LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

The Social Being of the Aromâni... 253
guides he asked if they could decipher them. they shook their heads;
whereupon to their amazement he translated the inscriptions into fluent
russian. 25
Since the Aromâni speak Greek as a language of expediency [or as the
Greek census has it: “language of daily use”], and since they ascend with
their sheep to the pindus in the spring, from whence they do not descend
until october, they lie almost wholly outside the experience of many
visitors to Greece, and even of many Greeks. eliot’s acuity [echoing that
of Weigand] cut the Gordian knot of cultural attribution in the Balkans. he
writes:
Many districts are bilingual; but it may always be assumed that
Greek or turkish is an acquired language, and that the second one
gives the speaker’s real race.
A Greek does not learn Vlah or Albanian, but the Vlahs and
Albanians find it advantageous to learn Greek... [eliot 1900 ; 296].
this deserves to be acknowledged as Eliot’s Principle.
eliot was a perceptive commentator on Aromân strategies for survival,
including the capacity for mimesis which allows them to move through
society without drawing attention to their identity. he captures this
characteristic in a passage in Turkey in Europe, 1900 [p. 409 ff]:
[the Aromanians] remind us of one of those ingenious pictures
in which an animal or human face is concealed so as not to be
obvious on first inspection, though when once seen it appears to be
the principal feature of the drawing. In the same way one may live
and travel in the Balkan lands without seeing or hearing anything
of the Vlahs, until one’s eyes are opened. then one runs the risk
of going to the opposite extreme and thinking, like roumanian
patriots, that most of the inhabitants of Macedonia [as well as of
Greece and Albania] are Vlahs in disguise.
eliot was also struck by fact that Aromân houses contained books,
and other attributes of european civilization, which were not on the whole
widespread in the Greek peninsula:
I have even known one with whom I stayed go so far as to replace
a broken glass window pane, not with brown paper, but with a
new piece of glass ; a proceeding I believe unique in the levant. 26
25 Sir Charles elIot, Japanese Buddhism. edward Arnold, (london, 1935), p. xIV.
26 Sir Charles elIot s.n. “odysseus”, Turkey in Europe ( Methuen, 1900) : 418.