Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovic

The present study analyzes the meanings bilingual and multilingual speakers attach to the term mother tongue, a familiar concept which is most often intuitively understood, but difficult to define. Taking as the main frame of reference the vulnerable linguistic communities of Serbia, the authors assess the answers given by the interviewees to the open question "What does the notion of mother tongue mean to you?" asked in the pilot sociolinguistic questionnaire the study is based on. The responses are classified in several categories, which are then analyzed and discussed. The findings show that the speakers give equal importance to the period of language acquisition, in early childhood, and the role of the family in language transmission for defining mother tongue. The diversity of responses obtained in the study suggests that the definitions provided by the censuses, used in the education context, human rights literature, or sociolinguistics, do not necessarily overlap with the social reality, as the actual members of the linguistic communities perceive the concept as being more heterogeneous than generally assumed and do not automatically connect it to mothers.

This study focuses on a comparison of two sets of in-depth, face-to-face interviews among Romanians living in Poland about their perceptions of the country and society, and their migrant experiences. The interviews were conducted five years apart, using the same guide, but carried out by Polish interviewers in the first case, and by a Romanian interviewer in the second. Comparative analysis of the material gained in this process reveals that, despite similar content in interviewee responses, the standing of the interviewer was by no means neutral. Crucial for the volume, type, and nature of the collected data-as well as for its interpretation-is the interviewer's identity. In this regard, the study draws on Michael's Herzfeld's concept of 'cultural intimacy' to explain the mutual reproduction of different levels of identity and to develop a framework for analyzing the interaction between the social scientists and their interlocutors.

Until the final decades of the 20th century, the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia practiced a rather unusual funerary custom about which very little was known: exhuming people who died very young 40 days after the funeral, so that the inconsolable family could see them once more. Apart from bringing peace and consolation to the family, it seems that the belief behind this custom was that if the corpse is taken out of the grave once more, so that the sun shines on it, the deceased would have two lives. The rare ethnographic references from the beginning of the previous century indicate a wider spread of the phenomenon in Eastern Serbia, among the Vlachs, but at the end of the 20th century, when the last exhumations were done, only a few villages in the Homolje region celebrated the custom. This paper draws on the few Serbian ethnographic sources from the first half of the last century and on the limited later mentions, and presents the narratives recorded by the authors in 2022 with Vlach interlocutors who had heard about the ritual, conducted it, or took part in it between 1970 and the 1990s. Special attention is paid to the area in which this phenomenon took place, situations in which the exhumation was done, and the beliefs underlying it.

This paper discusses the existence of two different systems of naming used among the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia: a private one, based on their Vlach patronyms, used exclusively in their home villages and transmitted only orally, and an official, Serbian one. After presenting an overview of Romanian names and naming practices in the 18th–19th centuries, with a focus on the double naming system, the author explains how the Vlachs kept their Vlach patronyms after settling in Eastern Serbia, and how the second, official naming system, was Serbianized over time. In the second half of the paper, the author focuses on the recent phenomenon of the private, Vlach name gaining visibility and being used in writing, starting with the turn of the millennium, based on a variety of data sets. The increased visibility of the Vlach naming system reflects the recent increased prestige of the language, which was standardized and has started to be used in writing. The paper demonstrates that the double naming of the Vlachs reflects their dual, contextual identity, while the use in writing of the Vlach names signals an important shift in the attitude towards identity and language.

While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more recent works have broadened the scope and conceptualisation of LL to include rural spaces. However, these works almost exclusively examine the Global North or the Global South. Suspended somewhere between the Global North and the Global South, the so-called Global East, to which Southeast Europe belongs, is for the most part excluded not just from notions of globality, but also from LL studies. The aim of this paper is to redirect the focus of LL research to a rural area in the Global East, namely, the village Ečka in the Serbian Banat, a region with a specific and lengthy history of multilingualism. We hold that the typologies used for the study of urban LL cannot yield relevant results if applied to rural LL. Our study is based on data collected in 2020 and 2021 during six field trips to Ečka which resulted in more than 300 photographs containing inscriptions in different languages and scripts. Furthermore, we conducted

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the mobility of the Romanians in Vojvodina during the last one hundred years, and show that the dynamics of this population significantly changed its profile, making the use of both “historical Romanian community” and “Romanian diaspora” unfit to reflect the current state of this community. In the first part of the paper, we present the autochthonous Romanian community of Vojvodina until the First World War, to focus then on the influx of Romanian citizens registered after this date, who merged with the existing population. In the second part, we analyze the state policies of Yugoslavia, and later Serbia, towards their national minorities and foreign citizens in the country, and the effect they had on the Romanians within the borders of the country.

