Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/39

 to Islam and are called Valakhadhes because the only Turkish they know is V’allahi, By God. As an analogous case one may perhaps quote the Pomaks or Mohammcdan Bulgarians of the Salonica province who after the Turkish revolution of 1908 were sedulously taught by the Young Turks as part of their programme of Ottomanisation to say V'allahi instead of Boga mi. Nicolaidy who wrote in 1859 says that two hundred years before two Greek boys from a village near Lapsishta were taken as slaves to Constantinople and were there con¬ verted to Islam. Later they returned to their native land and began to preach the doctrines of their new faith. They made many converts among the Christians anxious to escape from their inferior position and to obtain the right to bear arms, and were eventually rewarded with the title of Bey. Pouqueville seems to have thought that they were the descendants of the Vardariot Turks of Byzantine times, a theory which hardly seems possible. Weigand says that their racial type is Greek rather than Slavonic and that they have dark hair and aquiline noses. On the other hand many of those we have seen were tall and fair. But if the name Valakhadhes merely means that they are converts to Mahommedanism, it need have no racial significance.

The Kupatshari are hellenized or semi-hellenized Vlachs. That is to say that through intermarriage and the influence of the church and Greek education they have abandoned their native language. They still however retain the Vlach national costume, and many Vlach words occur in their dialect as well as many non-Greek sounds such as sh, zh, tsh, and dzh. They inhabit the district between Ghrevena and the pure Vlach villages of Pindus. At one of their villages, Labanitsa, which is only half hellenized we obtained some insight as to the process by which denationalisation occurs. In the school and church Greek is the only language used. All the older men in the village know Vlach and so do many of the women. But owing to the fact that the males outnumber the females the men are obliged to take brides from other villages. Pure Vlach villages like Turia and Perivoli are too proud to give their daughters in marriage to Kupatshari and so the bachelors of Labanitsa