Archive for June, 2010
The Temporary Regulations of May 1882 required Jews within the Pale of Settlement to settle only in towns and cities. In Bessarabia, which was situated within the Pale, some towns were demoted to the status of village to debar Jews from residence. Town and city limits were also redefined to reduce the immediately surrounding area available to Jews. In addition, Jews were forbidden to reside in an international border strip 50 versts (about 53 km) wide; as Bessarabia was a border province, this meant that a significant area of land along the Russian border with Romania was also out of bounds. Rights of residence for Jews were therefore strictly delimited in Bessarabia to around 40 larger settlements.
And of course they were subject to all the other civil and political disabilities imposed upon the Jews throughout Russia.
They were subject to two special taxes: the box tax (collected on kosher meat, at slaughter and sale) and the candle tax (on candles lit in synagogues). The community as a whole was made to make up the deficit of a Jewish tax defaulter.
Quotas (of from 2% to 10% of intake) controlled the admittance of Jews to high schools and universities, while other higher education institutes elsewhere in the empire (such as the Moscow Medical Academy and the Veterinary Institute in Kharkiv) were completely closed. Jewish school teachers were forbidden from teaching Russian to their pupils.
Jews could not enter government service, with the sole exception of doctors. They were usually prohibited from serving as elected representatives of zemstvo or town assemblies or artisan boards, or were restricted by quotas, as in the case of aldermen and guilds.
Jews could not become officers in the Russian army but were required to undertake military service; for various reasons, a higher proportion of the Jewish population was enlisted. A collective punishment was exacted, so that a Jewish family as a whole was held responsible for draft-dodgers in its midst, to the tune of a 300 ruble fine.
And in Bessarabia, as elsewhere in Russia, the Jews were resented for their acumen and their success in the remaining fields left open to them: as landowners’ preferred tenant farmers, as vine growers and inn keepers, as orchard men and tobacco growers, as middlemen and agents, as traders and exporters, and as money-lenders. What is interesting but probably not at all unusual is that the anti-Semitic feelings which led to the April 1903 pogroms in the Bessarabian capital Kishinev definitely appear to have been orchestrated and encouraged by the provincial government and police, and stoked by local media agitation, rather than being a spontaneous outburst of animosity from the townspeople. 42 Jews were killed, countless Jewish properties damaged and a community temporarily divided.
Genealogists deal with time and are accustomed to the passing of generations and the irretrievable loss of undocumented family lore which goes with it. Headstones are raised, weather and crumble; unwatched and untended cemeteries become overgrown and revert to nature. The places where our ancestors lived change inexorably: streets are renumbered, houses are demolished or rebuilt, villages and towns evolve and sprawl to the point that only a few landmarks survive which would be recognisable to earlier generations.
For most of us, however, something remains that we can visit and use to visualise, with who knows what degree of inaccuracy, how things may have been for our great great grandparents living in their home town or native village. But not for all of us. In too many cases, a community has disappeared: a Jewish dorf or shtetl entirely expunged, a German colony deported wholesale from Bessarabia, a Ukrainian village in SE Poland razed.
Sometimes the agency of change is not violence but something more mundane. The historical old town of Kalyazin in Tver’ oblast’, Russia was drowned unsentimentally by the Soviets. It was situated on the banks of the Volga, which was insufficiently navigable for the industrially driven USSR: too sluggish, too irregular, too many sandbanks. In 1940, as the Volga was widened, straightened, deepened, canalised where necessary and harnessed to deliver hydro-electric power, Kalyazin was submerged. Only the bell tower of the Church of Svyatoi Nikolai remains above water, tremendously evocative visually. The inhabitants of Kalyazin were relocated to a new site, still called Kalyazin, on higher ground above the Volga. Everything not taken down went beneath the waves.
