albania

Bektashi sufi lodges in Albania, 1910s

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This Google Map shows the location of each Albanian Bektashi lodge – teqe in Albanian, tekke in Turkish – identified in Frederick William Hasluck’s “Christianity and Islam Under The Sultans” – specifically, in part III, chapter XLII 10 (“Geographical distribution of the Bektashi – Albania”).

F W Hasluck died in 1920 and his book was first published in 1929, edited by his widow Margaret Hasluck, who was a scholar in her own right, fascinated by the Bektashi, and lived for some 13 years in Elbasan, Albania after his death.

Hasluck attributed the spread and success of Bektashism in Albania to the influence of Ali Pasha, known as Ali Pashë Tepelenjoti in Albanian, the Albanian governor of the pashalik of Yanina (modern Ioannina in Greece). Hasluck estimated that up to 90% of the Muslims in southern Albania were affiliated to the Bektashi during the C19th.

It’s unlikely that Hasluck’s account, ambitious as it was, enumerated every teqe in Albania in the 1910s. The undertaking would have been made more difficult by the destruction and damage to teqes and other Islamic heritage after the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars when the Greeks occupied Epirus. In some cases, the site he mentions was without a teqe, having merely a tyrbja (türbe in Turkish) – these sites were included either because Hasluck regarded the tyrbja as important or because he suspected that a teqe would develop organically at the site.

The Bektashi sites have been pinpointed to the precise location where the teqe survives and could be located on a modern map; in other cases, where this was not possible, the Google Map pin is simply centred in the village. Place names are as per modern Albanian, rather than the older versions (sometimes phonetic) used by the Haslucks in their study.

 

The Këlmendi in Srem

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In 1737, a group of Albanians found themselves in Srem on the plains of what is today the Vojvodina province of Serbia but was then part of Austro-Hungary – one of the flattest places in Central Europe.

These were members of the Këlmendi highland clan, also known as the Clementi and Klimenti (after their patron saint, St Clement (Klementi i Ohrit in Albanian; Sveti Kliment Ohridski in Serbo-Croat). They were originally from the Malësi (specifically the Malet e Kelmendit) near the modern Albanian border with Montenegro. Like other Albanians of this highland region, they were Roman Catholic.

Historically, the Këlmendi engaged in wholesale raiding and brigandage and, a generation earlier, in 1702, as a means of suppressing their activities and their deleterious effect upon trade and travel, the Ottomans forcibly resettled many of them on the harsh Pešter plateau (Albanian: Rrafshnalta e Peshterit) in the Sanjak.

In 1737, these Këlmendi had participated in a joint Serb/Albanian Orthodox/Catholic rising against the Ottomans. This was crushed by October that year and the Këlmendi fled north with their families, alongside the other defeated forces retreating towards Austria.

This is how the Këlmendi came to be settled in two villages, Hrtkovci and Nikinci, as part of the defensive forces, or Grenzer, on the Austrian military frontier (known as Vojna Krajina in Serbo-Croat). There they remained, Albanian-speaking Catholics for two centuries, only becoming assimilated into the local Croat population by the mid-C20th.

It is understood that, like many Croats in this part of Srem, they were displaced during the violent conflicts which accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. In 1992, a majority of the Croat Catholic population was expelled by Serb nationalists: the inhabitants of Hrtkovci are known to have been resettled in a former Serb village called Kula (itself ethnically cleansed of Serbs by Croats) to the NE of Požega in Croatia.

The Google Map shows the locations of these places. A third Srem village, Platičevo, is mentioned in some sources as being settled by Këlmendi and this is also shown on the map for good measure.

 

Sites associated with the Sufi saint Sari Saltik Baba

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The C13th Bektashi Sufi saint is venerated in several places in the Balkans, as well as Anatolia.

Both Muslims and Christians come to the sites in the Balkans, where he is sometimes identified with a Christian saint such as St Naum and especially St Nicholas. One feature of the shrines is that non-orthodox acts of devotion take place, such as tying strips of cloth to trees and making votive offerings during prayer.

Tradition holds that Sari Saltik Baba asked that, when he died, his body be washed and seven coffins prepared, in each of which his body would appear. More than seven sites with a claim are shown on the Google Map.

 

Vlach or Aromanian settlements in South-East Europe 

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The Aromanians are one of the most fascinating of the various transnational minority groups in the Balkans. In the context of the region known as Macedonia and now subdivided between the nation states of Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, this people tends to be called the Vlachs or Koutsovlachs but they are known by, and call themselves by, a number of different names, many geographically determined.

One reason for this is the nature of their traditional way of life, which was transhumance. Transhumant shepherds would migrate seasonally between summer and winter grazing lands, often significant distances apart, following the same droving routes between highland and lowland each year. They paid little regard to political boundaries, unless forced, and therefore the geographical space they occupied was greater than their numerical population might suggest (even though it is thought that there could well have been 500,000 Aromanians across the Balkans on the eve of the First World War).

Individual branches of Aromanians tended to be known by the names of the mountain ranges where they grazed their flocks in summer. For example, on the territory of modern Greece, those Aromanians frequenting the pastures of the Gramos mountain range in summer were known as the Gramostani and those on the Pindus Mountains as the Pindusteani.

By no means all Aromanians in this region practised transhumance. Many in fact were merchants and, indeed, part of the local elite in towns and larger villages, for example in what is now Florina prefecture in northern Greece abutting the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The whole geographical region of Macedonia was ethnically mixed and polyglot and therefore the Aromanians, whether shepherds or merchants, were likely to speak one or more of the local Slavic vernaculars and/or Greek and Turkish as well as Aromanian. Certainly, the urban Aromanians were or became Greek-speaking and of the Orthodox religion and increasingly identified themselves with the Greek nation state, although those who did not – and there were not a few of these – emigrated to Romania (particularly to Dobruja) and beyond to Australia and North America.

With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of nation states with enforced international borders, Vlachs have largely had to give up their transhumant lifestyle. Most remain bilingual or trilingual, speaking their own Vlach or Aromanian language plus the official state language and often a minority language – for example, the Vlachs in SE Albania may speak Albanian and Greek or Macedonian as well as their Vlach mother tongue.

Despite the processes of assimilation, there are still 20,000 or more Aromanians in Greece, with typical Vlach villages including Nymfaio (known as Nevesca in Aromanian) and Pisoderi in Florina prefecture, and Perivoli in Grevena prefecture.

Researching Aromanian family history is likely to be challenging, at least back beyond 1913 (when Epirus and Macedonia were incorporated into Greece). Many families were mobile across what are now international frontiers and many adjusted their surnames to suit the prevailing winds of politics (for instance, commonly changing the suffix at the end of their name from -ović  to -ov to –ovski).

Our Google Map shows just a selection of the main Vlach settlements in SE Europe – especially those where Albania, Greece and Macedonia meet. It also shows the settlements in Dobruja, Romania, which mostly date  from 1925 onwards, when the Romanian state offered land there to Albanian Vlachs.

There are many more settlements not shown on this map – the map does not purport to show the potentially hundreds of Vlach communities across Albania and Greece in particular.

 

A version of this blog and accompanying map were originally published on the bluebirdresearch website in 2010 and 2014.