Konrad Petrovszky, Phd, Austrian Academy of Sciences

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Konrad Petrovszky, PhD, Austrian Academy of Sciences Greater Aromania. The figure of the Vlach in pan-Romanianist conceptions of Balkan history When modern Romania emerged in the 1870s, Romance-speaking populations south of the Danube were soon at the centre of public and scientific interest in the country. Their heightened visibility partially resonated with the claims for Aromanian cultural autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. Since then, ensuing conceptions of Balkan history by Romanian scholars were strongly affected by the role assigned to the Vlachs, especially in the Medieval period. Thus, from the first phase of a frequently invoked “tribal solidarity” in the spirit of a defensive nationalism directed explicitly against the Greek megali idea, the discourse rapidly transformed. Around the turn of the century, the Vlachs were considered cultural agents of the hegemonic aspirations of the Romanian nation-state. Despite the fact that Romania's active engagement in those countries with Aromanian population came to an end with the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913, the peak of a Romanianizing reading of Balkan history was reached in the interwar period, when panRomanianism (supposed to promote the integration of Greater Romania) became the leading narrative in political discourse. As I will show in my paper, the process of a gradual intellectual appropriation of the Balkan Vlach populations – alongside their conflation into one single Romanian people – resonated very well with the changing priorities of Romanian national policies between the 1860s until the beginning of World War II. I will specifically focus on the permutations of the scholarly debate showing the interlinking between various debates related to “Romanians outside Romania.” .

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