Juxtapose this with a Volga legend, which inspired Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya. Rimsky-Korsakov made the substance of the legend more realistic, by having the city rendered invisible to the Tartar hordes threatening Russia by shrouding it in dense fog. In the original version of the tale, however, to avoid being sacked by the Mongols the city of Kitezh was immersed in the lake, the dome of its church being the last of the town to submerge, and henceforth led an underwater existence; if one puts ones ear to the ground on the lake shore and listens hard, then, if one is pure of heart, the bells of Kitezh can be heard pealing beneath the water.
Throughout the long 19th century, while thousands of Poles went into exile or campaigned and rebelled against the partition and occupation of their country, thousands of other Poles served in the Russian army, both as officers and as other ranks, just as they served in the imperial civil service, the police and the prison service throughout the length and breadth of the Russian empire.
There were various types of exemption from military service. Only sons were entitled to exemption, as were eldest sons acting in loco paternis due to the actual head of household being no longer able to support their family. Other young men were exempt for reasons of ill health.
As for the balance of non-exempted men, a lottery existed to determine who should be enlisted. A community was required to furnish the army with a certain number of recruits and, as this number was usually smaller than the number of non-exempt men available, lots were drawn to select which of the eligible would have to go for a soldier.
The loss of a son to the army was keenly felt by the family for a multitude of reasons, even in times of peace when no conflict was on the horizon and there was no imminent fear of his death. Firstly, there was the loss of the contribution made by an able-bodied member of the family, whether as a worker on a subsistence smallholding or as a wage-labourer in the town or country. Then there were the personal feelings of separation of a young man leaving home for the first time and entering into the unknown. In the mid 19th century, the standard term of service in the Russian military was seven to 15 years and conditions in the army were harsh; often the length of service was extended as a result of disciplinary action. During this period, communication between soldier and family was likely to be infrequent, even if the soldier was literate. And of course, unlike emigration, service in the Russian army was involuntary and, at least for the more politically and nationally conscious families, would have carried if not exactly shame – for military service was widespread and all but unavoidable for most – then the oppressive consciousness of being a powerless subject people.
In Lithuania today three different forms of a surname may be recognised: male, married female and unmarried female. For example, Mr Budrikas married to a Mrs Budrikienė might have a spinster daughter named Miss Budrikaitė. Of course, the form that the surname takes makes it unnecessary to ask whether or not Ona Budrikienė or Marija Budrikaitė are married, or to use a title for either of them.
However, more historically, in speech there were additional forms of the surname for different members of the family, based upon age and sex. The wife of a Mr Švelnas would be Mrs Švelnienė. Their young son would be Master Švelnytis and an adult son would be Mr Švelnukas. Their young daughter would be Miss Švelnytė and an adult but unmarried daughter would be Miss Švelnikė.
(This particular example is given by EJ Harrison, a member of the British mission to Lithuania writing in 1922, shortly after Lithuanian independence.)
Generally speaking, of course, the names of minors are unlikely to feature in these forms in the official documentary record. However, the forms of the names based on diminutives (Švelnukas and Švelnikė in the above example) may have been used to distinguish between families resident in the same village (e.g. between father and son) and it is quite possible that there may be a shared ancestor where surnames with a common root are found in the parish registers and other records of a locality.
If during the days of the Ottoman Empire the churches of the subject Christian peoples could not ring bells to call parishioners to prayer (see this blog), then how did the faithful know when to attend? In the days before pocket watches and public clocks, should we imagine a specially employed person rounding them up, or the pious telling the time by the position of the sun or being blessed with an innate homing instinct that would draw them to the church on time?
One traveller, the physician Adam Neale, writing circa 1805 à propos of Iaşi or Jassy, the capital of the principality of Moldavia, comments in passing:
“During the daytime, the clatter of the wooden mallets beating the tablets at the doors of the Greek churches, calling the people to prayers, the use of bells being prohibited in the Turkish provinces, produces a most disagreeable effect.”
(Travels Through Some Parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia and Turkey, Longman & Co, 1818)
In this context, the “Greek churches” are the Eastern Orthodox churches of the Romanian and Russian inhabitants of Iaşi.
