A new frontier between Yugoslavia and Roumania has been drawn by the
Allied Powers in the Banat. But before we consider its merits and
absurdities we must examine the Serbo-Roumanian question in the several
departments of eastern Serbia. During 1919 one heard a good deal, in
Bucharest and in Paris, of the pitiful Roumanians whom the Serbs had
always deprived of their own national schools and churches. It was
claimed, chiefly by a certain Dr. Athanasius Popovitch, that the
Roumanians in Serbia were longing for the day of their redemption. On
March 8, 1919, two deputations of Roumanians from the Timok and from
Macedonia, who had lately arrived in Paris in order to plead before the
Conference, presented themselves to the Roumanian colony at 114 Avenue
des Champs-Elysees. We are told that in consequence of their moving
narrative, and on account of the loud appeal made by them to all their
free brothers, the Roumanian colony founded, with great enthusiasm, a
national league for their delivery. The Vice-President of the league was
announced to be Dr. Athanasius Popovici. In a pamphlet called _Les
Roumains de Serbie_ (Paris, 1919), Dr. Draghicesco, a Roumanian Senator,
denounces the Serb authorities for having obliged Dr. Athanasius, while
he was a schoolboy, to change his surname into the purely Serbian one of
Popovitch. "Not being able to endure this regime of violence," we are
informed, "he expatriated himself and established himself in Roumania."
But if Dr. Athanasius felt so strongly with regard to his name when he
was a mere schoolboy, one is puzzled to understand why, being an adult
and a pamphleteer in 1919, he should be hesitating between Popovitch,
which is Serbian, and Popovici, which is Roumanian. The Senator does not
seem to be well informed as to the early years of Dr. Athanasius, who so
far from expatriating himself as an indignant schoolboy, remained in
Serbia, where he went through five classes of the gymnasium in Belgrade,
after which he studied theology in the same town, with a view to
succeeding his father, who was a priest at Du[vs]anovac in eastern
Serbia. Later on Athanasius performed his military service at Zaje[vc]a,
where he married--so one of his sisters told me--one Mileva, the
daughter of Yovan Stan[vc]evi['c], a merchant. After his marriage he
went to Jena, in order to continue his studies, and there he became a
Doctor of Letters. It may be that while he was at Jena he became
conscious of the regime of violence to which the Roumanians in Serbia
are subjected; at any rate he decided not to return to that country,
where his wife and three sisters are well satisfied to live. He launched
himself into a furious anti-Serbian propaganda in favour of those who,
in the words of Dr. Draghicesco, are profoundly sad and full of grief at
being neither Serbian nor Roumanian, who when they meet a Roumanian
brother listen to him with pleasure and, with their eyes full of tears,
murmur: "How happy we should be to be with you." ... When I travelled
through those parts with a view to verifying Dr. Athanasius's
assertions, I was invariably told by persons of Roumanian origin that
they had no complaint whatever against the Serbs, and that the last
thing they desired was to be politically united to the Roumanians of the
kingdom. Dr. Athanasius might reply that his wretched compatriots were
impelled by fear to give such answers. But what do they fear?--one finds
that among these people are deputies, priests, army officers and so
forth. "To-day," says Dr. Athanasius, "all the peoples who are reduced
to slavery by other people secure the right to return to their
fatherland." The Roumanians of Serbia would have to be a good deal more
miserable before wishing to have anything to do with Roumania. Milan
Soldatovi['c], ex-mayor of the great mining village of Bor and himself
of Roumanian origin, said that he had never heard of any one who went to
work in Roumania. No doubt the present generation of Roumanian
landowners deeply deplore the misdeeds of their ancestors, who drove the
ancestors of these peasants away from Roumania. "The peasant hovels were
merely dark burrows, called _bordei_, holes dug in the ground and
roofed with poles covered with earth, rising scarcely above the level of
the plain.... The interior was indescribable. Neither furniture nor
utensils, with the exception of the boards which served as beds or seats
and the pot for cooking the _mamaliga_"[113]--his sole food, a paste
consisting of maize meal cooked in water. And one cannot be astonished
if the Roumanians in Serbia are chary of believing that their native
land has changed for the better. "If," said a Roumanian peasant before
an Agricultural Commission in 1848, "if the boyar could have laid hands
upon the sun, he would have seized it and sold God's light and warmth to
the peasant for money." Even in 1919 the peasant still had much reason
to be dissatisfied, for where the owner parted with his land it was
usually--no doubt as a stage in the transaction--made over to the
village as a whole. And if the boyar no longer has the monopoly of the
sale of alcohol, if he has so far improved that Vallachia is not now
losing its inhabitants as it was after the Regulations of 1831, when we
read that "in vain the rivers are assiduously watched, as if in a state
of siege; the emigrants cross at the places which are clear of troops.
