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

Asterios Koukoudis research archive donation to Central Public Library of Veria

Αστέριος Κουκούδης All the records and the copyrights from the books and writings of the historian Asterios Koukoudis are from now on at the Public Library of Veria, on his request which was emplemented after his early death. The Public Library of Veria has the obligation, after the acceptance of the inheritance, to staff a special research department about the Vlachs. The website vlachs.gr will remain active and will be updated under the supervision of Mr. Dimitris Koukoudis.

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.

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).