The “tablet” is the semantron, also variously known as talanton, klepalo (in Bulgarian and Serbian) or toacă (in Romanian). It can still be found, especially in monasteries, and is still used, even when bells are available, perhaps out of habit and tradition, perhaps out of continued assertion of Orthodox freedom of worship long after the centuries of Turkish rule.
Sakhalin Island, in the Russian Far East, north of Japan, was of interest to the Tsarist Empire for a multitude of reasons: its proximity to the mouth of the Amur River, its mineral reserves, its strategic location in the push and shove of its relations with Japan, its potential value as a hub in the development of a navigable northern sea route which would join the sea ports of European Russia, such as Archangel and Murmansk, over the top of Siberia, to Manchuria. Russia was keen to colonise the island but it was not a natural destination for settlers – even discounting its utter remoteness, its climate and landscape were not exactly hospitable. Russia therefore pursued its traditional policy of establishing a penal colony, which it did from 1857.
Chekhov visited Sakhalin in July 1890 and, fascinatingly, in order to understand the human geography of the island, conducted his own personal, unofficial census of the population. He printed his own census forms on which to record the place of residence, the name, the status of the individual (convict, exile or “settler”, peasant formerly exiled, or free person), relationship to head of household, age, religion, place of birth, year of arrival on Sakhalin, occupation, literacy and marital status. He covered the island singlehandedly over three months. The Island of Sakhalin, the fine book that resulted from his stay, was published in Russia in 1895 and is available in an English language translation by Luba and Michael Terpak.
The Russian presence in Sakhalin was barely 30 years old when Chekhov visited and the writer found a frontier society with all the usual trimmings (drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, boredom etc). A distinction was maintained between convicts and exiles, the former being criminals (including army deserters) and the latter ex-convicts. The exiles were also termed “settlers”, as if they had come of their own free will. After 10 or six years, an exile was freed and legally acquired the status of a “peasant formerly exiled”. A “free person” was an individual who had voluntarily arrived in Sakhalin: this category covered wives and family of a convict or exile, but also traders, seafarers and the civil and prison service administration.
The political exiles came from all across the Russian Empire. Chekhov mentions Finns, Polish Catholics, Ukrainians and Armenians from Yerevan guberniya, for instance. Many of the other types of resident were vague or evasive about such details as their place of birth, their age or their date of arrival on Sakhalin. Not a few were unsure of their names, or had acquired new names. Chekhov lists the following surnames:
Besprozvaniya – “Nameless” Bezbozhny – “Godless” Bezotechestva – “Countryless” Boganov – “Godgiven” Koloda – “Fetter” Nepomnyashchy – “Unremembered” Neizvestnovo Zvaniya – “Man With No Name” Zamozdrya – “Behind Walls”
Note that these are the actual surnames in use, not the answers to Chekhov’s questions.
Chekhov also notes that marriage was not in favour anywhere on the island:
“Nowhere else in Russia is illicit marriage so widely and notoriously prevalent, and nowhere else does it take the peculiar form it does on Sakhalin. Illicit marriage or, as it is called here, free cohabitation, does not find objectors among either the officials or the priesthood but, on the contrary, it receives encouragement and is sanctioned. There are settlements where not even one legal marriage is encountered… Free couples… beget children for the colony and therefore there are no reasons to pass separate laws for them at registration”.
The Armenian diaspora is global and has been for centuries: as long ago as the 17th and 18th centuries, Armenian populations were well-established not just in the ancestral homelands of Anatolia and the Caucasus, in the then Russian and Ottoman Empires, but also right around the Black Sea, in Persia, much of Europe and India, with outposts all the way east to China and the Far East. Cities as diverse as Constantinople and Smyrna (Istanbul and Izmir in modern Turkey), Lemberg (L’viv in Ukraine), Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgia) and Baku (in today’s Azerbaijan) had significant Armenian populations. It might even be claimed with some truth that the cultural and social capital of stateless Armenia was Constantinople or Tiflis rather than Yerevan, which existed in something of a backwater at that time.
