My OperaThe Ethnoarchaeology of a "Passive" Ethnicity: The Arvanites of Central Greece_01
Sunday, February 1, 2009 10:33:22 AM
I have spent many years researching in the Greek landscape and have grown
used to the quiet rural life among the villages, chattering in the coffee shops
with local people in my poor modern Greek. For a long time, my conversations
with these farming folk were concerned with my interest in the importance of
olives, vines, and cereals, inquiries fed by the scholarly debate on whether the
modern Greeks and their lifestyle descend from the ancient Greek people and
their practices. I was following the common practice in Greek archaeology of
using anthropology as a guide to the ancient or prehistoric world of Greece.
All that began to change with the maturation of the Boeotia regional project,
a long-term study of a province immediately north of Athens, of which I am
codirector with Anthony Snodgrass of Cambridge University. We soon felt the
need to do something about the neglected archaeology of the fifteen hundred
years of post-Roman society in our province. We started by making sense of the
numerous medieval towers which littered the Boeotian landscape (Lock 1986).
Nonetheless, the limited Byzantine and then Prankish (Crusader) sources
provided a picture of a largely feudal landscape, filled with "Greeks" for the
most part but also peopled by a minority of short-stay invaders—French, Italian,
Catalan—essentially parasitic exploiters of local farmers. This did not disturb
the traditional model of potential continuity of Greek rural populations and their
typical lifestyles from antiquity to today. It was rather romantic, however, to
discover the forgotten history of those dukes of Athens whose curious appearance
in Shakespeare had always puzzled me—Otho de la Roche, Nicolas de St.
Omer, and so on (now wonderfully revivified in the recent introduction to
Prankish Greece by our project specialist Peter Lock (1995).
Now all this time, we were living, each summer over many years, in a village
called Mavrommati—"Black Eye" in Greek (the inhabitants told a tale
about a mottled cow that sat down in that spot). Yet our Athenian students who
attended the summer field-school we ran on the project found the village much
stranger than we did. They came and told us, mystified, that the older villagers,
left to their own private conversations, littered their talk with an unintelligible
language. "Who are they?"—they asked us.
We soon learned from our project anthropologists (cf. Slaughter and Kasimis
1986) that our village, as most others in this part of Central Greece, was
populated by Arvanites, speaking Arvanitika; in English this can be translated
as, respectively, "populations with their origin from the region in and around
modern Albania" and "Albanian-speakers." Yet our village looked typically
Greek: the role of the State, the Church, and everyday customs looked the same
as everywhere else in modern Greece.
Let us go back to the period before the Arvanitic presence—the high Middle
Ages and the period of those Prankish towers—a landscape covered with
flourishing rural settlements of Greek-speakers, dominated by an alien minor
nobility from the West who had arrived on the spurious Fourth Crusade in 1204
AD. Our ceramic specialists (John Hayes, Joanita Vroom) have perfectly mastered
the pottery of this Prankish age (cf. Vroom 1997, 1999), and in our surface
field survey we have located a small sample of the indigenous villages overseen
by the towers of nameless knights and bailiffs (figure 7.1). There is very good
reason to believe that the tower-village network in Boeotia represents a high
degree of continuity of favored settlement locations since the closely similar
Greco-Roman network of nucleated villages and small towns (figure 7.2).
Again, this is consistent with the traditional continuity model for ancient to
modern Greece.
Such potential continuity, however, if it had lasted from antiquity to the
high Middle Ages, very rarely survives the fourteenth century AD: archaeological
and historical sources prove a dramatic discontinuity in settlement and
population at the close of the Middle Ages. Numerous Byzantine village sites
are abandoned at this time and new villages appear nearby after a clear time
interval. The scanty Prankish sources for the fourteenth century tell us how
much of the countryside was swept clear of Byzantine rural communities by the
Black Death, the slave raids of Turkish pirates, and constant warfare among the
dukes of Athens, the revived Byzantine Empire, and Ottoman Turkish armies
advancing from the east. In desperation, the final, Florentine, dukes of Athens
invited immigration from Albania (which at that time was a tribal region considerably
more extensive than the modem state of that name), and large numbers
responded. Boeotia, Attica, and most of the North Péloponnèse were henceforth
dominated in the countryside by Albanian-speakers (Jochalas 1971).
