi', that is 'Tribals'.

[VAMPIR]

For all those who are not from former YU, one note: Serbs and Croats are one blood separated by Ortodox/Catolicism. If you look by western understanding of nation, answer is YES, there is Ortodox Croats, and Catolic Serbs, but if you look by Slavic understanding, answer is NO. In the Slavic tradition, especially Balkan tradition religion define nation. In that way many people considering Montenegrians as Serbs, 'cause of Ortodox religion.:)

[Zrinski]

Sorry Cernobog but that is not correct. Croats and Serbs were two different people even before they recieved Christianity and before the schism.

[VAMPIR]

Sorry Cernobog but that is not correct. Croats and Serbs were two different people even before they recieved Christianity and before the schism.
How different? What is the famous difference?:confused:
I guess will to be different from each other. :nono:

[Jebivjetar]

For all those who are not from former YU, one note: Serbs and Croats are one blood separated by Ortodox/Catolicism. If you look by western understanding of nation, answer is YES, there is Ortodox Croats, and Catolic Serbs, but if you look by Slavic understanding, answer is NO. In the Slavic tradition, especially Balkan tradition religion define nation. In that way many people considering Montenegrians as Serbs, 'cause of Ortodox religion.:)

Judging by your nickname, I guess you consider yourself a Slav. So by your own definition of a nation you are not Montenegrin but Serb. But you stated several times just the opposite.

Aren't you confused? Just a little bit? :rofl:

[WFHermans]

Language is not blood.

[VAMPIR]

Judging by your nickname, I guess you consider yourself a Slav. So by your own definition of a nation you are not Montenegrin but Serb. But you stated several times just the opposite.

Aren't you confused? Just a little bit? :rofl:
No, I'm not. :) Southern slavs have one root. In that way, we are all one. Language will tell you all. :) But in way of national states, we are all different! Western wiew of nation.
Clear?:hump:

[VAMPIR]

Language is not blood.
What is blood then? I don't speak about taken language(Georgia-Russian), but original peoples language. :nono:

[Watzy]

Southern slavs have one root.

Wrong, they have different roots. Croats came from their ancient state in Poland, and Serbs from somewhere else.

[Ace Rimmer]

This is going off-topic and leading nowhere.