During the 19th century, the Armenian presence spread in Egypt and of course developed in North America as well as in England and France, but the pattern of the diaspora shifted during the traumas of the 20th century. Today, the Armenian populations in some of the longer-established diaspora settlements have shrunk and the revitalised centres are elsewhere: in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France and USA.
With such a history, researching Armenian family history research is rarely straightforward. Even if a family was unaffected by the persecutions in the Ottoman Empire, the often international branching and dispersal of families means that an Armenian family tree rarely confines itself to a single country. The archives in the Republic of Armenia itself have some excellent resources – civil registration for its territory dates back in some cases all the way to 1730 and Armenian Apostolic Church parish registers from 1828. One advantage is that the historical records – all those up to 1928 – are concentrated at the National Archives in Yerevan. However, there are no countrywide indexes to names in the birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial registers, so it is necessary to know, or to find out, exactly where a family came form.
Of course, many family historians with Armenian roots are more interested in genealogical records for communities in western Armenia, or what is today Turkish territory. The best news is that records for two provinces of the Russian Empire now in Turkey are held in Yerevan. These are for the oblasts of Igdir and Kars (which included the towns of Ardahan and Kaghzvan) which were Russian territory from 1878 to 1917. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive records in Yerevan for the Armenian communities elsewhere within the borders of modern-day Turkey. What records of interest to Armenian family history there are in Turkish archives, and how accessible they are, is still uncertain. It is worth mentioning that, given the importance of Tiflis described above, there are also significant holdings of Armenian-interest records in the National Archives of Georgia.
If you are researching your Armenian family tree and would like assistance or advice, please feel free to contact Bluebird Research. We have reliable researchers in Armenia and Russia and would be happy to provide an assessment upon request. We expect to be able to offer professional research services in Turkey later this year, although we must caveat this by stressing that success may be doubtful given the prevailing circumstances on the ground.
Bluebird Research offers professional genealogical research services in Greece and would be delighted to assist you in investigating your family tree and obtaining vital documents from archives and record offices in Greece.
We can help whether your family left Greece for an English or Welsh sea port in the Victorian era, or settled in America before WW1, or emigrated to Canada in the 1920s, or arrived in Australia after World War Two.
We can help whatever the background of your ancestor – whether seaman or merchant or labourer from a village.
We can help whether your family came from the old Kingdom of Greece (regions such as Euboea, Livadia and Morea or Peloponnese); or from Thessaly and southern Epirus (acquired by Greece in 1881); or from central Epirus and Macedonia (acquired 1913) or from western Thrace (acquired 1919); or, for that matter, from one of the Ionian, or the Dodecanese or the Aegean Islands.
Comprehensive nationwide civil registration in Greece began in 1925 but in some areas local equivalents date back to 1831, just after independence. In addition, as well as Greek Orthodox church registers of baptism, marriage and burial, Greece benefits from more unusual record sources such as separate community-level male and female registers.
Our rates for paid research are reasonable and we would be glad to undertake family history research upon your behalf in Greece. We encourage all enquiries and are happy to respond to questions and provide assessments without charge or obligation.
The Poles arrived in the Brazilian state of Paraná from the end of the 1860s up to the start of the First World War. They came from all three parts of partitioned Poland. Some of the earliest settlers were from Opole in Śląsk and from Gdańsk in the Prussian sector of the Partition. Later many came from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from such provinces as Lublin and Siedlce in Russian Poland (sometimes almost entire villages emigrating), for instance at the time of the so-called “Brazilian fever” of 1895-97 and another peak around 1910-12. Periodically, Brazil, hoping to solve its post-slavery labour shortage, offered a free one-way passage to migrants from Europe to entice them to make the journey of up to two months.
Most of the Polish emigrants were from the landless or smallholding peasantry. They emigrated in the hope and expectation of free or cheap land and of possessing their own homesteads or farms in Brazil. They found themselves living on a frontier, often in isolated communities. Many had to clear the forest or uncultivated land to become small independent farmers, working up to 100 hectares, but just as many settled in towns and were employed on the railways or in industry. They often lived in self-contained and self-sufficient communities, which preserved a distinctively Polish culture for generations.