Emigration is especially rife in winter, when the frozen Danube presents
an ever-open bridge," yet among the Roumanians of Serbia it has been
handed down from father to son what happened in the reign of Prince
Milo[vs]. To take one case out of many such that are preserved in the
National Archives at Belgrade, a dispatch was sent on February 11, 1831,
by Vule Gligorievi['c], his representative in those parts, to Prince
Milo[vs], who was at Kragujevac, enclosing a supplication from the
priests and other inhabitants of the large Roumanian island called
Veliko Ostrvo, in the middle of the Danube, praying that they might be
allowed to cross to Serbia. "We are in great misery," they wrote, "and
have boyars who are very bad, and we cannot bear the misery in which we
find ourselves, and in the greatest grief we beg your Highness to let us
come to Serbia with our wives and children." The Prince had a special
sympathy for Roumania and was therefore most reluctant to intervene in
her internal affairs. He adopted a very cautious attitude in this
matter, but when Gligorievi['c] sent him petition after petition he was
finally so touched by the recital of their woes that he permitted them
to cross the river; and one night, with the help of the Serbian
authorities, the whole island crossed over, to wit 57 families, with 186
oxen, 70 horses, 694 sheep and 87 pigs. Milo[vs] made them a free grant
of land for the building of a village, together with a vast stretch of
territory for pasture and stock-raising; at his own expense he built
them a church and extended to them all the liberties and advantages
enjoyed in Serbia by the Serbs themselves. As a token of their gratitude
these Roumanian emigrants called their village Mihailovac, after the
name of Michael, the Prince's son. This village is the birthplace of our
friend Dr. Athanasius, whose sentiments appear to have placed him in a
minority of one. When his pamphlet came into the hands of Jorge
Korni['c], the mayor of Mihailovac and a Roumanian by origin, he brought
it to the prefect at Negotin saying that he wished to have nothing to do
"with any devil's work."
As Dr. Athanasius and his chauvinist friends give a pretty lurid picture
of the Roumanian villager who lives in Serbia, I visited a few places
where the population is wholly Roumanian or Serbo-Roumanian. The 766
inhabitants of Ostralje are all of Roumanian descent, the mayor being
one Velimir Mi[vs]kovi['c], a sergeant of reserves who has been
transferred from the army in order to carry on his municipal duties. All
the inhabitants speak Serbian and Vlach. "We were always Serbs," they
said. "Nobody told us that we had migrated to this place." And amongst
those who assembled to talk with us at the schoolmaster's house there
was only one who, in the Roumanian fashion, had drawn his socks over his
white trousers. The 2221 inhabitants of the village of Grljan are about
two-thirds of Roumanian and one-third of Serbian origin. Formerly they
each had their own part of the village, but now they are intermingled
both in the village and in the cemetery. They intermarry freely; thus
Jon Jonovi['c], the most notable person, who used to represent this
district in the Skup[vs]tina at Belgrade, has three Serbian
daughters-in-law. He was a member of the Opposition Liberal group of
Ribarac. "And did you ever request that your fellow-countrymen should
have their own Roumanian schools and churches?" we asked. This is one of
the chief demands of Dr. Athanasius. "I was not the only Roumanian who
was a deputy," said the old man of the furrowed face. "There was Novak
Dobromirovi['c] of Zlot; there was Jorge Stankovi['c], for instance; but
we never thought of asking for such a thing, since we had no need for
it." The son of the wealthy Sima Yovanovi['c] at Bor observed with a
smile that the first business of Roumanian schools would have to be the
teaching of Roumanian. "My father sent me to be educated at Vienna," he
said, "and when I met some boys from Bucharest we found that our
language was so different that we had to talk to one another in German.
And now when a commercial traveller comes here from Roumania I have to
talk German to him, as I would otherwise have to converse with my hands
and feet." The French mining officials, by the way, at Bor testified
that they had never heard of any tension between men of Serbian and
those of Roumanian origin; the Roumanians, who prefer agricultural work,
are more attracted to the mines in winter, when over 40 per cent. of the
1500 employes are Roumanians.
Dr. Athanasius and his friends are agitated, as one would imagine, when
they discuss with you the numbers of their countrymen. In _Le Temps_ of
April 22, 1919, they declared that they could produce 500,000, for they
realized that their previous claim of between 250,000 and 350,000 was
not large enough to give the Roumanians in Serbia the benefit of the
principle of nationality. But even this more modest figure will be
found, on examination, to be exaggerated. In the four north-eastern
counties of Serbia there were 159,510 Roumanians in 1895; 120,628 in
1900, and in 1910 a little over 90,000. This diminution, say the
chauvinists, is due to a falsifying of statistics, for those, they say,
who have attended a Serbian school are inscribed as Serbs. The truth is
that everyone is entered according to his mother-tongue. And history
knows countless instances of a gradual decrease in the case of people
placed in foreign surroundings and exposed to foreign influences. Like
the Illyrians who people Dalmatia, the Thracians of ancient Dacia and
the Serbs who emigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the
Roumanians of Serbia are undergoing this process and are inevitably
becoming Serbicized. Frequently we noticed that men possessing no
Serbian blood did not care to admit their Roumanian origin, which,
however, is no secret to their neighbours in spite of the Serbian
termination "i['c]" that, in the course of years, has been affixed to
their names. An allusion to their origin is clearly regarded as lacking
in delicacy. "Well, my ancestors were Roumanian," is often as much as
they will admit. And when some enterprising agitators came over from
Roumania to the department of Po[vz]arevac in 1919, the Roumanians of
those parts gave up to the authorities all those who did not manage to
escape. For ten years Lieut.-Colonel Gjorge Markovi['c] commanded the
9th Regiment, which is chiefly formed of Roumanians from that region.
They used to tell him that they wanted to have nothing to do with the
Roumanian boyars. "Here we are boyars ourselves," they said. All of them
speak Serbian, many of them write it; and on winter evenings they have
for years received instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic and
singing, which compares favourably with Roumania's army, in which, as I
was told at Bucharest, the plan of starting any education had to be
postponed in consequence of the outbreak of the Great War. Together with
the unwillingness of these people to acknowledge their origin, one
observes a general vagueness as to the home of their forefathers.
Apparently these came over from southern Hungary, whence the name
Ungureani,[114] or from Tara Rumaneasca, _i.e._ the Roumanian land,
whence the name Tarani. Others again are descended from Roumanized Serbs
who came from Kossovo and other Serb regions of the south, lived in the
Banat and Transylvania among the Roumanian villages, acquired the
Roumanian language and then crossed over to Serbia. These three classes
have all come to Serbia in recent times. Any attempt on the part of Dr.
Athanasius and his friends to drag in the Romans can be answered by the
undoubted fact that the ancient Roman colonists had completely
disappeared from Serbia as far back as the fifteenth century, leaving no
trace at all, and there is no connection between them and the present
Roumanian population of Serbia. No memories remain of the old Roman
colonists, save certain place-names which, as Professor Georgevi['c]
remarks, strike one as surprising in the midst of a purely Serbian
population. It is interesting to note that these ancient Roman
place-names are very rare in the regions inhabited to-day by men of
Roumanian origin.
It would not have been worth whole devoting so much space to the
activities of Dr. Athanasius and his adherents but for the fact that
European public opinion, which has concerned itself extremely little
with the Roumanians of Serbia, might possibly imagine that their
advocate deserves to be taken seriously.