page_title: Aromanians
section_title: History and self-identification
hierarchical_section_title: Aromanians / History and self-identification
caption_attribution_description: English: Vlach Shepherd in traditional clothes. Photo from the early 1900s Русский: Традиционный костюм аромунского пастуха. Начало XX века
context_page_description: The Aromanians or Macedo-Romanians are a Romance ethnic group native to the Balkans, traditionally living in northern and central Greece, Romania, central and southern Albania, North Macedonia, south-western Bulgaria, Montenegro, Croatia with the Dalmatic Mountains, Slovenia with the Istrian Peninsula, and all Serbia. The term Vlachs is used in Greece to refer to Aromanians, but this term is internationally used to encompass all Romance-speaking peoples of the Balkans and Tatra Mountains regions.
  Aromanians speak the Aromanian language, a Latin-derived vernacular very similar to Romanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own. It descends from the Vulgar Latin spoken by the Paleo-Balkan peoples subsequent to their Romanization. Aromanian is a mix of Latin and post-Big Migrations domestic language with additional influences from other surrounding languages of the Balkans, mainly Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian.
context_section_description: The Aromanians or Vlachs first appear in medieval Byzantine sources in the 11th century, in the Strategikon of Kekaumenos and Anna Komnene's Alexiad, in the area of Thessaly. In the 12th century, the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela records the existence of the district of "Vlachia" near Halmyros in eastern Thessaly, while the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates places "Great Vlachia" near Meteora. Thessalian Vlachia was apparently also known as "Vlachia in Hellas". Later medieval sources also speak of an "Upper Vlachia" in Epirus, and a "Little Vlachia" in Aetolia-Acarnania, but "Great Vlachia" is no longer mentioned after the late 13th century.
  The medieval Vlachs (Aromanians) of Herzegovina are considered authors of the famous funerary monuments with petroglyphs (stecci in Serbian) from Herzegovina and surrounding countries. The theory of the Vlach origin was proposed by Bogumil Hrabak (1956) and Marian Wenzel and more recently was supported by the archeological and anthropological researches of skeleton remains from the graves under stećci. The theory is much older and was first proposed by Arthur Evans in his work Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum (1883). While doing research with Felix von Luschan on stećak graves around Konavle, he found that a large number of skulls were not of Slavic origin but similar to older Illyrian and Arbanasi tribes, as well as noting that Dubrovnik memorials recorded those parts inhabited by the Vlachs until the 15th century.
caption: Aromanian shepherd in traditional clothes, photo from 1899, Archive: Manaki Brothers.
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