Moldova has been in the news a lot lately, at least if you read the kind of news I do. Not only did the Communists just lose the elections there, but the international press has been pointing out that this election was a key moment in deciding if Moldova will tilt toward Brussels and Washington or toward Moscow. Meanwhile, the Chinese have been working to elbow their way onto the scene as well.
For those of you familiar with Moldova, you may know about Transnistria, the break-away Russian-speaking micro-state run from Moscow, whose main economic drivers may be the illegal trade of weapons, women and cigarettes. But - let's be honest - this little Russian puppet statelet is kid's stuff in the world of esoterica. I have, however, recently discovered...
Gagauzia, a Turkish-speaking province of Moldova. You clever members of the blogosphere will be raising eyebrows: Turkish? Really? But Moldova doesn't border Turkey. But you more clever members will recall that Turkey once had an empire, a large empire.To be precise, the people of Gagauzia, the Gagauz, are not Turkish, nor is their language quite Turkish, though it belongs to the Turkic family of languages and is closely related to Turkish, along with Azeri and Turkmen. One might guess that the Gagauz are Muslims, but one would be wrong: they are predominately Eastern Orthodox.
From whence, you ask, did these people come? Well, you're not the only one asking. One Bulgarian scholar complied a list of 19 different theories on the origins of the Gagauz. The theories fall into two general schools, one claiming that the Gagauz are ethnically Turkic, descended from a tribe which emerged from the Central Asian steppe, the other school arguing that the Gagauz are in fact Balkan in origin, having simply adopted a Turkic language at some point (and intermarrying with the occasional Turk). I leave that debate to the ethnologists.
The Gagauz (whose unofficial flag is seen on the right) show up on the radar of history in the 19th century, when they fled religious persecution in then-Turkish Bulgaria for their present location in then-Russian Moldova. In the winter of 1906 they declared independence for five days, but Gagauz nationalism has been relatively mild. When the Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams, some in Gagauzia pushed for independence, at much the same time that Transnistria was declaring it. Gagauzia declared independence from the Soviet Union on 19 August 1991 - the day of the hardliners' coup attempt in Moscow - but nothing much seems to have come of it. A few days later Moldova declared independence and in 1994 Gagauzia's status as a "national-territorial autonomous unit" of that country was recognized.
Today Gagauzia (whose official flag is seen left) has a population of about 156,000 people, spread out over 707 square miles. Of those, most are Gagauz, though there are groups of Bulgarians, Russians, Moldovans and Ukranians, each making up between 3% and 5% of the population. There are approximately 100,000 Gagauz living outside Moldova, many of them in Ukraine, Greece and Turkey. Gagauzia's economy is primarily agricultural, with a strong emphasis on viticulture. Why is it that every small ethnic group around the Black Sea seems to make wine?Many thanks go out to the Rogues, Rascals and Rapscallions, whose many Challenges - which are definitely worth perusing! - have helped fire my love of esoterica over the years.
4 comments:
Interesting post, Aaron. I doubt I would ever have found out about Gagauzia but for this post.
Eastern Europe has to be one of the most fascinating areas on the globe because of all the historical/ethnic mix-ups in such a relatively small area. But, what is really crazy about eastern Europe is that with all the intermarriage, language-mixing, and religious conversions, I don't think it's possible right now to find out where some of these ethnic groups came from. This shows you how crazy a lot of nationalism in the early 20th century was. Who knew who belonged to which group? Nobody. Maybe modern genetics will change that, but that only goes to show that most racist-nationalists had no idea what they were talking about.
I wish that my ethnic group had a flag with a wolf's head on it.
As to the viticulture, with all of the "historical/ethnic mix-ups" and "intermarriage, language-mixing, and religious conversions" that Stephen so aptly mentions, that region of the world could use some good drinks.
Stephen you're wrong.
Everybody knows here what ethnic group they belong to, including those that are middle-way between two groups (groups of intermarried people of certain ethnicities aren't uncommon and have certain ethnic names as well just like black+white = brown/mestizo).
You need to learn a lot more about ethnicities in Europe before making such asumptions. Nationalism is not crazy. The crazy part was racism and when nationalism threatens humankind.
Anonymous,
I suspect that with the rise of nationalism in the last 200 years many more people in Europe are much more sure of their ethnic identity than they would have been back then.
It's easy to define some ethnic groups, but it always gets tough to define an ethnic group on the fringes. To use the example of Germany, which I know more about, Sorbian was still widely spoken in the area around Berlin during Bach's lifetime. However, at the same time, the language of high culture was High German. Yet at the same time, many of the peasants (and even the non-farmers in the villages) spoke Plattdeutsch. Nowadays, just about anybody who grows up in Brandenburg would say that he is "German," but back then it wasn't nearly so simple.
The same goes for Eastern Europe. I'm by no means an expert on Eastern Europe, but I know enough not to trust every ethnic classification. It was much more complicate 200 years ago. To cite an example from Polish culture, Adam Mickiewicz set "Pan Tadeusz," "the" Polish epic, in "Lithuania" (that is, the area of the old duchy). Today we would probably simply call that area Poland, especially since Mickiewicz wrote in Polish, but he considered Lithuania his homeland, at least in some sense.
In the last 200 years, so many groups in the area have been defining their cultures over and against each other. It would be no wonder if in the process they exaggerated their differences. For instance, what's a Belorussian? Here's what Czeslaw Milosz (who grow up in Polish-Jewish Wilno before it became Lithuanian Vilnius) had to say:
"The Belorussians are still a puzzle to me--a mass of people, spread over a large expanse of land, who have been constantly oppressed, who speak a language that could be described as a cross between Polish and Russian with a grammar systematized only in the twentieth century, and whose feelings of national identity was the latest product of Europe's nationalist movements. But their case brings us up against the fluidity of all definitions; such a mass can easily be transformed from subject to object in foreign hands."
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