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

The Social Being of the Aromâni... 255
enabled them to run or walk without making the slightest noise.
In fact they were agreeable honest rogues enough, and we got on
amazingly well together. 27
A major contribution of english-speaking scholarship to Aromân
studies was the work of A. J.B. Wace and M. S. thompson. they travelled
among the Aromâni in Greece, lived in Samarina, and produced their
seminal account The Nomads of the Balkans in 1914. Significantly enough
they had also produced definitive archaeological research on the neolithic
of thessaly [Wace and thompson 1912], following upon the pioneering
work of tsountas [Δίμινι και Σέσκλο]. there were many others who were
much more than travellers, such as edith Durham; or Sir Arthur evans,
who before the days of his Minoan fame was a perceptive archaeologist
and correspondent in the Balkans. 28
the great German school of romanian studies founded in leipzig
during the eighteenth century by the Swedish scholar thunmann29 deserves
to be better known. We should acknowledge among its truly great observers
and field-workers the name of Gustav Weigand30 . recalling hasluck and
Morant’s data [supra] on the relatively large size of Aromân villages in
thrace in the 1920s, we find thunmann a century and a half earlier [1774]
estimating the Aromâni as comprising over half the population of thrace;
and over three-quarters of the population of Macedonia and thessaly. he
notes that they have been known as “Vlahs” since the tenth century; and
that the Albanians call them tjuban, the turkish word for shepherd which is
widely used eg., in romanian [cioban] along with the latin word păcurar/
pecorarius, as well as in Daghestan. the streak of apologetic fatalism with
regard to their own culture which may still be found among the Aromâni,
can be shown by thunmann’s writings already to exist at least as far back
as the eighteenth century. 31
27 the hon. Curzon, robert, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (london, 1865)
pt. III., Ch. xVIII.
28 eVAnS, A. J., Through Bosnia and Hercegovina on foot during the Insurrection
(london, 1876).
29 thunMAnn, J., untersuchungen uber die Geschichte der ostlichen europaischer
Volker (leipzig, 1774).
30 Weigand’s bibliography is a very long one. see NANdriŞ, j.G., “The Aromâni,
Approaches to the evidence”. Balkan Arhiv n.F. Beiheft, Bd. 5 “Die Aromunen”, (ed.),
rupprecht rohr (hamburg, 1987).
31 Vuk Štefan Karađić [1787–1864] also depicts the retiring and apologetic aspect of
Aromân culture: “rijeć ova Vlah onamo nije nikaka poruga, jer isami Vlaši za sebe reku,
i.p., kad se kakav pravda zakakvoga gospodina nije doče kao u ugostno kao što treba: