Historical Context: Greeks, Romanians, Phanariotes

Comprised of the former principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Romania came into being in 1859 and gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877–1878, under the leadership of a Western-educated generation of politicians, many of whom were involved in the local iteration of the pan–European Revolution of 1848. As a largely illiterate and impoverished peasantry made up the country’s overwhelming majority, a right to vote depended on one’s tax bracket and/or educational qualifications: most citizens voted only indirectly, through delegates, and were essentially excluded from politics (Iordachi Reference Iordachi2019, 232–234, 530–538). Providing a legal means for ensuring the primacy of the middle classes within the state was a prevalent arrangement in Europe’s age of limited suffrage (Kahan Reference Kahan2003), yet in Romania the program of establishing a functioning nation-state with a “native” middle class as its main modernizing agent was seen to face two major stumbling-blocks, one external to the ethnic body and one internal.

On the one hand, fault was found with two minorities. The first, historically, was the Greek community, which had been present for centuries in trade and, especially in the 18th century, had entered the political and economic elite of Moldavia and Wallachia, with Ottoman support. The second were more recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Hapsburg Galicia and from Russia, who were accused of rapidly climbing the social ladder and becoming a monopolistic merchant class, facing ever-mounting legal persecution as a result. On the other hand, Romanians bemoaned their own presumed penchant for state employment, which came at the expense of taking initiative in trade or commerce, a pathology often referred to as funcționarism—even as the actual number of state employees remained modest. This was seen as the result of an educational system that was insufficiently concerned with practical matters and further perpetuated by a bureaucratic apparatus beholden to the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, their alternating rise to power creating a “bureaucratic proletariat” out of the other’s clientele, from clerks to teachers. In sum, that state-building could amplify this social pathology through the very expansion of an institutional network appeared all the more problematic (Sorescu Reference Sorescu, Marton, Monier and Dard2017). This, then, was the perception of an “absent” bourgeoisie, for which the Aromanians were imagined to offer a cure.

In Greece, Romania’s main contender for the hearts and minds of its desired kinfolk,Footnote ² similar anxieties existed over the existence of a bourgeoisie in connection to educational and bureaucratic development. Ever since the 1821 War of Independence, literate Greek elites could identify not as an agrarian populace but as a “better nation” than Ottoman Turks (Erdem Reference Erdem, Birtek and Dragonas2004, 79–80), and they could subsequently contrast the existence of a native bourgeoisie against their supposedly more backward Balkan neighbors, even as Romanian inroads in Macedonia at times gave them pause (Gounaris Reference Gounaris, Beaton and Ricks2009, 142, 145). At the same time, the Greek state could deliberately restrict secondary schooling in hopes to prevent the emergence of an intellectual proletariat (Koulouri Reference Koulouri1991, 106–112). Teaching corps themselves were at times found to be ridden by patronage, ill-trained, and oversized (Koulouri Reference Koulouri1991, 87, 93–100; Papadakis Reference Papadakis2006, 33), thereby jeopardizing the extension of nation-building efforts beyond the borders of the state. In short, similar anxieties marked similar processes, with Ottoman-ruled Macedonia lying at their intersection.

On their part, Romanians identified historical roots of funcționarism with the recent traumatic past of the Phanariote age, a long 18th century in which the Ottoman client states of Moldavia and Wallachia were ruled by a Hellenophone noble class of largely, but by no means strictly, Greek extraction.Footnote ³ Equated with moral, political, and economic corruption (Lemny Reference Lemny and Zub1985, 17–30), the period covered most of the 18th century and ended in 1821, when the Greek Revolution brought the fall from grace of Phanariote elites in the principalities, the Ottoman Empire, and Greece. In the Principalities, a Greek insurrection aimed at triggering a pan–Balkan Christian revolt failed to gain Russian backing and was quashed by the Ottomans. A simultaneous movement in Wallachia under the military leadership of Tudor Vladimirescu (1780–1821) collapsed with his assassination when its anti-Phanariote (but not anti-Ottoman) social and national goals diverged from the Greeks’ goals. While Vladimirescu was canonized as a national hero in the second half of the century, Romanians also stressed the Aromanian origins (though not necessarily the overt self-identification) of several key figures in the Greek War of Independence, thereby laying a moral claim to gratitude and recognition.

The Phanariote connection allows for drawing a productive comparison between how Greece and Romania came to perceive the desired political function of immigrated kinfolk within an emerging nation-state. In revolutionary and post–revolutionary Greece, Westernized “heterochton” Greeks mobilized their networks and cultural capital to position themselves as an imported administrative and political elite, oftentimes part of the diasporic Phanariote community. Their immigration came at a time when new cultural and political models of shared, transborder ethnic belonging and citizenship were negotiated; the power of the heterochtons was (at least temporarily) curtailed in the 1840s, when they were barred from holding office and forced to join the ranks of the educational system or emerging private sector (Petmezas Reference Petmezas, Beaton and Ricks2009). By contrast, the desired partial immigration of Aromanians to Romania in the second half of the century was not accompanied by an anxiety over their potential takeover of politics or administration; rather, the prospect of their bureaucratic employment was seen as a desertion of their entrepreneurial calling and corresponding function in the national division of labor.

Now, the end of the Phanariote order did not sever cultural ties, nor immediately and exclusively translate into Hellenephobia: the diffusion of both languages of “civilization” and educational models, for instance, was impelled by entangled relationships connecting France, Greece, and the principalities well into the century (Tipei Reference Tipei2018). Indeed, the very building blocks of what would subsequently become nationalist discourse had a transnational life: contemporary anti-Phanariote attitudes in both Greece and the principalities (and, subsequently, in Romania) were fueled by the same textual sources and couched in a common language (Bouchard Reference Bouchard2014). The rhetorical positioning that was initially embraced by the generation of 1848 intended to project a sense of otherness onto Phanariotes, in a way that Romanians and Greeks could be construed as their common victims (Folschweiller Reference Folschweiller2014). Anti-Phanariote discourse became entrenched in the nascent historiography (Rados 2002–Reference Rados2003) and in the public sphere, and it was heightened at a time when Phanariote networks could still pose threats to the emerging Romanian national project—such as during Moldavia’s interim governorship under a scion of the Vogoridis family, in the lead-up to what would be the Moldo-Wallachian Union of 1859 (Philliou Reference Philliou2011, 172–173). Tellingly, however, the reigning prince of the newly united principalities, Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1820–1873, r. 1859–1866), made efforts to reassure Greek diplomacy of his and his country’s favorable sentiments when monastic holdings dedicated to Mount Athos, run by Greek administrators, were on the cusp of being secularized in the lead-up to a major land reform; while Cuza privately invoked his Greek heritage, the press also made certain to distinguish between Phanariote monks and Greeks in general (Petrescu Reference Petrescu2007b, 425–426).

However, “discovering” the Aromanians in the process of Romanian nation-state building served to kindle a growing animosity toward the Greeks. The use of Greek as a lingua franca for Balkan merchants and the promise that Greek self-identification held for upward mobility and business opportunities—as well as the Greek state’s increasingly concerted propaganda aimed to maintaining the omnipresence of the Greek language in Macedonian schools and churches—all were seen as factors that, either through duress or incentivization, threatened to denationalize the Aromanians, and their elites in particular. If the Aromanians still appeared to live in an unduly prolonged past of Greek and Phanariote oppression, then it was incumbent upon the Romanian state to aid them in their national (and temporal) emancipation.

As the Macedonian Question of overlapping claims made by emerging nation-states to the Ottoman province increasingly drew international attention into the 20th century, Romania hastened to make a case for its regional relevance by investing in a network of schools and consulates, as well as by lobbying for the Aromanians’ religious and ethnic recognition in Istanbul. Given geographical distance from Romania, no direct territorial claims could be made; rather, the Romanian state relied on Ottoman support to strengthen the minority’s position in the changing landscape. Romanian nation-builders attempted to ascribe a normative ethnic identity to a target population that did not necessarily identify along ethnic lines and often adopted positional identities allowing for class mobility and community integration. Where such efforts succeeded, Aromanians’ local forms of self-identification were hoped to remain subordinate to an overarching Romanian identity, just as familiarizing Aromanians with a standardized version of the Romanian language had to be reconciled with its dissimilarity from local dialects (Trifon Reference Trifon2012, 60–67).

However, schools in Ottoman Macedonia, functioning with the cautious approval of Istanbul, did not always foster nation-builders’ desired ethnic cleavages. Attendance often reflected local communities’ interest in the education and social standing of their children, particularly when attaining or maintaining a middle-class status was at stake. The pragmatic appeal of more substantial subsidies (Gounaris Reference Gounaris1995, 417) or linguistic and cultural tools for social mobility spoke louder than national sentiment, as sometimes acknowledged by disgruntled officials (Koliopoulos and Veremis Reference Koliopoulos and Veremis2002, 161–162). Indeed, the choices made by a family or community could entail the differentiation of “ethnic” education along gender lines: Around 1889, “well-off Jewish families” in the Macedonian provincial capital of Monastir/Bitola “preferred sending their boys to the Greek high school and their girls to the Aromanian school, rather than to their own community schools” (Lory Reference Lory, Grandits, Clayer and Pichler2011, 57). Such strategies could furthermore give rise to intrafamilial, intergenerational ethnic cleavages, be they ultimately problematic or not (Agelopoulos Reference Agelopoulos1995, 255–256). From a broader point of view, however, the competition between schools as vectors for nationalizing programs nevertheless served to radicalize students and create a climate for social division by the beginning of the 20th century. While the network of Romanian schools would ultimately pale in comparison to those sponsored by Greece, Bulgaria, or Serbia, its importance for our narrative remains central, as the main form of Romanian nation-building in the region—especially given that parallel efforts at securing religious autonomy from the Greek Patriarchy in Istanbul and church services in a local dialect or Romanian proved comparatively less successful before 1905, when the Sultan offered recognition to a Vlach millet, no longer defined strictly in religious terms (Peyfuss Reference Peyfuss1994, 58–70).

Discovering the Prosthetic Bourgeoisie

19th-century literate Romanians imagined Aromanian history to have broadly mirrored that of Romanians in Moldavia and Wallachia. The relationship between the colonies settled by the emperor Trajan north of the Danube in Dacia after 106 CE—the canonical starting point of Romanian ethnogenesis—and the Latin colonies that the Aromanians embodied was a significant theme, with the terms “colonists” (coloni) and “colony” (colonia) being introduced even into didactic pamphlets written in local dialect (Cosmescu Reference Cosmescu1902, 33). The issue of how many waves of Latin colonization, and when, had brought the Aromanians into existence spoke to broader international controversies regarding the continued habitation of lands north of the Danube by Romanians in the Dark Ages—and, by extension, claims to political and cultural rights made by Romanians in Austro-Hungarian Transylvania as indigenous inhabitants. Historians thus debated whether the emergence of the Aromanians was linked to the southward relocation of Roman colonists from the province of Dacia after the emperor Aurelian evacuated the province in 271 CE, to a process whereby similar indigenous Thracian peoples had become Latinized and had resisted assimilation thereafter, or a combination of the two. Occasionally, a growing interest in pre-Roman, Thracian history further added a layer of ethnohistorical kinship between Romanians, Aromanians, and Albanians. Finally, the Aromanians were also a subject of controversies surrounding their importance in the makeup, ruling class, and regional relevance of the Second Bulgarian Empire during the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁴

For instance, noted historian A. D. Xenopol (1847–1920) insisted on the continued habitation of lands north of the Danube during the formative era of early Romanian ethnogenesis. For Xenopol, the two branches of Balkan Latindom had evolved in parallel, in separate geographical areas. Romanians in the Danubian lowlands and in Transylvania were archetypal ploughmen, never driven off their land, whereas Aromanians, forced to retreat to the mountains by Slavic invasions in the 7th century,

This canonical intervention shows how Aromanians were believed to be different enough so as to serve a desired function in a geographically distributed national division of labor: the Aromanians’ role was that of a supposed natural bourgeoisie of their geographical region.

Historically, what had set the stage for identifying Aromanians with mercantile prowess was the privileged position offered by the Ottoman Empire in its Balkan borderlands as military defenders of its expanding frontiers in the 15th and 16th centuries, and subsequently as economic actors in a growing international trade (Cazacu Reference Cazacu1989, 81–96). By the 18th century, Christian merchants inhabited towns such as M/Voschopolis, centers of both commerce and learning.Footnote ⁵ Around the beginning of the 19th century, part of an Orthodox, Greek-speaking, central-European diaspora began to identify in a separate manner (Seirinidou Reference Seirinidou and Rozen2008, 155–159), yet not always in a straightforwardly “national” way that privileged linguistic self-preservation, even as contacts were established between Aromanian elites and the early Romanian national movement in Transylvania (Peyfuss Reference Peyfuss1994, 24–30). Concomitantly, information emphasizing the mercantile disposition of the Aromanians was provided by contemporary travel accounts by Westerners, who remarked both upon their business acumen and their Romance language (Leake Reference Leake1814, 372–373; Reference Leake1835, 274–275, 300; Pouqueville Reference Pouqueville1826, 326–396). Already by the 1840s, these would color early perceptions of Aromanians in a nascent Romanian public sphere. One article, for instance, referring to them as a Roman “colony” transplanted from the province of Dacia, insisted on their “mercantile character,” and highlighted the role they had played in the Greek Revolution of 1821, implying their commitment to an anti-Phanariote struggle analogous to that in the principalities (De Morangies, Reference de Morangiés1841, “Les Roumounis de l’Ano-Valachie.” Spicuitorul/Le Glaneur Moldo-Valaque, July-September 1841).

But it was mainly after 1848 that future Romanian nation-state builders armed with some previous knowledge of the Aromanians’ existence would, during postrevolutionary exile, come into direct contact, and note both ethnolinguistic similarities, and their potential relevance in a regional setting (Trifon Reference Trifon2012, 218; Peyfuss Reference Peyfuss1994, 32–33; Neagu Reference Neagu2014, 61–62, 66–67). Aromanian pamphleteers themselves would, in retrospect, speak of “1848’s men of genius who, of course, created the Macedonian-Romanian Question with a grand purpose and a sublime ideal in mind” (Cosmescu Reference Cosmescu1902, 3). Emblematically, noted historian Nicolae Bălcescu (1819–1852) referred to Aromanians as “an outpost of Romanian-ness” (Reference Bălcescu, Zane and Zane1990 [1849], 174) in his correspondence with economist and future statesman Ion Ghica (1816–1897).Footnote ⁶ The narrative subsequently enshrined in the second half of the century was that, prior to a felicitous mutual rediscovery in the state-building heyday of the 1860s, Romanians and Aromanians had been relatively ignorant of each other on the level of active cooperation (Ciupală Reference Ciupală1996, 29–30). One mythologized foundational moment of the Aromanians’ “discovery” by the nascent Romanian state was the 1862 Bucharest journey of one Aromanian monk, Averchie, sent from Mt. Athos in order to negotiate with the government during its process of secularizing monastic holdings that supported the Holy Mountain. Though in actual fact Averchie had, too, met with revolutionary émigrés (Papacostea Reference Papacostea1929), the canonical narrative emphasized his surprise at understanding Romanian and excitement at witnessing the parade of a Christian army in the service of a Christian state made him cry out, in dialect: “I, too, am Romanian!”—the existence of the state was to be emphasized as a compelling catalyst for national feeling (Burada Reference Burada1890, 15–16).

In fact, this topos, albeit in a geographically inverted form, would also simultaneously be enshrined in a seminal travel account written in 1858 and published in 1863 by writer Dimitrie Bolintineanu (1819–1872), which would offer a rich toolbox of tropes and talking points for years to come. In postrevolutionary exile, Bolintineanu recounted an overnight stay in the house of an Aromanian family in the Epirus and spoke of “well-built people, with intelligent physiognomies, and a piercing look, but devoid of savagery” (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 326). They seemed deeply surprised upon hearing the (exaggerated) claim that in Romanian “lands there are neither Albanians, nor Greeks, nor Bulgarians; that our prince is Romanian, that we have a Romanian army, that our sermons are in Romanian, and that our churches have bells” (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 326). Religious freedom and ethnic homogeneity—even the narrator’s right to carry guns (made in Romania!) as a further privilege denied to Ottoman Christians—were all framed as revelations for the Aromanians.

In his manifesto-like introduction, Bolintineanu, himself of Aromanian descent, spoke of a community scattered across the region, to be defended both from the standpoint of a practical nationalism (the prosperity of each nation ensuring that of human society as a whole) but also from that of a poetic nationalism. The experience of Aromanians’ historical decline since the heyday of V/Moschopolis illuminated Bolintineanu’s own experience of historical time, offering him “a strange notion of truth,” witnessing “this noble ruin of legions that once filled the world with their glory, we may say: this nation never vanishes, and in its decay, is more interesting than in its brightest hour” (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 291–292). Romantic musings aside, the passage outlines a first crucial component of imagining the Aromanians: Like Romanians north of the Danube, they, too were legions settled through Roman colonization, their evolution running parallel. Bolintineanu also posited another similarity, between the recently ended suffering of the Moldo-Wallachians at the hands of the Phanariotes and the continued, denationalizing subjection of the Aromanians at the hands of the Greeks (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 292–293)—even in spite of the presumedly pivotal role that Aromanians had played in the attainment of Greek independence (and, by extension, the end of the Phanariote order, including in the Principalities).

Secondly, in reflecting on the servile status of other Christian nations in the Balkans, Bolintineanu othered them as inherently more decayed than the Turk himself, insofar as “nothing is weaker than Ottoman tyranny” (Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 305). While serfdom would only be abolished in Romania in 1864, and the country still remained a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, public discourse emphasized the contractual nature of the relationship enshrined by ancient capitulations as proof of agency, rather than subjection (Sorescu Reference Sorescu2018); Bolintineanu insisted that cultural and economic prowess granted the Aromanians a relative autonomy, equally proven by a past contractual relationship between Aromanians and Ottomans (Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 364–365). The text ended with the suggestion that concluding similar compacts anew would be salutary (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 395).

Thirdly, and most importantly, Bolintineanu repeatedly emphasized the status and prominence of Aromanian merchants throughout his travelogue, albeit without fully erasing the existence of ploughmen or shepherds. In turn, Bolintineanu’s geographical and economic breakdown of the various branches of the Aromanians provided, if with some acknowledged caveats, a further argument for their relative importance in the region, and for Romania, by extension (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 351–357). Lamenting the Hellenization of Aromanian elites, Bolintineanu correspondingly lauded the role of Aromanian women in perpetuating national identity in and through the household, seizing upon the importance of marriage patterns and gendered understandings of cultural and linguistic reproduction (Davidova Reference Davidova2012). This being said, Bolintineanu was nevertheless confident that the mass of the people would not be lured by the socioeconomic privileges that Hellenization promised (Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 306–307). Still, Bolintineanu wrote, “the upcoming government, the government of a more national, more liberal, and therefore more dignified regime, will—one hopes—direct its thoughts toward the colony of Aurelian” (Bolintineanu Reference Bolintineanu and Vârgolici1985 [1863], 333).

Though written in 1858, Bolintineanu’s text was published in 1863, Wallachia and Moldavia united in 1859 by the common election of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza: the conclusion read like a fulfilled prophecy. Bolintineanu’s long-standing friendship with the prince earned him the position of Minister of Education, having already served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1861, as well as in other previous diplomatic positions. In said capacity, but also as a founding member of a public committee supporting the Aromanian cause (Berciu-Drăghicescu and Petre Reference Berciu-Drăghicescu and Petre2004, 12–13), Bolintineanu could now foster awareness and institutional involvement. The committee’s manifesto, published in 1863, emphasized a shared Latin legacy, calling upon Aromanians to understand their role in the broader dynamic of national emancipation: “It is through you, brothers, that Dacia [i.e., North-Danubian Romania] may enter the great Neo-Latin family” (Anon. Reference Brezeanu, Zbuchea and Adamache1997). As early as 1860, the Romanian state had considered investing in Macedonian schools and churches, the first school opening with the support of a wealthy Aromanian merchant by 1864 (Berciu-Drăghicescu Reference Berciu-Drăghicescu1996, 37–42). As Moldavian historian, 1848er, and statesman Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–1891) also wrote during one of his many tenures as prime minister to Dimitrie Atanasescu (1836–1907), the first teacher sent to Macedonia, “The [re]awakening of the Romanian element in Macedonia is something that is all the more strengthening for Romania” (Berciu Reference Berciu-Drăghicescu1996, 188).

In parallel, with the involvement of Fr. Averchie recruited by the government in 1865, Romania also set up a program of study grants for Aromanian youths, who were hoped to return to Macedonia as patriotically inclined teachers (Peyfuss Reference Peyfuss1994, 34–38; Tanaşoca and Vâlcu Reference Tanaşoca and Vâlcu2012, 11–38). Funding was now redirected from monastic holdings, which were previously dedicated to monasteries in Greece and the Holy Land, and secularized in 1862, the outcome which Averchie had ironically been sent from Mt. Athos to help prevent. As one internal document justifying the allocation of 20,000 lei for study grants in 1865 phrased it, “For us, the Romanians of the Principalities, this is not only a matter of duty toward those of the same blood, but also one of vital interest for the future of our nationality” (Berciu-Drăghicescu and Petre Reference Berciu-Drăghicescu and Petre2004, 104). However, the Macedonian boarding school in Bucharest soon had to reckon with its graduates’ occasional reluctance to return to Macedonia, seeking out state employment in Romania proper (Tanaşoca and Vâlcu Reference Tanaşoca and Vâlcu2012, 103, 124–125). By 1870, reports to the minister of education (formally, the minister for instruction and religious cults,” Ministrul instrucțiunii și cultelor) spoke of how the boarding school had become

Already, party-based patronage and local clientelism seemed to converge: the pathology of funcționarism, by which the Aromanians were implicitly presumed to be untouched, now reared its head, the state a potential source of contagion. Yet it would be equally fair to consider how the issue was framed in the broader context of a still-nascent school system in Romania and Macedonia alike, and how its precarity was perceived by the actors in question:

On the one hand, the state pragmatically prioritized education as nation-building at home—it had also been under Bolintineanu’s tenure that funding was allocated for opening some one thousand village schools in Romania. On the other, fault was to be found with those it had trained but could not fully support: the boarding school finally closed its doors in 1873. Already, this foreshadowed how the school system in Macedonia could become the source of public scandals in the 1890s and early 1900s.

The Commercial Vanguard

The final three decades of the century saw the steady growth of a corpus of histories, travelogues, and assorted pamphlets, further entrenching and nuancing foundational topoi, involving a growing cast of politicians qua national entrepreneurs. The continued institutional and infrastructural efforts of expanding the school system in Macedonia as a preferred means of outreach were justified in Parliament in 1870 by historian and Pan-Latinist activist V. A. Urechia (1834–1901), who had formerly served as Bolintineanu’s secretary in the Ministry of Education:

While conquest was off the table, economic and political leverage were not. If the role of the Aromanians was that of mediators for Romania’s economic interests in the Balkans, this came as part of a transregional colonial continuum, as argued in the mid-1870s by polymath diplomat Mihail G. Obedenaru (1839–1885):

Obedenaru’s text (a polemical updated version of Romania’s official statistical and economic overview published for the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris) included such reflections for the benefit of an international audience. Here, the author attempted to offset the perceived encroachment of Austria—long feared to monopolize Romanian trade, and even more so upon the ratification of a commercial treaty in 1876—with the potential that Aromanians held for Romania in terms of comparative advantage over a more “backward” neighbor.

The treaties of San Stefano and Berlin stimulated Romania’s involvement in the Balkans. As a victorious cobelligerent in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), Romania won its independence from the Ottoman Empire alongside Serbia and Montenegro. On new diplomatic footing with Istanbul, Romania now hoped to expand its nation-building efforts more openly. The topos of Aromanians’ cultural and commercial prowess found a new intended audience—international diplomacy. Thus, safeguarding a form of autonomy for the Aromanians, as one pan-Latinist pamphlet published in 1877 dedicated to the French ambassador in Istanbul put it, this would be “in the interest of peace in the Orient, the general interest of Europe, of justice and the historical rights of nationalities” (Densușianu and Damé Reference Densușianu and Damé1877, 29–30). The ideal of Latin colonies as a bulwark of civilization and as a solution for the “Eastern Question” (Densușianu and Damé Reference Densușianu and Damé1877, 7–9) gained new salience: the Aromanians were not only a vanguard of Romanian interests, but of European civilization in general.

A memorandum on behalf of the Aromanians was also drafted for the 1878 Congress of Berlin by Aromanian teacher Apostol Mărgărit (1832–1903).Footnote ⁷ Though Mărgărit had been a teacher in the service of the Greek cause, his early conversion to Romanian nationalism meant that he had been active in Macedonia since the 1860s. Mărgărit’s shining hour came in 1878: although he was not sent to Berlin, his memorandum was nevertheless presented to prince Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1839–1914, r. 1866–1914, king as of 1881) in Bucharest. There, he received the reassurance of Mihail Kogălniceanu that the topic had been broached during negotiations, and he was given a letter of introduction to the Sultan’s Grand Vizier, Savfet Pasha (1814–1883) (Neagu Reference Neagu2014, 94). Indeed, the vizier’s support proved the first step toward recognizing the linguistic rights of the Aromanians, allowing the significant expansion of the school network with Mărgărit in charge of organizational efforts.

While the text of the memorandum appears to have never been fully published in Romanian, it was reprinted in Frățilia întru dreptate (Brotherhood Toward Justice). This was the first newspaper subsidized by the Macedonian-Romanian Cultural Society (Societatea de cultură Macedo-Română), published bilingually in Aromanian and Greek, openly adopting a conciliatory stance toward other nationalities and implicitly acknowledging the importance of Greek as a lingua franca. Written in a more-or-less fabricated idiom, hoped to be broadly intelligible to both Romanians and speakers of various Balkan dialects, the memorandum leaned heavily on the discourse of stratified waves of Latin colonization. The Aromanians were steadfast keepers of Latin prowess and purity, even as the Latin West reached its nadir in the Dark Ages: if the Aromanians were now isolated in the mountains, this was owing to their love of liberty, as a means of avoiding serfdom; none of this was new—save for the ambition of making Aromanians internationally heard (Anon., “Memoratum petrecutu de Romanili din Turchia cătră congresul de la Berlin.” Frățilia întru dreptate, 16–17/1880). The founding address of the Macedonian-Romanian Cultural Society (Stoicescu, Naum, and Petrescu-Birina Reference Stoicescu, Naum and Petrescu-Birina1900, 99-102) made clear that frustration over lacking representation in Berlin played a part in its establishment. In 1879, under the patronage of the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church and a who’s who of political figures, the society—animated by V. A. Urechia as its spiritus rector—was granted official recognition the following year. Offering a network of support to Aromanians in both Romania and the Balkans, it acted as a lobby group and financed the printing of a number of periodicals, as well as offered additional funding for schools in Macedonia.

Latin origins and civilization qua stability were once more invoked in a memorandum drafted in the lead-up to the 1881 Convention of Constantinople, which ultimately awarded territories in Thessaly and the Epirus to Greece. Again written by Mărgărit and submitted with the support of the Macedonian-Romanian Cultural Society (though not of the Romanian state), the document was fielded to European ambassadors in Istanbul (Neagu Reference Neagu2014, 120–121). Presenting themselves as Roman colonies, “the sole owners of the land and villages they inhabit, and therefore the true inhabitants and citizens of their country,” Aromanians proclaimed their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire as an “element of order,” mediating between Greek and Bulgarian ambitions. A favorable statistical exposé was also appended so as to bolster political claims, in an even more telling language:

Here, the argument was applied on two other scales: both to international politics and to a polity that was neither liberal nor (to the mind of most contemporaries) European, namely, the Ottoman Empire. This was not a plea for granting electoral rights to the Ottoman Vlachs but an appeal framed in European terms, for European diplomats: a region without a Greek bourgeoisie could not belong to the Greek state. Although the memorandum reached Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842–1918, r. 1876–1909) (Neagu Reference Neagu2014, 120–121) and the House of Commons (Parl. Deb. Sir Charles W. Dilke, H.C. Deb. May 19, 1881, “Turkey and Greece—The Greek Frontier,” vol. 261, col. 798), it failed to secure territorial autonomy for the Aromanians once the region was annexed by Greece.

Schools and Scandals

The new Balkan order did not make for smooth sailing for Romania either. Independence was accompanied by the forced cession of southern Bessarabia to Russia and the initially unwanted annexation of a multiethnic Dobruja on the Black Sea, which would prove a problem for Romania’s relationship with the newly established Bulgarian state, given its territorial claims.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, Romania’s international recognition was conditioned by the granting of political rights to its Jewish minority. However, anti-Semitism made politicians and the public insist that Jews would thus find new strength in preventing the consolidation of a Romanian middle class. As such, each application was subject to the separate approval of each chamber of Parliament; while Romanian-born Jews faced the indignity of being subjects without being citizens, ethnic Romanians born outside Romania proper were now recognized as citizens through a far simpler process (Iordachi Reference Iordachi2019, 333–351). At this stage, one finds the example of an Aromanian authoring a pamphlet against Jewish naturalization, implicitly emphasizing loyalty to state and nation and his moral stake in defending them (Lambru [Reference Lambru1879?]). But the anti-Semitic economic imagination of contemporaries also explicitly began to pit one group against the other. In 1882, a project encouraging merchants to relocate from the west-Wallachian region of Oltenia to the Moldavian capital of Iași—supposedly lost to Jewish economic dominance—also envisaged bringing “experienced merchants or tradesmen from the Romanian villages of Macedonia” at a more advanced stage, as one newspaper noted (Chiper Reference Chiper2014, 172). Although a failed experiment, this initiative, led and mediatized by a local committee for the strengthening of a Romanian merchant class, shows how even when a local subgroup within the borders of the state was associated with economic savoir-faire, the Aromanians were imagined to be in the lead.

Perhaps the most revealing document chronicling the ever-greater involvement of the Romanian state in Aromanian affairs was the comprehensive official history of state-funded schools abroad, the vast majority of which were in Macedonia. Published in 1906 (King Carol I’s 40th anniversary on the throne), the tome reprinted a village-by-village statistic—including the number of those who had “turned Greek,” thereby acknowledging the limits of education as a nation-building strategy—and lauded Aromanians as a people “partly made up of shepherds and oxherds, partly of merchants and craftsmen, which has preserved itself well throughout the centuries” (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 5–9). The importance of trade and commerce was reemphasized throughout, as were efforts made to optimize (and, indeed, direct) graduates’ career prospects: thus, a table with the known occupations of those who had graduated the high school in Monastir/Bitola—the flagship of Romanian education in the area—was reprinted (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 184). Moreover, the book noted that two commercial schools had been established recently in Ioannina and Thessaloniki, which served to train merchants and accountants (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 304—311)—though results would prove underwhelming (Nistor Reference Nistor2009, 85–86). As proudly proclaimed in an article published in both a consular report and later in an Aromanian newspaper (G. Z. Zuca, “Studii economice asupra românilor din Pind.” Lumina, 10/Reference Zuca1906,), such schools would reward Romania with ever-strengthening commercial links with Italy and Egypt. Finally, to this was added a separate boarding school in Istanbul, created with the specific purpose of allowing graduates to gain further education in Ottoman Turkish, so as to “enter public life” and prevent their emigration to Romania, in search of clerkships (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 207). However, with the benefit of hindsight, Aromanian activists would later describe such schools as a “breeding ground for job seekers [in Romania]” (Trifon Reference Trifon2012, 233). This was something that Romanians wanted to avoid at all costs—the contagion of funcționarism, either brought in by the state, or facilitated in its local development by state money.

Detailed and relatively nonpartisan, the book also gave due credit to the efforts of Apostol Mărgărit, who had been at the heart of organizational efforts on the ground. A survivor of assassination attempts, his credentials as a nationalist activist could not be denied. And yet, the book made mention of a conflict that had erupted between two recently established institutions: the Romanian consulate in Monastir/Bitola, opened in 1892, and the consistory (eforie) of Macedonian schools, which resulted in various schisms in the school system between 1895 and 1897 (Trifon Reference Trifon2012, 237). That this, in turn, came at the time of a massive increase in state funding could not fail to attract public attention and become a political weapon. Moreover, as recent involvement on behalf of kinfolk in Transylvania had threatened to jeopardize the relationship between Austria-Hungary and Romania (both part of a secret alliance), Bucharest was, as of 1896, prepared to concentrate its efforts on the Balkans more openly (Dinu Reference Dinu2014, 114–115). Taken together, these factors ensured a major scandal in Parliament over the budget and state of schools in Macedonia, leading to the dismissal of both the consul in Monastir/Bitola and the head of the diplomatic service in Istanbul (Cain Reference Cain2017, 161–162). Mărgărit was also singled out: a pamphlet, backed up by some forty 40 pages of incriminating documents, accused him of “Phanariote” impulses borne of his upbringing and of transforming the school system into his personal fiefdom, populated with drunken teachers (and worse) (Cosmulei Reference Cosmulei1891, 4–5). Not only was this pamphlet referenced in Parliament, but members of Parliament added further accusations, such as Mărgărit’s betrayal of Romanian interests by siding with Bulgarians or Catholic missionaries, undermining the reputation of the Vlachs as an “element of order” favored by the Sultan (N. Fleva, Parl. Deb., Chamber of Deputies, March 8, 1896, in: Desbaterile Adunărei Deputaților, 499–509). Another parliamentary member would go even further and claim that brothels staffed with women seduced by Mărgărit had functioned in Macedonian schools (N. Ceaur-Aslan, Parl. Deb. Chamber of Deputies, March 8, 1896, in: Desbaterile Adunărei Deputaților, 509–511). So great was the furor that Liberal Prime Minister D. A. Sturdza (1833–1914) contacted Italian diplomatic personnel for an independent external opinion on Mărgărit (Carageani Reference Carageani1999, 146).

As Mărgărit had benefitted from the support of both Liberals and Conservatives, ascribing partisan blame could only become a contentious issue (Trifon Reference Trifon2012, 75–92). However, declaring that Macedonia was not a matter of party politics but one of superior national interest was obviously (if ironically) a stance that lent itself to partisan politicking. Two major actors were involved in this as ministers of education (Tanașoca and Tanașoca Reference Tanașoca and Tanașoca2004, 141–154). One was the Liberal Spiru Haret (1851–1912), serving between 1897 and 1899, 1901 and 1904, and 1907 and 1910, the most active reformer of the Romanian school system. The other was Take Ionescu (1858–1922), a maverick Conservative who had made his political debut as a Liberal, and who served as minister of education between 1891 and 1895 and 1899 and 1900. During the period in question, the budget allocated for schools abroad by Romania grew from 250,000 lei (1891) to 525,000–530,000 lei per annum (1894–1901), supplemented with up to 200,000 lei (1899–1900) (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 25). As the overall budget of the ministry was between some 25 and 30 million lei between 1894 and 1908 (Murgescu Reference Murgescu2010, 192), such sums were not in and of themselves exorbitant; rather, their relative increase invited controversy.