Starting from the observation that researchers have often uncritically opposed vernacular religiosity to official, teologic religion, either minimizing the importance of popular religious behaviour of the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia or totally dismissing the role played the church in the life of this community, the author advocates for a change of perspective. This change of perspective is meant to bring about a different reading of the situation in the region, in which the local people become the focus of research, not church, religion or customs as abstract concepts. The first part of the article briefly discusses the role of the church in Eastern Serbia during the last two centuries, the co‑existence of vernacular and official religion, as well as the recent reintroduction of the religious service in Vlach Romanian in several churches. The second part of the article presents archival documents and testimonies of people who have met Mother Măndălina, the patron of the Malajnica Monastery, the first Vlach monastery in Eastern Serbia. The transcribed testimonies are crucial in understanding the rural world of this region in the first half of the 20th century, where, contrary to the common belief, Vlachs and Serbs together frequented with a certain regularity the church. The testimonies are even more valuable for a future tracing of the beginning of the cult of Mother Măndălina, who belongs to both communities and environments, Vlach and Serbian, vernacular and theologic.

By bringing to the readers’ attention an unpublished Ottoman era document in Romanian, issued in 1861 in Rabrovo, a village in the Vidin region, back then under Ottoman rule, the article tries to shed light on the wider historical and sociolinguistic context of the Romanian-speaking population south of the Danube in the 19th century. The document is a donation-adoption act by which a Romanian man gives one of his sons for adoption to his brother, who does not have heirs. The document is handwritten in Romanian, using Cyrillic script, signed by the chorbaji, mayor and eight witnesses, and stamped by the Turkish administrator. Though very short, it reveals several important facts about the Romanian-speaking population in Ottoman Bulgaria and its origin, the language used in communication and writing, family relations, etc. Coming from a family archive, this document of great emotional value for its owner, has also undisputable linguistic and historical significance.

This chapter surveys different Bayash communities in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and elsewhere, discussing how the initiatives to introduce their mother tongue in the educational system are preceded by a process of ideological clarification. The author examines language ideology in its specific correlation with language management and language standardization practices, shows how the Bayash communities view themselves culturally and historically and whether there is an opportunity for education in their native language in each state.

Elena Ceau?escu, spouse of the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceau?escu, generated in the 1980s a gigantic homage industry, as she was the object of a personality cult as strong as that of her husband?s. This paper briefly outlines the origin and elements of Nicolae Ceau?escu?s personality cult, to focus then on Elena Ceau?escu?s cult: how at first it was merged with the cult of her husband, her being a mere companion of the head of state, and then grew to the point of paralleling that of Nicolae Ceau?escu during the last years of communist rule in Romania. The second part focuses on the evolution of Romanian state television and its crucial role in the diffusion of her personality cult, showing how this state institution became completely subordinated to the presidential couple in the 1980s, and pointing to a paradox of the period: the shorter Romanian television?s daily broadcasting time, the larger the amount of programming on Ceau?escu. Finally, the paper shows how January wa...

În studiul de față ne ocupăm dintr-o perspectivă preponderent sociolingvistică de sistemele de scriere create de-a lungul timpului pentru reprezentarea grafică a variantei limbii române vorbite de comunitatea românofonă din Serbia de est. Urmărim în special ce influențează alegerea unui alfabet (latin sau chirilic), a unor convenții ortografice și a unui sistem de scriere și cum se corelează această alegere cu atitudinea ideologică (reintegraționistă sau independentistă) a propunătorilor. În acest scop, analizăm sistemele ortografice utilizate pentru redarea vernacularei în „Vorba noastră”, prima publicație în varianta locală (1945–1948), și mai ales sistemele propuse în ultimii 20 de ani de membrii comunității angajați în dispute politice și lingvistice (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, Societatea „Gergina”). Analiza și compararea sistemelor demonstrează importanța factorilor ideologici, sociali și politici în crearea și impunerea unei ortog...

