Medieval Transylvania

Hello everyone...this is my first post.

 

I don't have much personal knowledge to add to this discussion, but I did come across and interesting analysis made by American professor Kelley L. Ross (Vlach Connection). If you have time please take a look and tell us what you think.

 

I can read little Bulgarian, I'll try my best to understand that page  Thank you!

Yes, as far as I know they were only females. I know what you refer to  and yes, it is a possibility.

Edited by Chilbudios - 22-Feb-2008 at 13:43

The Romanian � is actually like the Russian ы. Etymologically it can come into Romanian from basically any vowel, e.g. a parallel vowel evolution o->� can be found in the word f�nt�nă from the Latin fontana. So I guess it could work a volhv -> *volv (I'm not sure though what was the original pronounciation of that lhv and if the h could drop like a loss of aspiration or something) -> *v�lv.

 

If it helps, in Romanian the word is polysemantic. The other meaning is "agitation, stir".

 

Anton, is there a Bulgarian word with similar phonetism and meaning? I'm asking because in Romanian folklore there's a certain type of fairy/witch (reigning in nature - waters, woods, etc.) called v�lvă and has some interesting phonetical (the term as it is in Romanian is in feminine form, we can reconstruct a masculine as *v�lv) and semantical similarities with the Russian term, but AFAIK the strong contacts between Romanians and Russians are much later, so if it is a loanword from Slavic I'd expect it to be borrowed from Serbs or Bulgarians.

Actually, I just realized that was saying the same thing as you.

I might be wrong but I cheked one version of Nestor here: http://www.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=4869 When he speaks about Valahs he call them Volohi when he speaks about mags he call them volhvi or volosvi, volisvov etc. He always put V at the end. All this however does not change the fact that Poles, Croats and Chezch call (or called earlier) Italians "volohi"

You are wrong Anton, at least in Russian it's also volohi. Just take a look at the Primary Chronicle of Nestor.

The next information is about Transylvania's territory during the Roman period but it helps understand why a signifiant Latinized population remained in the area of former Roman Dacia.




Transylvania�s Roman past visible from the air

By Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent


TRANSYLVANIA means, to most of us, vampire counts in Gothic castles, but centuries before this province of Romania acquired its sanguinary reputation it was a peaceful province of the Roman Empire, literally �the land beyond the forest�. A team from Glasgow University has now used aerial archaeology to locate Roman farms and forts in Transylvania, showing an impressive level of population density and organisation.



Writing in the journal Archaeological Prospection, William Hanson and Ionana A. Oltean, a Romanian archaeologist at Glasgow, report that the dry summer of 2000 yielded a large number of �parchmarks� visible from the air. These are areas of restricted crop growth indicating the presence of buried stone walls, which make for a shallower, drier soil and plants that are paler than their fellows on wetter areas nearby.

Their survey covered part of the Mures basin and the Hateg plain to the south, in the heartland of the ancient Dacian kingdom conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan. At Alba Iulia, the legionary fortress of Apulum, they detected civil settlement outside the walls, now threatened by modern urban development; at Cigmau, the Roman Germisara, a complex pattern of settlement was revealed.

The Roman fort sits on a hilly spur, and is long, narrow and irregular, unlike the usual rectangular plan; buildings identified inside it include the headquarters, what was probably the commander�s house, and a large granary at least 20 metres (63ft) long. The civilian settlement or vicus outside has been known about for a long time, but the parchmarks revealed numerous stone buildings, running for nearly 400 meters. A previously unknown Roman villa was found at Oarda, and is one of the few examples known in Dacia with multiple buildings. There are several ranges grouped around what seems to have been a large courtyard. Another previously unknown villa was found at Vintu de Jos in the next small valley to the southwest, where there seems to have been a preceding native settlement of oval houses with sunken floors.

The investigators, whose flying programme was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, were surprised at the lack of �positive cropmarks�, where crops grow higher over loose, wet deposits such as ditch fill. One answer may be that the Mures valley has wide areas of alluvium, where the difference between undisturbed soils and refilled features is low, a phenomenon noted in aerial surveys in Britain also.

The restrictions imposed by the former communist regime mean that aerial archaeology in Romania is in its infancy: the results of the Glasgow team, and the encouraging precedents set by Otto Braasch and James Pickering in the former East Germany, suggest that the Roman occupation of Transylvania will prove to have been as highly organised as in the core provinces of the Empire.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_...ticle852705.ece

Please, let  Wikipedia behind you.