Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/16

 Turkish rule demanded or had demanded for them by others churches and schools of their own. It hardly perhaps need be said that one and all of these movements were most disconcerting for the Greeks and in particular for the Greek Patriarchate which ever since 1767, when it suppressed the Bulgarian Patriarchate at Okhridha in Macedonia, has fought tooth and nail against all attempts at religious or educational freedom. Among the Vlachs the national movement began in the Pindus villages about 1867 ; it was originated by natives of Macedonia, but help was soon procured from Bucharest which became the centre of the movement. Roumanian elementary schools were founded in several of the Vlach villages and afterwards higher grade schools were started in Yannina, Salonica, and Monastir. Eventually in 1905 the Vlachs were recognized by the Turks as forming a separate ‘ millet ’ or nationality. This however brought no real unity as the Vlach villages are widely scattered and many from their position alone are too closely connected with Greece to wish to take a course of their own. The movement however in the first instance was of an educational kind, and the purely political aspect it has at times assumed has been produced almost entirely by the opposition with which it was met.

Greek opposition at first was confined to exerting pressure by means of the church, but in 1881 when Thessaly and a considerable Vlach population came under Greek rule Roumanian education had to retire northwards and the situation became more acute. The theory had by that time been devised in Greece that the Vlachs were Vlachophone Hellenes, that is to say racially Greeks who had leamt Vlach. The arguments then and since brought against the Roumanian schools were curiously inept ; it was urged that they taught a foreign language, and were financed and staffed by Roumanians and not Vlachs. As far as language is concerned Roumanian has a close connection with Vlach while Greek has none, and in the lower forms of the Roumanian schools the Vlach dialect is used to some extent. Both schools equally in most of the Vlach villages were financed from