In this article we examine, from a predominantly sociolinguistic perspective, the writing systems created throughout time for the graphic rendering of the variety of Romanian spoken by the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia. We especially investigate what influences the choice of a script (Latin or Cyrillic), of orthographic conventions and of a writing system, and how this choice correlates with the ideological attitude (reintegrationist or independentist) of the proponents. To this end, we analyse the writing systems used for rendering the vernacular in “Vorba noastră”, the first publication in the local variety (1945–1948), and the systems put forward in the last 20 years by the members of the community engaged in political and linguistic debates (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, the “Gergina” Association). The analysis and the comparison of the systems attest to the importance of the ideological, social and political factors in creating and imposin...

During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literaturę presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment. The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early...

Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological research on the Romanian communities in Eastern Serbia, this article seeks to contribute to the global scholarship on diaspora and migration. It reveals interesting differences between the well defined and intensely studied notion of “diaspora” on the one hand, and the understudied, but useful concept of “near diaspora” on the other. First, the presence of Romanians in Eastern Serbia is looked at from a gender perspective, in the wider context of feminization of international migration. Second, the paper argues that the Romanian women in Eastern Serbia adopt the strategy of living in the “social fog”, thus becoming what can be termed “foggy diaspora”.

We attempt to nuance the theory that the Gypsy Court is practiced only by Romani-speaking peoples, showing that the memory of this institution and certain elements are still present today among the Bayash of Hungary, western Serbia and northern Croatia. We base our study on recent ethnological and anthropological field studies that we carried out in the regions of Medjimurje (Croatia) and Bačka (Serbia), and on written sources of the Bayash from Hungary. Additionally, we discuss older Romanian ethnographic accounts of the rudiments of the juridical system of the Rudari from southern Romania, which were apparently overlooked by researchers attempting to clarify the mechanisms behind the existence or preservation of this institution among different Gypsy groups.

The paper offers a critical survey of vulnerable and endangered languages and linguistic varieties in Serbia presented in three international inventories: UNESCO?s Atlas of the World?s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages. As the inventories differ widely in terms of assessing the exact level of language endangerment and vulnerability, and lack to provide empirical support for their assessment, the paper provides thorough information from official local sources, relevant studies and the authors? own field research, when available, on the language categorized as endangered (Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Judezmo, Vojvodina Rusyn, Romani), but also presents additional linguistic varieties which have not been registered yet by any of the mentioned inventories (Megleno-Romanian, Bayash Romanian and Vlach Romanian).

This paper looks into a specific segment of the linguistic landscape of rural Banat: the cemetery. Focusing on the epitaphs found in the two Christian Orthodox cemeteries of Banatsko Novo Selo, a village with a large Romanian minority in the Pančevo municipality, it analizes several aspects connected to the use of Romanian. First, the author shows how the local variant of Romanian infiltrates in the epitaphs and is used in parallel with standard Romanian. Second, the occurrence of new, bilingual Serbian-Romanian epitaphs is discussed, and comparison is made to other multilingual cemeteries in the Banat region. Third, fragments of literary creations of Romanian authors found on tombstones, which form the so-called epitaphic or wild literature, are analyzed. Finally, one of the common topics that has recently appeared in the Romanian epitaphs is detailed and discussed: life and death abroad.

By bringing to the readers’ attention an unpublished Ottoman era document in Romanian, issued in 1861 in Rabrovo, a village in the Vidin region, back then under Ottoman rule, the article tries to shed light on the wider historical and sociolinguistic context of the Romanian-speaking population south of the Danube in the 19th century. The document is a donation-adoption act by which a Romanian man gives one of his sons for adoption to his brother, who does not have heirs. The document is handwritten in Romanian, using Cyrillic script, signed by the chorbaji, mayor and eight witnesses, and stamped by the Turkish administrator. Though very short, it reveals several important facts about the Romanian-speaking population in Ottoman Bulgaria and its origin, the language used in communication and writing, family relations, etc. Coming from a family archive, this document of great emotional value for its owner, has also undisputable linguistic and historical significance.

