The Vanishing Aromanian - FOREWORD

„Aromanian […]is spoken by half a million people, mainly in parts of northern Greece, Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Bulgaria.” , said Martin Maiden . The Aromanian Question, as Max Dreysuss said in his book , is not new, but has never been solved. Regardless how sensitive and delicate this problem might be, one cannot just be another silent witness to the disappearance of Aromanians, known by so many names . Armân / Makedon-Armân – self definition = identifies their native space, the ancient Macedonia . We use, instead of the well-known Aromanian, the ethnonim armân as defined by their own community: Armân / Makedon-Armân. Even in Romania, who claims they are Romanians, before Weigand coined in 1895 the word Aromanians, the term used was „macedo-român” (Macedo-Romanian). For Romania, they are Romanians and for Greece, they just simply don’t exist. Or, they existed only as enemies, and things are getting worse. Branislav Stefanoski - Al Dabija told me: "In 1981, people from Greece declared themselves Aromanians / Makedon-Armâns. Today, unfortunately, they are all Vlahos!" Now more than ever, though, the interests related to the assimilation are stronger than ever, even in EU countries, wanting a larger number of potential citizens for a stronger voice at the common European table. So, once again, Makedon-Armâns fell midway between various state interests. The danger of assimilation is real and, despite Recommendation 1333 /97 of the Council of Europe concerning their rights as a minority, Aromanians could just perish right before our eyes.

2002

For my doctoral thesis “Ethnicity and distribution of the Aromanians in Southeast Europe” I studied the question if the Aromanians (also Aroumanians, Aromunians, Cincars, Kutsovlachs, Macedoromanians) can be defined today as a uniform group, if they form subgroups and in what aspects they differ. For this purpose I made a detailed list of Aromanian settlements and a survey of the reasons for their present distribution. Further, narrative interviews with sociogeographical and ethnological methods were made (on methodology see Kahl 1999: 7–13). This paper, written three years after the empirical study, summarizes some of the results and adds recent developments. ETHNOLOGIA BALKANICA, VOL. 6 (2002)

2015

The Aromanian problem is in fact, what Balkans have lost when nation-states rose. This article is divided in two main parts: the one regarding the elements which describe Aromanians through the historical doxa and understanding, trying to set up the question regarding their identity; the other one regarding the solutions brought by cosmopolitan theses and discourses in order to assure their recognition and preservation. Our goal is not to stigmatize the nation-state paradigm, but to highlight its limits in respect to itself and to cosmopolitanism.

The Vanishing Aromanian, 2018

Pages from the book ”The Vanishing Aromanian” by Eugene Matzota Available on AMAZON https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Aromanian-Eugene-Matzota/dp/198493399X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F3UKV4W3TXKV&keywords=the+vanishing+aromanian&qid=1647860784&sprefix=the+vanishing+aromanian%2Caps%2C227&sr=8-1

Res Historica, 2016

The Vanishing Aromanian, 2018

A-Romanians, Romanians? I have to say from the very beginning that this is a book that may be written unwittingly from a Romanian point of view, because the author was born in Romania. On the other hand, the author is coming from a family with 800 years of Aromanian history. Therefore, I must have a better understanding of the problems related both to Romanians and to Aromanians. After years of study, I have serious reasons to believe that Aromanians are not Romanians, as the state policy of Romania tries to impose for the more than a century, but rather brothers. And this is not at all a blasphemy… Now, for somebody who has no idea where the Balkans could be on the world map, this word, Aromanian, maybe doesn’t mean a thing. Aromanians, A-Romanians, and more than this, Vlachs? Too much confusion here… Pages from the book ”The Vanishing Aromanian” by Eugene Matzota Available on AMAZON https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Aromanian-Eugene-Matzota/dp/198493399X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F3UKV4W3TXKV&keywords=the+vanishing+aromanian&qid=1647860784&sprefix=the+vanishing+aromanian%2Caps%2C227&sr=8-1

Die Aromunen: Sprache–Geschichte–Geographie, 1987

Hiperboreea, 2021

Nineteenth-century western-European travel literature constitutes a potentially rich historical source, which has, to date, been insufficiently exploited from the perspective of Aromanian studies. In exploring several British travelogues from the first half of the nineteenth century, the author sets out to identify specific Aromanian self-images containing essential markers of the Balkan Aromanians’ ethnicity, as it presented itself on the eve of its morphing into a mere aspect of Romanian or Greek nationality. Several important topoi of the Aromanian ethnic identity come to light; the idea of the ethnic community’s Roman origins, the endonyms being used, the social practice of endogamy, and the circulated stories of potential Aromanian folk-hero figures in the making (pending possible incorporation into the Aromanian collective memory) all function as identity markers, articulating the ethnic boundary that ensures the internal coherence of the Aromanian ethnic community and sets it...

1999

Today, many thousands of Aromanians (also known as „Vlachs“) live quite compactly in Northern Greece, Macedonia (FYROM) and southern Albania; and there are still traces of Vlach-Aromanian and Aromanian populations in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Romania. In Albania, they were recently estimated at about 200,000 by the English scholar Tom Winnifrith. In Albanian communist times, Aromanians were not recognised as a separate minority group, officially considered to be almost completely assimilated. However, in the early post-communist transition period, a vivid Aromanian ethnic movement emerged in Albania and it became part of a recent global Balkan Aromanian initiative. The Albanian Aromanians’ new emphasis of their ethnicity can be seen as a pragmatic strategy of adjustment to successes and failures in the Albanian political transition and to globalisation. It is exactly the re-vitalisation of the conflict between followers of a pro-Greek and a pro-Romanian Aromanian identification ...

1999