[note]

The first historical record of Romanians in the Istrian region is purported to date back to 940 A.D. when scholarly Roman Emperor Constantine VII recorded in De Administrando Imperio that there were Romance-language speakers in this area who called themselves Romans but who did not come from Rome. This newly uncovered reference is consistent with what has been repeatedly stated by native Romanians over the years [to M.C., this writer] on what they learned in their schools about the origins of the elusive Istro-Romanians - more specifically, that they were mercenary soldiers who were imported with their families directly from Transylvania to Istria by the Romans legions.

The first certain mention of Romanians in Istria comes from 1329 where a Serbian chronicle mentions that a Vlach population was living in Istria, naming a Vlach called Pasculus, but another document from the second half of the twelfth century preserves the name of a leader in Istria called Radul, a name that could also be Romanian. There also have been recent findings to suggest that the Istro-Romanian people (more probably Vlachs in general) were already present in certain regions of nearby Friuli going back to the 1200s.

Insofar as Romanian linguists are concerned, the opinions are divided. Some modern linguists and historians believe that the Istro-Romanians migrated on their own volition directly from Transylvania to their present region of Istria between 600 and 1,000 years ago, while other Romanian linguists are more skeptical and would like to see Istro-Romanians as the native tribe of that region (Istria and Northern Dalmatia) in a possible filiation with the mysterious "Black Romanians" - the Morovlachi or Morlaci, a very distinct group that settled in great numbers in Dalmatia. [Silviu Dragomir: "Originea coloniilor romane din Istria" ("The Origins of the Romanian colonies of Istria") and "Vlahii si Moralacii", 1924 ("The Vlachs and the Morlachs".)]

Istrian historian Carlo de Franceschi (1809-93) recounts that the "indigeni carsolini di razza romanica, che, giusta lo storico Fra Ireneo [1625-1713], ancora intorno al 1700 fra loro denominavansi Rumeri (Romani), ebbero dai triestini il nome di Cicci." The Romanian linguist, philogist, folklorist and poet Ovid Densusianu (1873-1938), does not admit that Istro-Romanians are native to Istria, where we find them today (or when he still was finding them in the 30's when he researched for his book Histoire de la langue roumaine, I, p. 337). He stated: "Un premier fait que nous devons mettre en evidence, c'est que l'istro-roumain n'a pu se developper a l'origine la ou nous le trouvons aujourd'hui". His suppositions were confirmed by Prof. Dr. Iosif Popovici (1876-1928), who travelled extensively in Istria and who endorsed the theory that the Istro-Romanians were natives of Tara Motilor (Western Transylvania) who migrated into Istria sometimes during the Middle Ages. ("Dialectele romane din Istria", I, Halle a.d.S., 1914, p. 122 urm.)

On the other hand, a leading current authority, Prof. Petru Neiescu of the University of Cluj, who has studied the Istro-Romanian language and people for over twenty years, suggests that the origins of the Istro-Romanians is Alba Iulia in Hunedoara County, situated in the South-Western part of Transylvania, where the Apuseni Mountains meet the Meridional Carpathians. He also suggests that the people settled in Istria around the year 1420 near the Ciceria mountains of Istria to repopulate areas that had been devastated by the plagues. Links of anthropological value from that region in present-day Romania are the humble wooden churches in Lunca Motilor (Hunedoara) and Troas (Arad) which are preserved "in situ" under the auspices of The Museum of the Romanian Peasant. There are no comparable structures in Istria.

The Istro-Romanians Today

The language known as Istro-Romanian is spoken by people who call themselves Cici, Vlahi or Rumeni / Rumâni / Rumâri, but which were nicknamed as Ciribiri by the local surrounding population (a term that at one time referred in a derogatory way only to the language they spoke) and Istrian Vlachs (1) and Cici by linguists. There is no literary tradition, however. In 1905, Andrea Glavina, himself an Istro-Romanian by birth and upbringing but who was educated in Romania, published "Calendaru lu rumeri din Istrie" ("The Calendar of the Romanians of Istria"). Since then, a few collections of folk tales and poems have also been published.