The Brazilian census of 1920 apparently counted 32,299 individuals of Polish birth. However, this is almost certainly an under-estimate as, of course, the Second Republic was not created until 1918 and all Poles who emigrated before that date would have done so as subjects of other states (e.g. Austrian or Russian) and are likely to have been recorded as such in official paperwork in Brazil.
Nowadays, their descendants reside in the central and southern part of Paraná state, especially around the capital Curitiba, where many settlements have significant if not majority populations with Polish ancestry, even if Brazilian Portuguese is their first language.
The Ottomans in the heyday of their rule permitted no church bells to be rung out to call the faithful to prayer, or to celebrate a marriage service or other festival. Bells were removed from churches already in existence at the time of Ottoman occupation and frequently the most convenient buildings were promptly converted for use as mosques and a minaret raised for the benefit of the occupying imperial power. Churches constructed during the years of Turkey-in-Europe were built with towers empty of bells.
All empires of all political persuasions wax and wane and the Ottomans became famous for being the proverbial “sick man of Europe” during the 19th century. Adjacent powers – the Austrian and the Russian – started to eye Ottoman territory hungrily and of course the subject peoples of the empire began to nibble away at its fabric during the long drive towards self-determination and independence.
The Austrians occupied Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878 and formally annexed it in 1908. However, even before the Austrians marched in, the Christians of Bosnia had begun to wrest concessions and compromises from the enfeebled Ottoman state. Sv Ive Krstitelja (St John the Baptist) at the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutjeska, between Sarajevo and Zenica, claims the distinction, in 1860, of being the first church in Bosnia to raise a belfry and be able to ring bells to call to prayer its worshippers (in this case, of course, Roman Catholics) while still under Ottoman rule.
In 1862 A A Paton published volume 2 of his Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic, about his experiences travelling in the Hungary (and elsewhere) in 1849. This was before the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise, which established the Dual Monarchy and gave Hungary dominion over lands which today are in Croatia, Romania and Slovakia, for example.
Paton visited the town of Szeged, or Szegedin in German, which lies in SE Hungary today but was more or less centrally located within the Hungarian Kingdom up until the country, defeated in WW1, was severely truncated by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
He remarks on the impact of the ascendant Hungarian culture on the minority nationalities of Szeged:
“Most of the shop-signs in the public place of the Palanka have German names, but the designation of the trade and baptismal name is in Magyar. During the mania for Magyarisation, none were so keen to identify themselves with the Magyars as the small German shop-keepers… Magyarism was very naturally more or less associated with the idea of aristocracy and supremacy and, while the Croats and Serbians, and the great majority of Slovaks, much to their honour, were rather proud of their nationality than ashamed of it, these German tradesmen… were anxious to throw off their own names and adopt Magyar ones. Not one, two, or three, but hundreds of such instances have occurred. For instance, a German whose name is, let us say, Johann Hoffman, dubs himself Remeny Janos, because Remen is the Magyar word “to hope,” and Janos is the Magyar for John.”
The “Palanka” in this account is the core of the old town of Szeged.
It is not clear how far individuals such as the fictitious János Remény would have travelled along the road of assimilation. Over the next two generations, their families might have become completely magyarised, or they may have retained a German identity for their private lives, with the new Magyar identity used primarily for business and social advantage. In any event, the family historian researching their apparently bona fide ethnic Hungarian roots should be alive to the possibility that at some point the family name may disappear from the documentary record.
The Third Partition of Poland took place in 1795 and the partitioning powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia embarked on a process of registration of the inhabitants of the formerly independent country. This affected all sections of society – the Polish gentry (szlachta), town dwellers, Roman Catholic and other clergy, and the peasantry – and was implemented as part of the process of social control and political subjugation. Jews, who had enjoyed some autonomy under the old Polish state, now had to register with the civil authorities, a process which required a surname. Where surnames were not already in use – as was often the case – civil servants would assign a name to a family as part of the registration process.