Defending his legacy against Haret’s calls for reform in 1897, Ionescu published a pamphlet where he claimed that “we do not want to turn the Macedonian Question into a partisan one,” yet openly lauded the efforts of the Conservatives in raising its profile on the political agenda (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1897, 15). By 1898, Haret had come into conflict with Mărgărit and, drawing on a series of damning reports, set the stage for reform. However, once in power, Ionescu would also acknowledge its necessity, draft a project similar to that of Haret, and, in a letter to the minister of foreign affairs, emphasize the importance of dissuading graduates from simply immigrating to Romania in search of government jobs or seeking employment in Macedonian schools (Tanașoca and Tanașoca Reference Tanașoca and Tanașoca2004, 153). As such, in 1900, a new Conservative government would close down 49 of some 127 schools (Cordescu Reference Cordescu1906, 20).

In 1901–1902 the partisan nature of the Macedonian Question became fully apparent, ending in the departure of Mărgărit: a lingering global economic crisis made budgetary readjustment a necessity. In Parliament, Spiru Haret, now a minister once more, railed against the Conservatives, who had continued to approve ever-more-sizeable budgets, while allegedly choosing to cover up Mărgărit’s corruption and clientelism. Haret saw fit to reframe the “Macedonian Question as a purely Liberal question,” claiming his party had been the first to show sustained and genuine interest in it—to the point that it had refrained from criticizing its opponents’ spending. Yet, as it had turned out, money diverted from “the purse of our wretched peasants, themselves reduced to eating roots,” had supposedly financed nonexistent schools in Albania and the Epirus, subsidized personnel in schools that already had more staff than students, and paid for a variety of seemingly random items: “Behold, the national ideal, embodied by bicycles!”(Spiru Haret, Parl. Deb., Chamber of Deputies, December 8, 1901, in: Desbaterile Adunărei Deputaților, 145–158).

The issue was thus framed not merely as one of blatant corruption but once more as compounded by a disregard for the “national question” at home, which, kinship notwithstanding, took precedence over the Balkans. As budgets dropped to some 300,000–400,000 lei between 1901 and 1905, few opportunities were on offer for ex-teachers: as several reports warned in 1903 and 1904, a proletariat prone to emigration was now coming into being (Vâlcu Reference Vâlcu2002, 79–80). As a footloose, a precarious proletariat was the conceptual opposite of the desired bourgeoisie; this was a troubling prospect. Although Haret was by no means unsympathetic to the Aromanian cause as such, a new surge in funding came only after his departure, in 1905.

Citizenship, Public Mobilization, and the Greek-Romanian Endgame

Public interest in the plight of the Aromanians was impelled not only by political scandals. The consolidation of a press dedicated to, and written by Aromanians—though often published in Romania and in Romanian, rather than in dialect—demonstrates the degree to which Aromanian writers identified with and popularized the tropes we have outlined. Thus, articles in Lumina (The Light), a state-sponsored newspaper edited by the didactic corps of the high school in Monastir/Bitola, struck a balance between othering the Aromanians on account of their virtues and including them in a broader pan-Romanian narrative. This was achieved by explaining “Why Aromanians Are Not Agriculturalists” (Constantin Belemace, “De ce nu sunt aromânii agricultori,” Lumina, 4/Reference Belemace1904) nuancing the topic of “Agriculture Amongst the Aromanians” (Nicolae Batzaria, “Agricultura la aromâni,”Lumina, 6/Reference Batzaria1904), downplaying the potentially unsavory implications of being identified with a nomadic lifestyle, as in the case of shepherds, for instance, and militating for the strengthening of “powerful Romanian centers” in the Balkans by sedentarizing them (G. Z. Zuca, “Păstoritul și agricultura la românii din Pind,” Lumina, 3/Reference Zuca1906). Indeed, the trope of sedentarization-as-legitimation was also present in the language of petitions submitted to Romanian authorities: in 1901, one village near Monastir/Bitola demanded its own school on the grounds that its population was made up of former shepherds who had now settled down and taken up crafts and commerce (Vâlcu Reference Vâlcu2002, 101).Footnote ⁹

One programmatic article by educator and future politician Nicolae Batzaria (1874–1952) on “The Importance of the Aromanian Element” (“Importanța elementului aromân,” Lumina, 2/Reference Batzaria1904 and “Menirea elementului aromân,” Lumina, 3/Reference Batzaria1904) combined almost all the classic topoi. The absence of rural serfdom among the Aromanians, their role as a cultural and economic elite, as a vanguard of European civilization (in fact, hyphenated as “cultural-civilizing-economic”), implied their future role as Romania’s economic vanguard. “From the borders of Russia to the shores of the Adriatic, one language, culture, and civilization shall be the chosen one: Romanian.” Indeed, “The beautiful economic role which Aromanians educated in a national spirit will be called to fulfil, as well as the determining role they can have for the future expansion of Romania’s trade on the markets of the European Orient,” was to be supported by the creation of shipping agencies, commercial museums, and by securing select trade monopolies. This national division of labor was couched in a language of naturalness and logical necessity:

The rhetoric of regional relevance as an economic vanguard complemented that of pitting Aromanians against the usual suspects: Jews and Greeks. However, if Aromanians were to displace the Jews, then they had to be in some sense comparable to them, too, and not only to north-Danubian Romanians. And, occasionally, the comparison was made. As German linguist Gustav Weigand (1860–1930) remarked in a study dedicated to the Aromanians and funded by the Romanian government (Peyfuss Reference Peyfuss1994, 19), “their endurance, thriftiness, intelligence, and foresight [are] qualities that make them similar to the Jews” (Weigand Reference Weigand1894, 59), an opinion soon picked up on by (A)Romanian writers (Stoicescu, Naum, and Petrescu-Birina Reference Stoicescu, Naum and Petrescu-Birina1900, 40). The comparison also appears to have been made on the ground, in the Balkans: one writer would note how rural Aromanians in Albania spoke of those from the former metropolis of V/Moschopolis as “proper cousins of the Jews, and, upon asking a Moschopolitan what kind of garb he wore, he laughingly replied: Jewish” (Burileanu Reference Burileanu1906, 109).

