Αστέριος Κουκούδης - Μελέτες για τους Βλάχους - Asterios I. Koykoudis

Introduction to the English edition

When I first took up the study of the Vlachs, my investigations were much more in the nature of a personal quest. I was looking for my own roots with the kind of curiosity anyone might feel about his or her ancestry. I eventually came to be more interested in the distant origins of the Vlachs themselves, having realised that, whatever those origins might be, they do not necessarily invest the Vlachs with a collective identity.
From this point onwards, the challenge for me was to paint a portrait of the Vlachs that rose above the political prejudices old and new which prevent others from seeing them as they really are. What I wanted to do was to demolish the stereotypical view of them as either a small, insignificant, marginal group of traditional pastoral nomads or a still unliberated ethnic minority in need of protection. It seemed to me that the best way of answering the fundamental question of "Who are the Vlachs?" was to make a historical record of all their villages and settlements and to portray their many and various intracommunal groups and distinctions, together with an account of their dispersal throughout the Balkans after the watershed year of 1769. My aim was to show the diverse identity which they themselves evolved (under the influence, of course, of their environment) from the first mediaeval references until the early twentieth century, when political interference in the general view of the Vlachs, nationalism, and the concomitant propaganda became serious factors in the games that were being played over the fate of the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans.

Foreword by the President of the Hellenic Republic

At first glance, Asterios Koukoudis’s Studies on the Vlachs is a huge index of all the Vlach villages in the southern Balkans, an index that includes a historical review of the ancestral Vlach villages and a lengthier account of the history of the Vlach villages in Central Macedonia. In order to amass this vast quantity of material, Mr Koukoudis worked not only in libraries and archives, but with the Vlachs themselves. The sheer volume of material alone makes this work commendable; but its contribution to the history of the Vlachs is much greater.

Introduction, assessment, conclusions

When I used to go to my mother’s village in Roumlouki, I remember how my Grekos grandad, barba-Dziordzi, would ask me: ‘What are you, lad, a Romios or a Vlahos?’. And in Veria, my Vlach grandad, lala-Steryios, would ask me in Vlach: ‘Tse hi tini, Armin ia Grek?’ (What are you, an Aroumanian or a Grekos?). And, anxious not to disappoint either of them, I would give each the answer he wanted to hear. It was years later that I realised that they both wanted me to say the same thing, but each wanted to hear it in his own language.
I remember when I was a little lad running about in the backstreets of Veria, my Vlach grandmother, teta-Hryssoula, wouldn’t turn her head or answer me if I called her yaya (‘granny’ in Greek) by mistake. She was absolutely determined that her grandchildren — even the children of her Greek-speaking daughters-in-law — should learn to call her mana mari (‘grandmother’ in Vlach). Nor would she let us call lala-Steryios, her husband, pappou (‘grandad’ in Greek). She wanted us to call him afendi, which was the correct way for Vlach children to address their father’s father. Lala-Steryios liked us to call him afendi, but he didn’t insist on it. But since she couldn’t teach us to speak Vlach, teta-Hryssoula definitely wanted us to call her mana mari. Her insistence on this was even greater if we called her yaya by mistake in front of her Vlach friends in the neighbourhood where my father grew up. And she had her way. None of her grandchildren ever called her yaya. To us, even when she wasn’t there, she was mana mari, and that’s what we called her and how we referred to her, arousing the curiosity of people who didn’t know what mana mari meant. When I grew up and wanted to learn Vlach, I tried to persuade her to speak Vlach to me, but, as she said herself, it was too late. We couldn’t really have a proper conversation, and teta-Hryssoula would talk to me in Greek. It was only when she wanted to keep some little secret from my mother or when she was in a good mood that she’d speak to me in Vlach, hoping I’d understand. But she was right, it was too late.