20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The Greek historiography about the Macedonian Romanians 863therefore Romanised, bilingual Greeks. 3 This reference to the Vlachs wasprobably an answer to the affirmations made by Gheorghe Constantin Rojain 1808, in a work which had been published in Budapest (also in German).In his book he had considered the Greek Vlachs to be the brothers of theRomanians. Even if the work of Koumas did not receive the proper attentionin Greece, because it had been written in German, it was he who laid thefoundation of the autochthonous theory regarding the Vlachs’origin.In the same period, the Vlach scholar Nikolaos Tzartzoulis, a professorat the Academy of Iaşi, mantained that the Macedonian Romanians weredescendants of the ancient Greeks. 4In 1856, Panaiotis Aravantinos in his work The Chronicle of Epirusgives out the idea that in the 10 th century a group of Dacs from the regionMoesia left its native places and moved slowly southwards, settling downin the Pind Mountains and in Thessalia. He did not agree with those whoaffirmed that the Vlachs were Romanised Greeks. 5 This was the first workwritten by a Greek in which the immigrationist theory was sustained, butas the work contained many gaps and confusions, it did not enjoy a greataudience.The most passionate sustainer of the immigrationist theory was thedoctor Nikolaos Georgiades (1830-1923), who in his work Thessalia,published in 1880, (translated later into German and French) mantainedthat the Vlachs had come from the northern part of the Balcanic Peninsulain the 11 th century and had definitively settled down in the area of thePind Mountains, where they were later Hellenised, preserving only theirlanguage. 6 A highly cultivated man, Georgiades, influenced a lot of Greekintellectuals of that epoch, who also embraced this theory. Among them wasthe archaeologist N. Giannoppoulos in 1891 7 , the historian KonstantinosVlytsakis in 1892 8 and others. In 1905 another work of Aravantinos wasprinted with the title "A Monography about the Kutso-Vlachs", which hadbeen written in 1862, but it had not been possible to be published at thattime.In the other camp, will distinguish themselves, among others, thefollowing personalities: the historian Spiros Papagheorghiou, in 1908 9 ,3The Vlachs of Greek origin, 2005, Athens, 40 (in Greek).4Ibidem, 53.5Antonis Koltsidas 1993, The Vlachs of Greek origin. 2 nd edition, Thessaloniki, 35(in Greek).6Collective. the quoted work, 31.7Ibidem, 32.8Ibidem, 33.9An. Koltsidas. op.cit., 36.