Even better information of a far more detailed and accurate nature is provided
by the newly translated census records for central Greece of the early Ottoman
Empire, after its definitive conquest of Byzantine Greece by 1453.
These were made available by our project Ottomanist, Professor Machiel Kiel of
Utrecht University (Kiel 1997; Bintliff 1995, 1997) (see figure 7.3). These tax
archives describe the population of what is now Greece, listing—village by village—
crops, animals, and the ethnicity of each settlement, in detail comparable
to that of the Domesday Book taxation census ordered by the Norman conquerors
in eleventh-century AD England. In the 1466 record (see figure 7.4), shortly
after the conquest, the fearful extent of Byzantine depopulation is vividly
brought out by the widespread scatter of small, newly colonizing Albanian
hamlets and the few surviving, but larger, Greek-speaking refuge communities.
The Greek-speakers would have called themselves, ironically, "Romioi" or
"Romans" to signify the Byzantine claim to continuity with the Eastern Roman
Empire—and hence were part of the communities called "Rum" by the Ottomans.
Here, on the earliest so far discovered Ottoman register for our region, we
found our own host village—its real origin not linked to a cow but called simply
after its founder, an Albanian clan-chief—Gjin Mavromati (John the Black-
Eyed), who selected this location along with his followers. In fact, most of the
new settlements appear to be small social groups of no more than thirty families,
tied to a chief who is frequently the eponymous village founder. That these incomers
were not merely ethnic Greeks with an Albanian-speaking tradition can
be shown through study of both the new village names and the personal names
listed in the Ottoman village registers, where typical Albanian personal and clan
names are ubiquitous, along with specific onomastic references to districts in
modem Albania.
At first, the Greeks continued to practice their traditional polyculture from
stable village sites, while the Albanian clan hamlets were mobile around several
village locations (katuns) with large flocks and cereal cultivation. Then under
the benevolent influence of the Pax Ottomanica, both Albanian and Greek villages
grew in size and number, while the Albanians adopted the permanent settlement
locus and tree-crops of their Greek neighbors (see figure 7.5). One finds
the same material culture on sites of both ethnic groups, expressed in ceramics
and, at least by the sixteenth century, in house types (figure 7.6). I would like to
know the costume differences, however! Aspects of Greek national costume,
such as that worn by the modern Palace Guard (Evzonoi) are essentially Albanian
costume (Mpiris 1997, 288 n. 2).
Clearly, the strongly agricultural and provincially conservative nature of
Boeotia has allowed retention of custom to today—young people in their thirties
are still proud to say they can speak traditional Arvanitika. Yet there are no "Albanian
Clubs" in Boeotia nor local histories of these people. In cosmopolitan
Athens, such clubs do exist without exciting much controversy (Carabott,
personal communication, 2001), probably because their activity has minimal
influence and public profile in a city containing almost half of the entire Greek
population. The Greek national education system (cf. chapter 3 in this volume)
stresses the heritage of classical Athens and the continuity of Greek virtues. Indeed,
history and archaeology for Greeks today usually all but stop at the Age of
Alexander, and the former only picks up again with the War of Independence in
the early nineteenth century. During the intervening two millennia of "oppression,"
the Greek spirit slumbered in chains, with only Byzantine churches and
icons to mark the eternal flame. The Albanian Greeks are a people without a
formal history and no acknowledged place in the Modern Greek state. How did
this come about?
First, we can explain the astonishing persistence of Albanian village culture
from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries through the ethnic and religious
tolerance characteristic of Islamic empires and so lacking in their Christian
equivalents. Ottoman control rested upon allowing local communities to keep
their religion, language, local laws, and representatives, provided that taxes were
paid (the millet system). There was no pressure for Greeks and Albanians to
conform to each other's language or other behavior.
Clear signs of change are revealed in the travel diaries of the German
scholar Ludwig Ross (1851), when he accompanied the Bavarian Otto, whom
the Allies had foisted as king upon the newly freed Greek nation in the aftermath
of the War of Independence in the 1830s. Ross praises the well-built Greek
villages of central Greece with their healthy, happy, dancing inhabitants, and
contrasts them specifically with the hovels and sickly inhabitants of Albanian
villages. In fact, recent scholarship has underlined how far it was the West that
built modern Greece in its own fanciful image as the land of a long-oppressed
people who were the direct descendants of Pericles.
This Western creation of "the glorious continuing story of the Greek People"
has been epitomized recently in the publication of multi-volume popular
encyclopedias such as "The History of the Greek Nation" and marked even more
recently by hysterical reactions to the supposed threat posed by the Slav Republic
of Macedonia—not least merely by appropriating the name "Macedonia."
Being saddled with such a foundation charter from the early years of independence
has forced the Greek education system and state propaganda to focus the
survival of the struggling young nation onto what Benedict Anderson (1991) has
termed the "imagined community" of Greeks.
Thus from the late nineteenth century onward the children of the inhabitants
of the new "nation-state" were taught in Greek, history confined itself to the
episodes of pure Greekness, and the tolerant Ottoman attitude to cultural diversity
yielded to a deliberate policy of total Hellenization of the populace—effective
enough to fool the casual observer. One is rather amazed at the persistence
today of such dual-speaking populations in much of the Albanian colonization
zone. However, apart from the provinciality of this essentially agricultural
province, a high rate of illiteracy until well into this century has also helped to
preserve Arvanitika hi the Boeotian villagers (Meijs 1993).
However, this is not a story to be uncovered easily. In the last few years,
with the collapse of East European Communism, modem-day Albanians have
flooded out of their homeland once more, in search of better employment, with
a particular focus on areas settled by then- forefathers in the Middle Ages and,
more recently, southern Italy and central and southern Greece. They are welcomed
as cheap labor but despised as untrustworthy ex-Communists. Any link
to the local population is refuted with as much vehemence as illogicality. This
denial of the multiethnic composition of the rural landscape has been helped by
state-imposed systematic place-name changes throughout this century, many as
late as the 1960s, through which a wonderful scatter of traditional Greek, Slav,
Albanian, and sometimes Italian village names has been suppressed—wherever
conceivable—in favor of the name of any ancient Greek toponym remotely
connected to the neighborhood. Thus, for example, one of our study villages,
formerly known by variants of its original Albanian founder's name of Zogra
Kobili, has been transformed into the village of Leondarion (a classical locality
not even certainly connected to the district).
While compiling my maps of village systems across the post-medieval
centuries from the Ottoman sources (archives so remarkably discovered and
tabulated for us by Machiel Kiel; see Kiel 1997; Bintliff 1995, 1997), I was
careful to indicate in the English captions which of them were Albanianspeaking
and which Greek-speaking villages. A strong supporter of the project,
the Orthodox bishop of Livadhia, Hieronymus, watched over my shoulder as the
maps took shape. "Very interesting," he said, looking at the symbols for ethnicity,
"but what you have written here is quite wrong. You see the people in
Greece who speak a language like Albanian are Arvanites, not Alvanoi, and
they speak Arvanitika not Alvanika."
In this seemingly innocuous, and of course technically correct, comment
lies a much deeper layer of ideology, signified by the mere substitution of an "r"
for an "1." The bishop was voicing the accepted modern position among those
Greeks who are well aware of the persistence of indigenous Albanian-speakers
in the provinces of their country: the "Albanians" are not like us at all, they are
ex-Communists from outside the modern Greek state who come here for work
from their backward country; as for the Arvanites (traditional inhabitants of the
Greek countryside speaking Albanian)—well, they are a kind of ethnic Greek
population from somewhere on the northwest borders of Greece, where the line
between the Greek state and that of Albania has always been fuzzy and permeable
to intermarriage.
Thus the difference between an "1" and an "r" neatly allows the modern
Greeks to divorce themselves and their history from that of the unpopular but
widely employed, modern Gastarbeiter of post-Communist Albania. Shortly
after this conversation, I saw the bishop pass across the courtyard of our project
base—a converted monastery run as a research center—to talk to the genuine
Albanian guestworkers who were restoring its stonework. I knew he was himself
an Arvanitis, and listened with interest as he chatted fluently to them—and it
wasn't in Greek! I was tempted, but wisely forbore, to ask him which language
they were conversing in—Arvanitika or Alvanika?
In a volume focusing on historic identities and boundary formation, it is a
matter of considerable interest to understand a minority's view of itself in relation
to the larger national whole into which it has been merged. Given their special
history, what is the relevance of the survival of Arvanitic language within
the modern Greek state? In conversation, provincial villagers who recognize the
Arvanitic origin of their community acknowledge this unproblematically. This
is clearly helped by the prominent role played by Arvanitic and Albanian (i.e.,
more recent migrant) heroes in the War of Independence. But clearly, as one can
see—and as these villagers point out—they are in every respect "typical" Greeks
in their politics, lifestyle, aspirations, and the desire to see their children pursue
professional careers in Athens, rather than remain within the limited economic
and social horizons of the Boeotian villages. Basically, therefore, there is never
a hint of Arvanitic resistance to Greekness, even as a means to signify the failings
of Athens to bring better conditions to the countryside, or the virtues of the
provincial way of life. One also gets the feeling that although the Arvanitic
background is unconsciously a source of local pride in knowing one's particular
roots (hence the ease with which villagers will direct you to abandoned settlements
centuries old, or discuss the arrival of their warlike, semipastoral ancestors),
this is "water under the bridge," which has no real relevance either to the
present or more importantly the future of local communities.
In contrast therefore to the more openly problematic issue of Slav speakers
in northern Greece, Arvanitic speakers in central Greece lack any signs of an
assertive ethnicity. I would like to suggest that they possess what we might term
a passive ethnicity. As a result of a number of historical factors, much of the
rural population in central Greece was Albanian-speaking by the time of the
creation of the modern Greek state in the 1830s. Until this century, most of
these people were illiterate and unschooled, yet there existed sufficient knowledge
of Greek to communicate with officials and townspeople, itinerant traders,
and so on, to limit the need to transform rural language usage. Life was extremely
provincial, with just one major carriage-road passing through the center
of the large province of Boeotia even in the 1930s (beyond which horseback and
cart took over; van Effenterre 1989). Even in the 1960s, Arvanitic village children
could be figures of fun for their Greek peers in the schools of Thebes (one
of the two regional towns) (K. Sarri, personal communication, 2000). It was not
a matter of cultural resistance but simple conservatism and provinciality, the
extreme narrowness of rural life, that allowed Arvanitic language and local historic
memories to survive so effectively to the very recent period.
This fits well with the observation that intermarriage between villages of
Arvanitic origin and those of native Greek-speaking origin has been common.
Presumably the migrant spouses would develop sufficient vocabulary to communicate
with relatives who used little Greek, or a hybrid dialect (such as can be
heard in Boeotian villages today, according to research by K. Papagiannopoullos).
Interestingly, a scientific study which analyzed the marriage patterns of the
forty-five traditional Albano-Italian villages in southern Italy (Biondi et al.
1993) found that such villages exhibited no more inbreeding that other rural
communities in Italy and less than remote communes of the central Apennines
and Alpine districts. Again one might suggest that in that other major zone of
Albanian medieval colonization, a similar passive ethnicity has operated.
Two studies of the use ofArvanitika in Greece itself (Trudgill and Tzavaras
1977; Tsitsipis 1983) add further insight into Arvanitic attitudes within modern
Greece. The language is shown to be heading toward extinction, with those using
it rapidly losing grammatical knowledge and its deployment growing more
limited in range and context. Language decline is matched with the degree of
linkage to major population centers and macroeconomic interactions to the
wider world, supporting my view of the importance of narrow horizons in the
long survival of Arvanitic traditions and language use. Questionnaires suggest
that there is also a compromise at work, in which Arvanitic communities do not
undervalue local roots and yet embrace the reality of a purely Greek linguistic
future: members of Arvanitic communities say it is better to be Arvanit than to
speak Arvanitic. As the researchers comment, the last sentiment should mark the
imminent demise of Arvanitika as a functioning alternative to modern demotic
Greek. I am not entirely sure about this—despite two generations of intensive
schooling where Arvanitika was forbidden, a limited knowledge is still a matter
of pride to some villagers, and in the villages with no main road communications,
conversations among older folk can be 95 percent Arvanitic, even at the
present day. For me as an archaeologist who wants to give local communities
their own history—something even current Greek history syllabuses fail to do—
an ethical problem does arise in privileging the very different basis from which
Arvanitic villages have developed. Does this rural society really want to have
such a history highlighted? Would rediscovering their supposed historical ethnicity
be even disadvantageous to them, especially to their children? I am still
unsure of the answer to these questions.
