Aromanian

The Aromanians are an Eastern Romance people of the southern Balkans, often called Vlachs in medieval and Ottoman sources. Like Romanian, their language descends from the Vulgar Latin of Romanized Paleo-Balkan peoples and keeps a Romance vocabulary beneath Greek, Slavic and Turkish loans.

They traditionally kept flocks in the mountains of northern Greece and Albania, moving seasonally between highland pastures and markets. Eleventh-century Byzantine writings first place Vlach shepherds in Thessaly; later sources name Great Vlachia near Meteora.

Under the Ottomans they were Orthodox of the Rum millet, and many urban families grew wealthy and Hellenized. Their mountain city of Moscopole, in south-eastern Albania, became an eighteenth-century commercial centre with the Ottoman Balkans' first printing press outside Constantinople, until raids in 1769 and destruction by Ali Pasha of Ioannina in 1788 scattered its people.