Another context in which comparisons between Jews and Aromanians were made—if only for their rhetorical value—was the hurdle of acquiring citizenship. While Jewish applicants were seldom granted citizenship by the Romanian Parliament, Aromanian applicants were, by contrast, explicitly praised for their commercial acumen, and welcomed on account of it, as Romanians by birth. As of the 1860s (Petrescu, Reference Petrescu, Bulei and Ciupală2007a, 223–224), when legal provisions acknowledging a foreign applicant’s ethnic belonging as a “Romanian” were not yet comprehensively codified (Parl. Deb., Wallachian Assembly, June 4, 1860, in: Monitorul: ḑiar oficial al Țerei Românesci. Principatele Unite, 785), members of Parliament debating the moral profile of Aromanian applicants would positively highlight the fact that, while in Romania, one such individual had “always practiced trade, rather than chased after paid positions [in the state apparatus]” (Parl. Deb., Senate, May 19, 1865, in: Monitorul Oficial, 511). Still, a decade later, the sluggish pace at which citizenship applications were felt to be processed gave rise to animosity, especially in light of the Aromanians’ claim to being exceptionally averse to funcționarism and “the only ones who have given our commerce a national color” (“Școlile macedonene,” Albina Pindului, 4/1875).

However, Romanian statesmen were particularly anxious about applications from Macedonia. Whereas documents from Hapsburg Transylvania or Bukovina could be expected to readily substantiate claims to a Romanian ethnic origin, the accuracy of records in Ottoman Macedonia, such as they existed, appeared less certain.Footnote ¹⁰ The fear was that Romania ran the risk of granting citizenship to morally corrupt, self-interested allogenous colonizers rather than strengthen its bourgeoisie by offering embattled kinfolk a chance to thrive.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, in 1886, a list of signatures gathered by an applicant from their native village in Macedonia in lieu of parish records was intensely scrutinized given the presence of several Greek names. On his part, as prime minister, the ‘48er, and a major Liberal statesman, I. C. Brătianu (1821–1891) proved relatively relaxed, arguing that it would have been unlikely for the applicant to be Bulgarian, that if he were Albanian he would nevertheless be readily assimilated, and that if he were Greek a willingness to abjure his origins would be a point of pride for the Romanians. Yet, no less notable a figure than Mihail Kogălniceanu countered that Macedonia was a veritable battleground where Aromanians were the most persecuted ethnicity of all: it had been “the shame of Romanian history” that “Phanariotes” old and new had gained citizenship; caution could finally be more fully exercised, now that the Phanariote past was a past, and the state the sole custodian of the nation’s interests (Parl. Deb., Chamber of Deputies, February 22, 1886, in: Desbaterile Adunărilor Legiuitoare, 783–786).

As such, the prospect of granting citizenship to the persecutors of Macedonian Aromanians appeared unconscionably naïve. Aromanians, too, warned of the danger: while neither all Macedonians were Aromanians, nor had all Aromanians defected to the Greek side—as a series of articles in Peninsula Balcanică argued in the 1890s—even the Jews were alleged to receive a more favorable treatment from Parliament; in the meantime, laws destined to prevent foreigners from settling in the countryside also prevented noncitizen Aromanians from displacing those who were truly undesirable by ethnocentric standards (“Recunoașterile,” Peninsula Balcanică, 2/1893-1894, “Situația românilor macedoneni,” Peninsula Balcanică, 5/1893-1894, “Împământenirile,” Peninsula Balcanică, 50/1893-1894). Rhetorical value aside, any comparison with the Jews on this particular account was inherently inaccurate and malicious. As already noted, if Romanians from the near abroad could gain citizen status by simply being recognized as ethnic Romanians and renouncing any previous foreign protection/citizenship, Romanian-born Jews were subject to a much more complicated set of requirements, and were scarcely granted naturalization.

Just how many Aromanians were there in Romania, and how many were angling for citizenship? No specific heading was included in the census of 1899, the first held since 1859. In practice, distinguishing between ethnic Romanians and the other nationals of states with significant Romanian minorities proved impossible from the standpoint of official statistics, as acknowledged in the introduction to the published results of the census (Colescu Reference Colescu1905, lxvii–lvi). Given that outside the Dobruja the mass of Romanian citizens was deemed ethnically homogenous enough for the inexistence of a local “nationalities question,” foreigners were classified in terms of citizenship/protection rather than from the standpoint of their language or country of origin. It was therefore noted that Aromanians from Ottoman Macedonia or Transylvanian Romanians were not counted separately from other subjects of those states (Colescu Reference Colescu1905, l), which implies that, at least for the former, overlapping religious criteria could not clarify ethnic make-up.

Of 23,756 Ottoman subjects residing in Romania in 1899, some 16,839 were Christian Orthodox, which would have presumably included the majority of Ottoman Greeks, Aromanians, or Bulgarians (Rachieru Reference Rachieru2018, 194–199). Likewise, this posed the same problem for discerning between Aromanians and Greeks or Bulgarians under Greek or Bulgarian protection. Little is known, thus far, about the Ottoman state’s reaction to Romanian overtures toward offering citizenship to Aromanian imperial subjects. The Ottoman nationality law of 1869 aimed to control the acquisition of foreign citizenship by mandating official approval for each applicant, not granting recognition to any unsanctioned change in an individual’s legal status, and gradually adding a series of disincentivizing measures, which restricted emigrants’ rights to property ownership and inheritance (Hanley Reference Hanley2016). Indeed, as gaining foreign citizenship could offer individuals the benefit of avoiding tax burdens, patterns of transborder mobility and “amphibious” self-identification could work well against the interests of the Ottoman state (Lyberatos Reference Lyberatos2016, 185–186). In the Romanian case, the granting of Romanian citizenship to Ottoman subjects in the Dobruja after its annexation (Rachieru Reference Rachieru2018, 123–128, 213–214) was a pressing issue, compounded by the nonratification of a consular convention before 1918 (152–167), which prevented Ottoman diplomatic personnel from compiling a registry and fully engaging with its subjects on Romanian territory (187–188).

However, as we have seen, ethnicity certainly mattered when one applied for Romanian citizenship. Though no exhaustive study has thus far covered individual files and parliamentary procedure, one little-known published source offers a partial insight: 14 pages of tables listing applications for recognition and naturalization, as examined by the parliamentary committee on citizenship, between December 1908 and December 1909 (Anon. 1910). This was a huge backlog of some 520 applications for the recognition of citizenship by (would-be) ethnic Romanians, as well as some 94 application for naturalization, some of them submitted as early as 1883. For the former category of applicant, historical regions such as “Macedonia,” “Transylvania,” “Banat,” “Bukovina,” and “Bessarabia” were listed under the heading “country of origin,” rather than specific countries of origin per se, for the latter. In all, 76 out of 520 applicants for recognition were Macedonians, of whom 54 had applied before 1907. Of the 54, 29 were “merchants,” and only four were listed as “functionaries”—there was some truth, then, to the mercantile topos, or at least the applicants managed to frame their Romanian life-course as such.

