The Balkan Vlachs III
The Vlachs in Greece
Many researchers and scholars judge that the largest part of the Balkan Vlachs is concentrated in Greece. The census of 1935 recorded 19,703 Vlachs in Greece, but according to the last census in Greece that allowed people to express their ethnic identity (in 1951), there were 39,855 Vlachs in this state.[1] However, a real number of the Vlachs in Greece today is up to 120,000.[2]
The Vlachs in a post-war Greece are not acknowledged as an ethnic or national group for the very reason that Greece from the mid-1950s does not recognize an existence of any national or cultural minority on its own territory. The religious minorities are only allowed.[3] The Vlach ethnocultural self-identity became extremely disreputable as a result of a Greek course of action of ethnic homogenization in the form of Hellenization of all Greece’s Eastern Orthodox inhabitants. Consequently, a great portion of the Greek Vlachs is Hellenophile.[4] The part of the policy of ethnic homogenization was a practice to rename ethnic minorities in order to make as bigger as a gap between them and their home countries in the Balkans. Therefore, the Greek Vlachs have been renamed to the Vlach-speaking Greeks (similar to the Slavic Macedonians who were officially considered as the Slavophone Greeks). In general, cultural and travel relations between the Greek and the other regional Vlachs are limited by the Greek government like connections with the Romanian cultural and educational institutions.
Probably the pivotal reason why the Greek authorities are not willing to open the Vlach-language schools and to allow the church service in the Vlach language is unpleasant experience with the same matter from the turn of the 20th century when a significant part of the Vlach community in Greece, following the Romanian propaganda and political support, fought for the Romanian-language schools and churches to be opened in the Kingdom of Greece. Although this requirement was rejected, the Greeks understood any further similar Vlach or Romanian action as interference into domestic affairs as politically incorrect steps. Nevertheless, one significant number of the Vlachs left Greece and migrated to Romania as a reaction to the Greek unwillingness to promote the protection of the Vlach ethnocultural identity.[5]
