ABSTRACT
A romanian communities in the Balkans were one of the numerous ethnic micro-identities throughout Europe which were parts of that cultural and multilinguistic space in the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, Bulgarian, Serbia, and Albanian medieval states, and the Ottoman Empire. Along with Greek and Slav communities they shared the common ethos of Orthodox Christianity, and with Albanian and Turkish peoples built the successive imperial identities that contributed to economic, societal, and political changes. The Romanian philosopher, economist and political prisoner Petre Tutea once stated that Aromanians were ‘Super-Romanians, absolute Romanians’ and their national instinct was that of a haunted beast. Tutea implicitly referred to various, successive forms of ethnic persecution that Aromanians had suffered starting with the civil war in Macedonia. The national construct of Aromanianness and their pulling out of transnational Christian identity might be considered a scientific enterprise, namely by the Western travellers through South-Eastern Europe.