This chapter surveys different Bayash communities in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and elsewhere, discussing how the initiatives to introduce their mother tongue in the educational system are preceded by a process of ideological clarification. The author examines language ideology in its specific correlation with language management and language standardization practices, shows how the Bayash communities view themselves culturally and historically and whether there is an opportunity for education in their native language in each state.

Starting from the role Sanda Golopenția played in establishing a digitized corpus of Romanian charms and in the advancement of scholarship on charms and charming, the author considers possible solutions for creating a corpus of Vlach Romanian charms. After an overview of Golopenția’s activity, the author introduces the Vlach Romanian community of Eastern Serbia, focusing on their specific  traditional culture, which has developed, in the last two centuries, at the intersection of two cultures, Romanian and Serbian. In the light of the fact that ‘Vlach magic’ is today a real cultural brand of the community, the paper further details on the charm collecting activity taking place in the region in the last hundred years. The  recorded texts form a rather heterogeneous collection, transcribed using different orthographies and  even alphabets, by Serbian or Romanian researchers. In spite of the relatively large number of existing texts, a corpus of Vlach Romanian charms is still to be compiled. The author stresses that this task could be fulfilled following Golopenția’s ideas and principles, which, even if more than three decades old, prove extremely useful even today.

Over the past thirty years, media and television studies have come a long way: from becoming a discipline of study, forming their own methods and methodologies up to encompassing various other disciplines and spanning across all continents. Nevertheless, the vast majority of existing work on television studies remained, for a long period, restricted to American and Western European academic centers and traditions, and developed mostly in reference to capitalist / democratic television-television systems fueled by and entrenched in capitalist / democratic 1 economies. However, during recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. Sabina Mihelj, one of its pioneers, points to the topicality of socialist television stud-1 The extent to which these two terms overlap-capitalist (mostly negative connotation) and democratic (positive connotation)-outreaches the scope of this study. Though, we should take into account two seminal elements in the history of European television: firstly, the rejection, in Europe, at least until the 1970s, of many capitalist features of American (commercial) television; secondly, the recent discovery (precisely within Socialist television research) of a much more porous split between Western and Eastern television networks.

The belief in vampires is still alive today among the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia: vampires are both textual and extratextual creatures. The transcripts of the narratives this article is based on reveal that the vampire is part of the collective mythology of the informants, but they also belong to the personal mythological systems of each and every participant. Even if most of them are not collective creations, they relate similar experiences, follow the same textual pattern, and thus they have the potential to become, at one moment, a collective asset, and to penetrate into the repertoire of the community.

Lăzăriţa among the Karavlachs in BiH. The avatars of a ritual
Abstract
In this essay, the author tries to shed light on the role of the Karavlachs in transmitting the spring ritual called lăzări aț  and on the transformations it has gone through during this process. It is argued that the ritual has been taken over by the Karavlachs from the surrounding populations out of economic reasons, but also because of their wish to identify with the majority. The author stresses their important role in preserving, transmitting and “giving back” the rituals to the majority populations (in our case, to the Serbs in BiH), also discussing the process of folklorization some rituals must undergo nowadays in order to survive.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the role of the Bayash in preserving and transmitting both the Romanian, and their own intangible cultural heritage. After presenting the general UNESCO frame for cultural heritage protection and discussing the way it is implemented in Romania, the paper focuses on the Bayash, both within and outside the country, and identifies core elements of their culture which function as identity markers and should be included on a representative list of intangible cultural heritage: the ritual of gurban, woodcarving, the manufacture of clay ovens etc. Last but not least, the paper raises several questions regarding the way in which the cultural heritage of minority groups is best preserved.