Norman Davies writes in his Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford University Press, 2001) of how the young ETA Hoffmann, the German writer and musician, approached the momentous task of giving surnames to a people. He was posted and worked as a civil servant at Poznań (Posen), Płock and finally Warsaw.
“He glares at a client in deathly silence, and then shouts out the first word which comes to mind. This word, which enters into the Register, becomes the client’s official surname. At the end, Hoffmann says when the certificate is to be collected, and calls for the next customer.”
As described, the process, even when not demeaning, was completely arbitrary and often simply a matter of caprice:
“Before dinner, or on an empty stomach, he issues serious or melancholy surnames, after dinner more amusing ones.”
Davies relates how apparently one Friday Hoffmann gave Jewish registrants the names of fish; on Monday the names of flowers. On other days, everyone was given the names of birds, or church-related names. Once, hung-over following a drinking bout with a Prussian army officer, Jews coming to Hoffmann’s office were given military names such as Festung, Fojer, Pistolet, Szyspulver, Trommel, Trompeter and Harmata.
Even if some of these stories are apocryphal, the attitude of the partitioning authorities to their new Jewish subjects is clear. Davies’ account also flags the point that Jewish family historians should not necessarily read too much into the surnames on their family tree.
The first waves of Greek Catholics – mostly Carpatho-Rusyns or Ruthenes, but some Slovaks and Hungarians – arrived in USA circa 1868 to 1870, mostly from what was then NE Hungary and within a few years also from the Galicia in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. The most significant early settlements, all well-established before 1890, were in the American towns shown below (with the archeparchy or eparchy from which they obtained their priest given afterwards in brackets):
Freeland PA (Munkács)
Hazleton PA (Munkács)
Jersey City NJ (Lemberg)
Kingston PA (Eperjes)
Minneapolis MN (Eperjes)
Olyphant PA (Eperjes)
Scranton PA (Munkács)
Shamokin PA (Peremysl)
Shenandoah PA (Lemberg)
Wilkes-Barre PA (Munkács)
The Greek Catholic eparchy from which the parish priest was taken may indicate something of the majority origin of the parishioners – i.e. Eperjes (today Prešov in Slovakia), Munkács (now Mukachevo in Ukraine), Lemberg (L’viv, Ukraine) and Peremyshl (Przemyśl, Poland). However, it must be emphasised that these ecclesiastical districts are adjacent to one another and do not heed international borders. For example, an immigrant from Peremyshl eparchy may have been born equally in what is today Poland or in Ukraine.
Greek Catholic communities to develop throughout the 1890s and beyond, especially in Pennsylvania (for example, parishes were formed in Audenried, Braddock, Freeland, Lansford, Johnstown, Leisenring, Mahanoy City, Mayfield, McKeesport, Minersville, Mount Carmel, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Ramey) but also in New York State (Brooklyn, Buffalo and Yonkers), New Jersey (Passaic, Perth Amboy and Trenton) and Ohio (Cleveland).
Old travel books may possess a condescending tone and often seem ill-informed and romanticised, but they are still worth reading for the occasional and sometimes surprising insights they may give about the lives or at least the lands of our ancestors. Writers on the Balkans invariably viewed them as half-savage and as the gateway to the Orient or the boundary between contrasting civilisations.
Maude M Holbach’s Bosnia & Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings is largely what you might expect from a Western traveller writing a volume of that title in 1910: sometimes patronising, sometimes gushing, but sometimes also keenly observant and genuinely responsive to the beauty of the Bosnian landscape and its people.
Especially striking is a passing comment she makes about the Roman Catholics of Jajce:
“The Bosnians are very religious, with the childish simple superstitious religion of the Middle Ages, and the Catholic people of Jajce still cling to the custom of tattooing a cross on their hands and breast. It is said it was introduced in Turkish times to prevent apostacy, for no Christian thus marked with the sign of his faith could go over to Islam without enduring the painful operation of removing the tattooed portion of the skin.”
