Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/14

 many of the Vlach communities elsewhere. Thus in 1911 on our way from Salonica to Samarina we went to the villages around Verria and also to Neveska and Klisura ; in the following year we visited Monastir and the Vlach communities between it and Resna, Okhridha, Muskopol'e and Kortsha. Apart from these and similar journeys made mainly to study the distribution and customs of the Vlachs while travelling in the Balkan peninsula for archæological reasons we have endeavoured to see as much as possible of Vlach life and there are few towns in Southern Macedonia where we have not some Vlach acquaintances. Outside Macedonia and Thessaly there are still several gaps in our knowledge ; of the Vlach villages in Acarnania we have visited only one ; Albania north of Konitsa and west of Muskopol'e is unknown to us, and the Farsherots or Albanian Vlachs we have met have been mostly those settled in Macedonia and Greece. When in Bulgaria we were fortunate in having introductions to the Vlach colony at Sofia, which is of Macedonian origin, but of the other Vlach communities in Bulgaria we have no personal knowledge. Lastly in Macedonia itself we have never been to the Meglen though we have met several natives of that district in other parts of the country. This book therefore can have no claim to be a complete account of all the Vlach settlements ; its aim is rather to give a detailed description of Samarina and the adjacent villages on Pindus together with some account of the Balkan Vlachs as a whole.

The recent history of the Vlachs has been complicated by political troubles, which cannot quite be ignored though it seems needless to discuss them in detail. We have therefore noted only the main effects on certain of the villages, and give here a brief account of the circumstances under which the dispute arose.

At the time when the whole peninsula was under Turkish rule in accordance with Turkish custom religion alone was recognized as the basis of nationality, so that the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople was the head and representative of all the orthodox Christians before the Sublime Porte. In 1821 came the revolt in the south which ended in the