Just why these applicants were on the backlog is not explained in this terse document. But we may take these numbers as proof that the issue had become ever more pressing at the beginning of the 20th century, when growing violence in Macedonia threatened to set in motion a wave of emigration, even as Ottoman authorities moved to restrict it. This ties in with how, “in moments of hardship, national identity became an urgent point of reference and functioned as an ‘emergency identity’” (Dragostinova Reference Dragostinova2008, 171): whether on the ground or in Romania, (re)alignment with a national identity impelled individuals and communities to mobilize a language of national belonging in their interaction with other actors, including state authority, as a means of avoiding violence and persecution. The Macedonian-Romanian Cultural Society set up a placement system for Aromanians under the condition that they return to Macedonia, and it lent its expertise to the state by confirming the ethnic status of applicants for citizenship (Vâlcu Reference Vâlcu2002, 104–105). In August 1903, the outbreak of a transethnic anti-Ottoman uprising on St. Elijah’s Day (widely known as “Ilinden”) marked the beginning of a veritable civil war. Insisting on the Aromanians’ loyalty to the Sultan, the Romanian government denied Aromanian involvement in the revolutionary episode, portraying them as collateral victims of violence (Nistor Reference Nistor2009, 58–60) rather than actors mediating between Greek and Bulgarian factions (Puttkamer Reference Von Puttkamer2017, 239). Ottoman authorities proved willing to accept the narrative and moved toward acknowledging the Aromanians as a distinct community—which also meant religious autonomy from the Greek Patriarch in Istanbul.Footnote ¹² Although the Ottoman government had previously recognized the rights of Arab Christians to hold church service in their own language as of 1892, it had no desire to complicate its relationship with the Patriarch and was wary of setting a regional precedent in Macedonia (Arslan Reference Arslan2004, 125, 129). As evidenced by the Ottoman census of 1903, both the administration and the population found that official denominational categories no longer corresponded to local practices of self-identification. Thus, the recognition of the Vlachs as a millet in May 1905, granting them administrative recognition and religious autonomy by virtue of ethnic distinction, was part of the complicated evolution of what a millet could mean (Yosmaoğlu Reference Yosmaoğlu2006, 65; Dundar Reference Dundar2015, 14).

As the Patriarch proved unwilling to accept this state of affairs, Greek irregulars in the Ottoman Empire and Greece began a campaign against pro-Romanian Aromanians. As the Greek government supported the Patriarch and was unwilling to recognize the existence of an Aromanian minority, this resulted in a diplomatic breakdown between Romania and Greece. For (A)Romanian pamphleteers, the age of Phanariote subjection had not yet ended in Macedonia—nor in Romania, insofar as Greeks in Aromanians’ clothing could tighten their grip on the countryside. This was both a temporal and a geographical entanglement. The Patriarch himself—seen as the root of the problem—had already for some time been vilified as a Phanariote: both in a literal sense, as his see was in the Istanbul neighborhood of Phanar, and in a figurative/historical sense (Anon. 1897), which came closer in its focus to the Bulgarian variant of anti-Phanariote discourse (Detrez Reference Detrez, Tsibiridou and Palantzas2013). If Aromanians had supposedly led Greece toward independence, it was a sad paradox that one could still ask: “Have the Phanariotes Disappeared?”—as argued one suggestively-titled article in 1905 (G. Missail, “Perit-au fanarioții?,” Revista Macedoniei, 5/Reference Missail1905). Part of a series attacking both the Patriarch and the Greek community, it was authored by the veteran nationalist activist George Missail (1835–1906), who had also written on “The Phanar and Our Brothers in the Pindus,” and concluded that

The language of newspapers involved in Hellenophobic agitation in the summer of 1906 also drew on the topos of the Phanariote. Even as the historiographical understanding of the Phanariote past was now becoming ever more nuanced (Rados Reference Rados2008), the rhetorical equation of “Greeks” and “Phanariotes” seemed complete. As a series of anti-Greek rallies swept the country (Kontogeorgis Reference Kontogeorgis and Lyberatos2013), Greek citizens suspected of supporting terrorism in Macedonia were expelled, and Greek merchants and estate administrators were accused of cynically exploiting Romanian peasants in order to finance bandits. Newly founded periodicals bore names such as Liga anti-grecească (The Anti-Greek League, renamed Liga Neamului, The League of the Nation, after its tenth issue) and Apărarea neamului românesc (The Defense of the Romanian Nation). The first issue of Liga anti-grecească reprinted a speech held in the Danubian port town of Giurgiu, insistently evoking the memory of Vladimirescu and the Phanariotes in order to stir passions against the local Greek minority (“Marele miting anti-grecesc din Giurgiu,” Liga anti-grecească, 1/1906); the same held true for the manifesto in Apărarea neamului românesc, which had in fact organized the meeting in question (“Apel către cetățenii giurgiuveni,” Apărarea neamului românesc, 1/1906). Continuities between a past of oppression and the present were highlighted in articles with titles such as “Yesterday! And Today!” where the Phanariote era was presented as “the darkest stain upon our past,” exhorting Romanians in general (and the Aromanians, in particular) to recall the civilizing mission bequeathed upon them as a colonial outpost of civilization in the Orient by their Roman ancestors (“Eri! Și azi!,” Liga anti-grecească, 3/1906). If “Romania was once considered a Greek colony” by the Phanariotes, one article argued, this was reason enough to expel Greeks who still thought so (“Noile expulzări,”Apărarea neamului românesc, 9/1906). Moreover, lists singling out alleged Greek conspirators were published for the benefit of the Ministry of the Interior (Apărarea neamului românesc, 12/1906). In this climate of anxiety, reactions to one Aromanian militant’s rejected citizenship application called for “a Byzantine government and a parliament of Greeks […] and all the sons of vagabond Phanariotes” to be purged swiftly by the legendary Vlad the Impaler (Apărarea neamului românesc, 23/1906).

Aromanian newspapers played the same tune—down to similar complaints regarding how granting citizenship to Jews and Greeks was indefensible, so long as Aromanians were rejected (“Recunoașterile macedonenilor,” Românul de la Pind, January 29, 1907). One article in the short-lived Aromânul (The Aromanian) compared “Greek Emigration to America and Immigration to Our Country,” arguing that if Greeks as far afield as the USA could subsidize their national cause by sending significant sums of money back home in spite of their poverty, then surely the wealthy Greek administrators of rural estates in Romania did all the more so, siphoning off the country’s riches (“Emigrarea grecilor în America față cu imigrarea în țara noastră,” Aromânul, 3/1906). Once more, Aromanians could be presented as the very solution to the problem—even if Greek newspapers supposedly warned of an economic war that would ruin Romania, there was little cause for concern that the expulsion of Greek merchants would wreak havoc:

Aromanians made full use of their potential as a prosthetic bourgeoisie: always-already Romanian, even when not yet citizens, they could speak on behalf of the nation at large, while highlighting their particular role in its division of labor and actively involving themselves as morally authorized gatekeepers of the state’s ethnic purity. This position relied not only on a set of positive characterological traits but also on the sense of lack that permeated Romanians’ self-perception, allowing Aromanians to seize the opportunity presented by the rhetorics of self-blame. The descendants of Roman colonies could both act as a colonial vanguard and simultaneously undo the damage of foreign economic colonization in the kingdom. Finally, thinking about the Aromanians made time move out of joint: if the Balkans still appeared to live in a Phanariote age that would not end, doubt was also cast over whether it had well and truly ended in Romania proper.