In the aftermath of the World War II, many Istro-Romanians were forced to become refugees of the new communist state and left their native Istria for parts unknown, leaving entire villages almost totally abandoned. Some settled in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, while it is believed that the vaste majority left for the United States (a large concentration in New York and the mid-Atlantic states), Australia, Argentina (and other South American countries), and Canada.

While the majority of Istro-Romanians have been scattered around the world, the number of native speakers who have remained in Istria is estimated today to be less than 1,000 (less than 500 is probably more accurate), and the language is listed as "seriously endangered" in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages.² The native speakers are concentrated in about ten villages, although some have emigrated to the larger neighboring towns and cities - such as Labin, Pula, Poreč, Rijeka and Trieste. There are may other Istrian villages with Romanian-style names which are not counted in their number today, including Buzet (lips), Katun (hamlet), Gradinje (garden), Letaj, Sucodru (forest), Costirceanu and Rumania (decidedly Romanian names). Some of these names are official, while some are used only by Istro-Romanian speakers.

Due to its very small number of speakers in Istria, there is no public education or press in Istro-Romanian, and its speakers yet remain to be officially recognized among the minorities in Croatia. Their number was reduced due to assimilation: in the 1921 Italian census (made shortly after World War I when Istria was awarded to Italy) there were 1,644 Romanian speakers recorded in the area, which does not necessarily corrolate to the actual number of speakers; whereas Romanian scholar Sextil Puşcariu, in his Studii istroromâne, Vol. II, Bucureşti (1926), estimated their number to be about 3,000.

How many Istro-Romanians are left in the Istrian region?

According to the 1991 Croatian census, only 810 persons declared themselves as Romanians and 22 as Morlachs. "In reality this number is categorically higher", assures us Dr. Ervino Curtis of the recently reconstituted Association of the Romanians of Istria. "In many a case, Istro-Romanians living in Fiume or in other cities of Croatia, failed to declare their real national background hence their trace is lost. In these last years, the interest of the Istro-Romanians is to make their cultural plea heard in the scientific and academic ambience, so to make themselves heard and within the reach of political and public opinion. We need to act concretely to save this moribund culture, which is the fruit of a centennial tradition. With the death of a culture, something within all of us is dying as well, and it is indispensable to stop this process before it becomes irreversible."

The sound of silence: echoes of Vegliot, the Dalmatian Language

There have been several efforts in the last two centuries to document the Istro-Romanian language by different groups of Romanian and Croatian linguists. Lacking a common goal and methodology for preserving the spoken language of the native speakers who are scattered around the world and whose speech was not Slavicized, the rarely-used language in situ is guaranteed total extinction probably in the next generation, thereby following in the footsteps of the nearby Vegliot Dalmatian language which was also squeezed out by the neighboring Slavic languages.

Once thought to be a language that bridged the gap between the Romanian language and Italian, Dalmatian was only distantly related to the nearby Romanian dialects, such as the nearly extinct Istro-Romanian spoken in nearby Istria, Croatia. Among the similarities with Romanian, there are some consonant shifts that can be found among the Romance languages only in Dalmatian and Romanian:

Vegliot is the Northern dialect and it is derived from the Italian name of Krk, "Veglia", an island in the Kvarner Bay. On the inscription dating from the beginning of the 4th century, Krk is named as "Splendissima civitas Curictarum". The current Croatian name derives from the Roman name (Curicum, Curicta), while the name Vecla / Vegla / Veglia (meaning "Old Town") was created by the Byzantines in the medieval Romanesque period.

The last speaker of any Dalmatian dialect was Tuone Udaina / Antonio Udina (birthdate unknown), who was killed by a landmine on June 10, 1898. His language was studied by an Istrian scholar, Matteo Giulio Bartoli who visited him in 1897 and wrote down thousands of words, stories, accounts of his life, which were published in a book, with Italian translation, which provides much information on the vocabulary, phonology and grammar of the language. He wrote them in Italian and published a translation in German (´´Das Dalmatische´´) in 1906. However, the Italian language manuscripts were lost, and the work was not retranslated into the Italian until 2001. Also unfortunate is that Udina was hardly an ideal informant; Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents' private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well thereby making his pronunciations and speech formations less than accurate.