Holbach also describes how the Croatians of Jajce do not stand at worship but “kneel or sit cross-legged on the ground in Oriental fashion”, often on the prayer mats or even handkerchiefs which they bring with them to church. Other customs apparently borrowed from Muslim neighbours included touching the forehead to the ground in prayer and raising the palms of the hands upwards to receive the blessing.
If you read late 18th or 19th century writings in English about Dalmatia, you are likely to find references to Morlachs, or sometimes (using the Italian) the Morlacchi. The term seems to have been used derogatively rather than descriptively or, to be more accurate, the Morlachs tend to be described disparagingly. They are rough if not savage, inured to hardship, impoverished and imprudent, superstitious and ignorant. It is granted only that they a tough and martial people – and, as such, handy to the Austrian Empire defending its border against the Ottomans – and, equally handily, that they are extremely hospitable to travellers.
Morlachia is even marked on some period maps from the 16th and 17th centuries, being all that part of Dalmatia away from and parallel to the Adriatic coast. On a modern map of Croatia, Morlachia would correspond roughly to the strip of land running all the way from the hinterland of Senj down past Zadar and Split to Dubrovnik, but excluding the ports and the littoral itself. It is clear that they were thought of as unassimilated to the more urbane Mediterranean culture of the Dalmatian coast, with its strong Italian and seafaring connections.
They are described somewhat uncertainly and inconsistently by travellers as Greek Orthodox or maybe Greek Catholic, or perhaps Roman Catholic. It seems that, by the time of the curious and romantic Western travel writers, the people presented to them by their guides as Morlachs were simply the Slavic peasants of inner Dalmatia. The true historical Morlachs, a transhumant Vlach people, had long since assimilated to the Slavic population and/or moved west to Istria, but their name remained as a coatpeg on which to lazily hang up the contemporary inhabitants of the same land. You are unlikely to find the term Morlach used in modern scholarly works, except with reference to the true Vlach ethnic group. Nowadays, of course the descendants of the so-called “Morlachs” would presumably self-identify as Croats or Serbs, depending on their confession.
The Ruthenians or rusyny are a Slavic people occupying the eastern Carpathians and observing none of history’s changing international political borders. Many Ruthenes emigrated to North America during the decades before the First World War, although the use of “Ruthene” or “Ruthenian” in, for example, American and Canadian passenger lists and immigration records of that era also referred to the Greek Catholic Ukrainians of Galicia. Today, the Ruthenian homeland is divided between Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, with most living in the Ukrainian Zakarpats’ka oblast’.
The rusyny were originally Eastern Orthodox but the majority of communities converted to Greek Catholicism at different dates after 1596. David Buxton’s The Wooden Churches of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1981) describes in great detail and, with black and white photographs and plans, the beautiful traditional blockwork timber churches built by the Boyko (or Bojko), Lemko and Hutsul ethnic groups throughout this region.
The churches of the Boyko and Lemko are orientated similarly and share the same basic tripartite structure of a western narthex; the central nave or naos, where the congregation stands; and, separated from the naos by the iconostasis, the eastern sanctuary, which only the priest may enter. In Boyko churches, a dome is raised above each of the three sections but distinctively with the central dome, the one above the naos, raised higher than the others. The churches tend to be small and symmetrical, and to have an external gallery (opasannya) on all sides. The bell tower is a separate structure standing to one side. Lemko churches, on the other hand, are usually larger and grander, and are distinguished by the western section – the narthex – being topped by a tall tower (often a bell tower), giving them a very different profile.
Hutsul churches are cruciform, adding an additional cell either side of the central naos. They may have a single central dome, or a dome additional on each of the other four components. As with Boyko churches, there was often a covered gallery around the whole building and the bell tower stood separately.
