Aromanians, as they call themselves, are the descendants of the Latin speaking people in the Roman Empire and their language resembles Romanian and Italian. My grandma’s family were well educated merchants who decided to migrate from Kruševo to Romania after the Ilinden uprising of 1903, the Balkan Wars and World War I. However, while slowly travelling to Romania they spent several years in Kumanovo, where they married my great-grandmother to my great-grandfather, Novak. For the standards of the early 20th century Macedonia, my grandma was an educated woman having completed both primary and middle school. She was supposed to be a teacher, but her husband didn’t allow it. She passed her native tongue to her sons, so my grandpa Jovan was fluent in French, facilitated by his mother’s native tongue (Aromanian language). Unfortunately, he did not pass the language to his daughters (my aunt and my mom). She was remembered as a very beautiful lady, with sophisticated civic manner and an atypical look, resembling ancient Roman women.   

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Global History

• Ilinden Uprising (1903) - The Ilinden Uprising was a seminal event in the contemporary Macedonian history. Macedonian revolutionaries from the VMRO (check the entry for my grandpa Atanas) decided to overthrow the Ottoman government and to establish an independent Macedonian republic. This desperate act of defiance also was an attempt to draw the attention of the European public to the suffering of the Macedonian people under the Ottoman yoke. The uprising failed and the revenge of the Ottoman authorities was fierce. However, the Macedonian Republic which lasted only for 10 days became the railing cry and the national myth of the Macedonian people. My great-grandma’s hometown was the capital of the Macedonian republic, and the Ottomans destroyed the town when they quashed the uprising. This led to the migration of many Macedonians, Aromanians and Albanians out of Kruševo.