Partial Bibliography

Constantin VII, Porphyrogennetos or Porphyrogenitus, "the Purple-born", (September 2, 905 – November 9, 959) was the son of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI "the Wise" or "the Philosopher - the Byzantine emperor from 886 to 912 during one of the most brilliant periods of the state's history - and his fourth wife Zoe Karbonopsina. He was also the nephew of the Emperor Alexander. He is famous for his two descriptive books, De Administrando Imperio, the commonly used Latin title of a scholarly work written in Greek language, and De Ceremoniis, , the Latin title of a work of compilation produced for Constantine VII and partially revised or updated under Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969), perhaps under the direction of Basil Lekapenos, the imperial Parakoimomenos.

De Administrando Imperio

De Administrando Imperio is the commonly used Latin title of a scholarly work written in Greek.The Greek title of the work is Πρὸς τὸν ἴδιον υἱὸν Ρωμανόν ("to my own son Romanus"), revealing its role as an internal and foreign policy manual for the use of Constantine's son and successor, the Emperor Romanus II.

Constantine was a scholar-emperor, who sought to foster learning and education in the Byzantine Empire. He produced many other works, including De Ceremoniis, a treatise on the etiquette and procedures of the imperial court; and a biography of his grandfather, Basil I. De Administrando Imperio was written between 948 and 952. It contains advice on running the ethnically-mixed empire as well as fighting external enemies. The work combines two of Constantine's earlier treatises, "On the Governance of the State and the various Nations" (Περί Διοικήσεως τοῦ Κράτους βιβλίον καί τῶν διαφόρων Έθνῶν), concerning the histories and characters of the nations neighbouring the Empire, including the Kievan Rus', Arabs, Lombards, Armenians, and Georgians; and the "On the Themes of East and West" (Περί θεμάτων Άνατολῆς καί Δύσεως), concerning recent events in the imperial provinces. To this combination was added Constantine's own political instructions to his son Romanus.

The work describes the Pechenegs, Kievan Rus', Hungarians (under the name Turkoi), Bulgarians, Tatars, and Khazars to the north; the Arabs to the east and south and their expansion as far as Spain; and the Germans, Lombards, Venetians, Dalmatians, Croats, White Croats, Serbs, and Moravians to the west. As well as historical and geographical information, which is often confused and filled with legend, Constantine gives information on how to manipulate each nation against each other, rather than use imperial money and resources to wage war against them directly. There is also information about imperial provinces, including Armenia, Iberia, Cyprus, and the Peloponnese, with recent diplomatic events which were considered useful for Romanus' instruction.

It was not intended for general publication, as it contains many state secrets (including Greek fire, although, notably, not its ingredients) and is clearly written in the format of a long father-to-son letter, intended for Romanus' personal use. The earliest surviving copy was made by John Doukas in the late 11th century. As a result, it is preserved fully in only three manuscripts (two of which are now located in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the third in the Vatican Library), and only partially in a fourth (now located in Modena). It was first published in 1611 by Johannes Meursius, who gave it the Latin title by which it is now universally known, and which translates as On Administering the Empire. Constantine himself did not give the work a name. Among its later editors was Jacques Paul Migne in the Patrologia Graeca.

The latest critical edition was first proposed by J.B. Bury, but was completed by Gyula Moravcsik and translated into English by Romily J.H. Jenkins in 1967.

Source:  Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, ed. Gy. Moravcsik, trans. R.J.H. Jenkins, rev. ed., Washington, Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967.

Notes:

1. Vlachs (also called Wlachs, Wallachs, Olahs) are the Romanized population in Central and Eastern Europe, including Romanians, Aromanians, Istro-Romanians and Megleno-Romanians, but since the creation of the Romanian state, this term was mostly used for the Vlachs living south of the Danube river.  They are descendants of the Roman colonists or of the Romanized Dacian, Thracian and Illyrian local population (there are disputes about their origins).
2. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations system established in 1946. The Organization's main objective is to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms (Article 1 of UNESCO's Constitution).

See:

• April 21, 2008 - Conseil de l'Europe, Motion for a Resolution: La situation culturelle difficile de la minorité istro-roumaine particulièrement menacée (Fra) & Difficult cultural situation of the Istro-Romanian minority particularly threatened (Eng)

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Created: Saturday, June 26, 1999; Last updated: Sunday, February 07, 2010
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