Wooden buildings, no matter how well constructed, are subject to destruction by fire and, of course, are vulnerable at times of war and conflict. Many striking Carpatho-Rusyn wooden churches have been irretrievably lost and others moved to the open-air ethnological museums or skansens. However, it is still possible to see late 17th, 18th and 19th century wooden churches at their original sites in the Ruthenian lands of SE Poland, NE Slovakia and Western Ukraine.
Today the Albanians are usually thought of as Muslims, particularly since the Kosovar Albanians have increasingly asserted their Islamic identity against the Orthodox Serbs. However, there are still areas of Albania itself which are Christian rather than Muslim and, indeed, the Albanians have not always been wedded to one faith or another.
“Throughout their turbulent history, Albanians had shifted with relative ease from one religion to another: Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim according to momentary interest. During the late middle ages, their country had become the battlefield between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East: whenever the West was advancing, the Albanian feudal lords – often followed by their populations – espoused Catholicism; whenever Byzantium was the victor and the West retreated, they embraced Orthodoxy.”
Miranda Vickers, The Albanians, LB Tauris, 1999
This pragmatism or expediency seems a clear response to survival needs. During the long centuries of Ottoman rule, Albanians were inclined to convert to Islam, which held distinct advantages.
“The majority of converts, however, were men, whilst women often retained their Christian beliefs even when married to Muslims, and were a factor in maintaining goodwill between the members of the two faiths. At various times, whole villages voluntarily renounced the religion of their forefathers for political advantage…. To make their already difficult lives easier, therefore, many Albanians gradually adopted at least the outer signs of the Islamic faith, thus obtaining such privileges as the right to bear arms.”
Vickers also quotes JC Hobhouse’s A Journey Through Albania of 1809:
“These people, living between Christians and Mahomadens, declare that they are utterly unable to judge which religion is best but to be certain of not entirely rejecting the truth, they very prudently follow both. They go to the mosques on Fridays and to the church on Sundays, thus making sure of the protection of the true prophet.”
Historically, it was the Albanian tribes in the north and south of the country which were Christian – for example, the Catholic Hoti and Mirdites in the north and the Orthodox Suliots by the southern border with Greece. Under the militantly atheist Communist regime, of course, religion was discouraged everywhere within the country and anathematised as backward and bourgeois. By 1973, the great majority of churches and mosques had been closed down, some destroyed and some converted to secular and even provocative new uses: the Roman Catholic cathedral of Shën Shtjefnit (St Stephen) in Shkodër (known as Scutari in Italian and generally in the English-speaking world) became a sports centre, while other Church buildings in the city became blocks of flats, warehouses, and a political police HQ. Only the elderly still attended the few remaining church services. Parents were dissuaded from giving their children religious names, while lists of approved secular names were published. Most churches and mosques stayed closed until late in 1989 or 1990, when practising a religion ceased to be an offence.
In Serbian peasant families, surnames were often taken in the very early years of the 19th century. Say there were three brothers, Andrija, Pavle and Stojan, each of whom settled and married in or around the same village. Their families then took a patronymic as their surname, becoming respectively Andrić, Pavlić and Stojanović. The children of the three brothers therefore had different family names, and so on down each male line of descent, which in Serbian is known as a vamilija. Traditionally, kin within a vamilija cannot inter-marry, no matter how far down the lineage.
Each vamilija has its own patron saint and celebrates the saint’s feast day or slava. The slava is of central importance in Serbian tradition and, especially where a surname is common locally, individual families will be known and distinguished by their slava. The family’s patron saint does not appear in any official state or church records but, if it is known or can be found out, it can prove of assistance in identifying related families when undertaking genealogical research to locate surviving family in Serbia. Historically, too, each vamilija tended to reside in its own neighbourhood of a settlement, although in this respect it should be remembered that many Serbian villages are dispersed communities of scattered smallholdings, rather than concentrated and clustered in the manner of villages in many other places in Europe. Often, too, in rural areas (and Serbia was and still is very much a rural land) the vamilija will have its own burial ground (perhaps on a hillside, unconnected to the church), or section of a village cemetery.