next
(67%)
Unregistered user # Saturday, December 5, 2009 5:57:51 AM
macedonancientmacedonia # Saturday, December 5, 2009 6:16:43 AM
http://my.opera.com/macedonianneighbourhood/blog/show.dml/4235614
Makedonka # Saturday, December 5, 2009 12:39:43 PM
So in order to keep their STOLEN territory in place as "theirs" they must make up stories of ""brotherhood" to further assimilate (Hellenise) all ethnicities in today’s gayreecia. Been Arvanite is another Albanian tribe, and the only difference between them all is the different time of arrival in history of the Balkans!
Read here your history – this is a Helsinki report….it says all and is not much different from what Macedon already pointed out in his blog.
“The first Christian Albanian migrations to what is today Greek territory took place as early as the XI-XII centuries (Trudgill, 1975:5; Banfi, 1994:19), although the main ones most often mentioned in the bibliography happened in the XIV-XV centuries, when Albanians were invited to settle in depopulated areas by their Byzantine, Catalan or Florentine rulers (Tsitsipis, 1994:1; Trudgill, 1975:5; Nakratzas, 1992:20-24 & 78-90; Banfi, 1994:19). According to some authors, they were also fleeing forced Islamization by the Turks in what is today Albania (Katsanis, 1994:1). So, some have estimated that, when the Ottomans conquered the whole Greek territory in the XV century, some 45% of it was populated by Albanians (Trudgill, 1975:6). Another wave of Muslim Albanian migrations took place during the Ottoman period, mainly in the XVIII century (Trudgill, 1975:6; Banfi, 1994:19). All these Albanians are the ancestors of modern-day Arvanites in Central and Southern Greece.”
In full here;
http://www.greekhelsinki.gr/english/reports/arvanites.html
Anyhow I think that you all should be proud of who you are, instead of been manipulated with some "ancient greecizam", because YOU HAVE YOUR OWN IDENTITY (Albanian) since ancient times in Caucasus, today’s Azerbaijan - but Greeks NEVER had any, even now their only identity is been "Christians", which bay the way AGAIN is fake.
Regards to you
Unregistered user # Sunday, December 6, 2009 12:58:23 AM
Unregistered user # Sunday, December 6, 2009 1:07:19 AM
Unregistered user # Sunday, December 6, 2009 1:12:53 AM
Unregistered user # Sunday, December 6, 2009 1:29:10 AM
Unregistered user # Monday, December 7, 2009 4:44:02 AM
Unregistered user # Tuesday, December 8, 2009 8:08:59 AM
macedonancientmacedonia # Tuesday, December 8, 2009 4:33:51 PM
Modern Greeks are PLACIPICKI.....
http://my.opera.com/ancientmacedonia/blog/2009/08/17/y-haplogroup-j2-in-macedonia-2
Unregistered user # Wednesday, December 9, 2009 12:01:19 PM
Makedonka # Friday, December 18, 2009 11:31:31 AM
Then he said;
"Arvanites are descendants of the original pre-Greek “Pelasgian” population and as such actually autochthonous Arvanites prefer to regard Arvanitic as a separate language. As Arvanitic is almost exclusively a spoken language (There is no Arvanitic alphabet only language).
So my question is; How can Arvanites "identify themselves ethnically and nationally as Greeks" IF as he quoted; "Arvanites are descendants of the original pre-Greek “Pelasgian” population"?
Isn't been pre-Greek means been NO Greek at the same time, ethnically or/and culturally?
And my other questions are; What is the ORAL LANGUAGE called and how come that this PRE-HISTORIC people as you quoted been "Pelasgians", known as people who teaches Gayreeks how to write and give them an alphabet, have NO alphabet of their own?
Regards