Elena Ceauşescu, spouse of the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, generated in the 1980s a gigantic homage industry, as she was the object of a personality cult as strong as that of her husband' s. This paper briefly outlines the origin and elements of Nicolae Ceauşescu' s personality cult, to focus then on Elena Ceauşescu' s cult: how at first it was merged with the cult of her husband, her being a mere companion of the head of state, and then grew to the point of paralleling that of Nicolae Ceauşescu during the last years of communist rule in Romania. The second part focuses on the evolution of Roma-nian state television and its crucial role in the diffusion of her personality cult, showing how this state institution became completely subordinated to the presidential couple in the 1980s, and pointing to a paradox of the period: the shorter Romanian television' s daily broadcasting time, the larger the amount of programming on Ceauşescu. Finally, the paper shows how January was infused with anniversary dates meant to consolidate the personality cult of the presidential couple and to reinvent communist traditions.

This chapter offers insight into the way the Others, Yugoslav neighbours, were perceived by the Romanians watching Yugoslavian television in the 1980s in Timişoara, the biggest city of the Romanian Banat. This period of Romanian history , the last years of the totalitarian communist regime, was characterized by an ever-growing and ubiquitous personality cult of Nicolae Ceauşescu. 1 Romanians were forced to live in the self-sufficiency imposed by a ruler trying to prevent his citizens from any form of contact with the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, those living in the close vicinity of state borders had the privilege of watching foreign television , which had a strong signal in these regions, and thus of getting accustomed to the reality of the neighbouring countries, of learning their languages, and of finding out about the Western way of life and values. This chapter is based on a series of interviews with Romanians from Timişoara, who represented a fervent audience of Yugoslav television in the last decades of communist rule. I will analyse the way in which the image of the relevant Others, the Yugoslavs, is discursively constructed by the interlocutors who got acquainted with them by watching Yugoslavian television. In order to render a better image of the social and political context in which all this happened, I offer a brief review of Romanian television during that period, which has been characterized as the most absurd media in Europe, and I discuss the practice of watching foreign TV in socialist Europe. I draw upon the concept of otherness employed in human geography and also try to see to what extent the traces of these relevant Others can be detected today in Timişoara.

This paper focuses on the Romanian speaking community in Vajska, a village in North-Western Serbia, near the Croatian border. This village in unique in that here functions the only school in Serbia where Romanian is taught outside the Banat and Eastern Serbia, regions with a large population of Romanians and Vlachs. The Romanian language speakers here claim Romanian origins, but part of the majority population considers them Roma, and they are known as Bayash in the relevant literature. Relying on the scarce ethnographic sources available and on her field research from 2016, the author presents the community and its vernacular, evaluates its vitality and prestige, to focus on the methods and framework of teaching the optional subject “Romanian language with elements of national culture” in the primary school in Vajska. The teacher’s background, personality and professional competence are also assessed, as they are elements of utmost importance in the process of language maintenance and teaching.

This paper aims at offering insight into the contemporary migration of Romanians towards Serbia, starting with the interwar period, continuing with the communist rule and focusing on the period after the fall of the Romanian communist regime, in 1989. What this study does is delimit the stages of the Romanian migration to Serbia, identify the social categories taking part in these migratory processes, the preferred regions for settling in Serbia, as well as the reasons behind people's decision to leave the country. I also show how the Romanian emigrants relate to the Romanian autochthonous communities in Serbia (the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia and the Romanians o Vojvodina), in which they usually settle. After presenting the theoretical background relating to ethnic migrations, I introduce a new theoretical concept, reverse ethnic migration, which best fits the situation of contemporary Romanian migrants to Serbia. These migrations take place from a majority (Romanians in Romania) towards a national minority (Romanians or Vlachs in Serbia), thus in an " opposite " direction. The migrations are not state supported and they are individual in most of the cases. I argue that the interwar migrations were state planned, being the result of the Yugoslav-Romanian School Convention from 1933; those taking place during communism were triggered, in many instances, by political reasons; while the post-communist migration was labour oriented.

Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological research on the Romanian communities in Eastern Serbia, this article seeks to contribute to the global scholarship on diaspora and migration. It reveals interesting differences between the well defined and intensely studied notion of " diaspora " on the one hand, and the understudied, but useful concept of " near diaspora " on the other. First, the presence of Romanians in Eastern Serbia is looked at from a gender perspective, in the wider context of feminization of international migration. Second, the paper argues that the Romanian women in Eastern Serbia adopt the strategy of living in the " social fog " , thus becoming what can be termed " foggy diaspora ". Preamble 2 It was already midday in the torrid summer of 2003 when the second Vlach lady I tried to talk to that day about local traditions and customs saw me off to the gate. Wearing a long black skirt, faded t-shirt and dark head scarf, under which strands of grey hair could be spotted, and bracing herself on a thick wooden stick, probably carved from a branch of one of the trees behind her shriveled house, she waved with a wrinkled hand in the direction of the bridge. She was old, she said, and could not remember a lot of things. Furthermore, she could not speak proper Romanian, only the broken speech from her village, stuffed with Serbian words, as she claimed. But, she added, there were real Romanian women (românoaice, as opposed to the local rumânce) in the village, who would for sure know much more and better than she did. Maybe I even knew them from Romania, she encouraged me. They also came to work.

In the last ten years of the communist regime, the life of Romanians was marked by a general crisis. Everyday life was marked by fear, poverty and cutting all the ties with the rest of the free world. The energy rationalizing program, initiated by Nicolae Ceauşescu in the 1980s, and the need of the Communist Party to control everything aired on TV led to cutting the program of the Romanian television to two hours per day. The legitimate reaction of the people was to develop strategies of satysfying their need for information, entertainment and culture. Thus, half of Romania was watching video tapes smuggled from Western Europe, while the other half, in the vicinity of state borders, was watching the television programs of neighbouring countries. The Romanians born before 1980 know all this from their personal, usually painful experience. The Romanians born after 1980 have listened, watched or read about it. For Serbs and former Yugoslavs, this is almost unknown. This collection of interviews is dedicated mainly to the readers from former Yugoslav countries, so that they find out what a huge role the Yugoslav television played in raising awareness of the free world for the Romanians from Banat, and not only, in the 1980s.
As the Banat was the closest to Yugoslavia, people “on this side of the border” were watching mesmerized the Yugoslav TV when the Romanian state television was offering only two hours of propaganda. The TV screen became a window into a more beautiful, free world. The television of the neighbouring country helped them pierce the iron curtain which was standing between the secluded Romania and the rest of Europe. Everyone who watched the Yugoslav TV (the “Serbs”, as they called it in Banat) fell in love with the “better world” on the other side of the border. Yugoslavia has long stood for the idyllic image of the promised land, the West in a nutshell. Everything “on the other side of the border” seemed better and more beautiful, be it on TV, or in real life: raspberries were bigger than in Romania, the radio and TV hosts had sexy voices, men were more determined, as my interlocutors declares, on the border of stereotyping and idealization.
After more than 25 years, this image is still alive. All my interlocutors have enthusiastically talked about this period and about the process of their growing up with Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav TV, while offering a sharp judgment of the Romanian society of the 1980s. They convinced their friends to take part in the study, even suggested to gather together, as they did twenty years ago, in front of the TV, when they could peep into the amazing world of personal freedom and consumerism. This book is dedicated to them, as well as to those “on the other side of the border”.
The book consists of three parts. The first part provides a brief historical review of the Romanian communist regime, with a special emphasis on the last years of Ceauşescu’s rule, when the country was marked by an acute crisis of the economy and society. In the 1980s the Romanian state television became one of the most absurd mass-media institutions in Europe, losing all its roles, except for propaganda. Next, I talk about the phenomenon of watching foreign TV programs in the border areas of Europe, in the second half of the last century, to focus on watching the Yugoslav TV in the western part of Romania. I also show how watching Yugoslav TV helped people learn Serbian and shaped their view on life. The second part of the book contains the complete transcription of 11 interviews, translated from Romanian into Serbian. The interviews were recorded in Timişoara between 2011 and 2014 (with two exceptions, which were sent by e-mail), with the original goal of studying the circumstances in which the subjects learned the Serbian language. Besides their importance for clarifying the context of learning Serbian, the narratives of my interlocutors contain fragments of oral history with illustrative depictions of everyday life on the western frontier of socialist Romania. The third part of the book is an annex with the language test the interlocutors solved and their answers, which show a high comprehensive and communicative competence, in spite of the two decades from the exposure to Serbian.
When my respondents talk about learning Serbian by watching Yugoslav TV during their childhood and adolescence, their critical attitude towards the Romanian communist regime is coupled with an admiration for socialist Yugoslavia and its system of values, which has lately been labelled Yugonostalgia. Yugonostalgia is most strongly manifested among the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia, many of whom have left the federation after its breakup, at the beginning of the nineties. Paradoxically, many Banat Romanians are also Yugonostalgic, more precisely, they are nostalgically and emotionally tied to liberal and lenient Yugoslav regime, idealized for the desirable aspects of life in former Yugoslavia, among which economic security, multiculturalism and a better standard of living. By making the interlocutors plunge into and examine their own past, the interviews had a therapeutic effect on them, helping them come to terms with the collective past, marked by a great historical shift.

This book has two main parts: a comprehensive and extended introduction comprised of four separate chapters, and a dictionary of the supernatural beings which appear in the folklore of the Vlachs of north-eastern Serbia.

In the first chapter, The Vlachs – an introduction, the author offers several landmarks for the origins and history of the Vlachs of north-eastern Serbia, trying to present them in the wider context of other Romanian language communities living in Serbia. After a detailed discussion on the Vlach vernaculars, the author focuses on the four Vlach dialectal and ethnographic groups – Ţărani, Ungureni, Ungureni-Munteni and Bufani, with a special emphasis on the last one. The second chapter, Studies on the folk culture of the Vlachs, represents a comprehensive review of the studies dealing with the folk culture of this community, which have been published both in Serbia and Romania, starting from the 19th century on. The third chapter, The present-day fieldwork with the Vlachs, apart from the theoretical frame on fieldwork methods, ethics and interaction, presents the characteristic features of this region, as far as field research is concerned, emphasizing, among others, the delicate issue of the researcher-interlocutor relation. As well, a special attention is paid to the stages which precede and follow fieldwork. In the fourth and last chapter of the first part, Is there a Vlach mythology?, the author shows that the mythological universe of this community is formed of a series of overlapping and intersections of variants, of blank spaces or shadowed ones, repetitions and redundancies, and the image which results from here is a blurry and protean one. In conclusion, one cannot generalize and talk about a Vlach mythology, but only about an assembly of mythological texts, obtained from different narrators. Here is where the author also details on the corpus she based her analysis on, which sums up more than a hundred texts, of different types and dimensions, collected personally between 2003 and 2009 in several localities from north-eastern Serbia.

The second part of the book, Draft for a mythological dictionary of the Vlachs, is comprised of eleven entries, which present eleven supernatural characters that appear in different mythological texts recorded with the Vlachs. All the entries have been compiled from a comparative perspective, Romanian and Slavic. For the very beginning, the author notices that the three demonic beings which people narrate about in all the regions of north-eastern Serbia inhabited by Vlachs (as well as in Romania, Serbia and wider in the Balkans) and which appear in the repertoire of almost every interlocutor are Ursitoarele (the Faiths), Zburătorul (the evil spirit tormenting girls and women) and Moroiul (the Ghost) – connected to three important periods in people’s life: birth, adulthood (its erotic side) and death. They can be classified as active demons, because they are narrated about in the present, out of personal experience, and the practices which aim to neutralize or to pacify them are still present nowadays. The other demonic characters presented in the book are: Ala, Sântoaderii, Joimărica, Miazanopţii, Muma pădurii, Samodiva, Şoimanele and Vâlva. Every time it was necessary, the author marked if they are still alive in the memory of her interlocutors, who tell about them using the present tense, and whether they are “active” or have been “deactivated”, being transformed into mere masks or processions.

The aim of the study was, on the one hand, to place the community of Vlachs from north-eastern Serbia in a wider historical and ethnological frame, which would offer an accurate and scientifically objective image of this community, which is today object of intense political debates, and on the other hand, to mark the relations, influences and confluences in the domain of folk beliefs about supernatural beings from this border space, situated at the intersection of more cultures.