I was reading along in Colin Thubron’s NYRB review (archived) of four novels by Kapka Kassabova when I got to this passage:
A gleam of such idealism—and an ingrained restlessness—led the poet and narrative writer Kapka Kassabova to join some of the last migratory pastoralists in Europe on their seasonal ascent to the high pastures in the Pirin Mountains of her native Bulgaria. This was not an epic migration like that of Iran’s Bakhtiari people, for instance, some of whom still trek with their goats and high-packed mules between the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf, but a near-solitary journey with a wayward flock of sheep to rocky uplands and a spartan hut.
She was entering a world of old transhumance, of annual migration, for this was the traditional terrain of the nomadic Karakachans, whose lives were grounded only in the last century. Their unseen presence haunts Kassabova’s latest book, Anima: A Wild Pastoral. Most widely studied in Greece, where their elusiveness—they avoided human habitation and often traveled by night—provoked both curiosity and unease, the Karakachans still inhabit mountainous regions in Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania, but their origins are unknown. They perhaps descend from prehistoric Thracian-Illyrian peoples, who were early Hellenized. Their traditions were austerely patriarchal. Elaborately sashed and kilted, they trekked under huge goat-hair capes so coarse and stiff, one traveler wrote, that a man could almost step out and leave it standing like a sentry box. Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time, to the excitement of anthropologists, and the geometric patterns of their textiles are teasingly reminiscent of those on preclassical Greek vases.
Who were these Karakachans? If you put it into the Wikipedia search box, it redirects to Sarakatsani, and that name was familiar; the Wikipedia article says:
The most widely accepted theory for the origin of the name “Sarakatsani” is that it comes from the Turkish word karakaçan (from kara = ‘black’ and kaçan = ‘fugitive’), used by the Ottomans, in reference to those people who dressed in black and fled to the mountains during the Ottoman rule. According to other theories, the name could stem from the village of Sakaretsi (the supposed homeland of the Sarakatsani), or from the village of Syrrako.
That’s a lot of hypotheses; Sarakatsani and karakaçan are certainly strikingly similar, but it’s not clear why the k- would have become s-. The OED’s entry for Sarakatsan is from 1993, but the etymology says only “< modern Greek Σαρακατσάνοι the Sarakatsans.” They do not have an entry for Karakachan, and frankly I think it’s unhelpful to use that term in English. As for “Their spoken Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time”: I don’t doubt it, since all of Greek is scattered with words from Homer’s time. I guess this is one of those folk-linguistic things like “Appalachian English is full of words from Shakespeare’s time” or whatever.
Каракачани is the regular Bulgarian name for them, although supposedly they are also name куцовлахи, the same as Aromanians (they had similar economy and similar costumes)
Bulgarian WP also suggests Aromanian sarac-tsani ‘бедняк’ = ‘pauper’.
Каракачани are a _really_ complicated topic I can not address tonight. I’ll try to tomorow.
I think I’ve mentioned them before here.
Y: They identified as Vlach, I don’t know about the etymology. But they were speaking in the 1880s a Romance language.
V: I figured you’d be a more complete source than WP.
patrick fermor (of course) has some encounters with them, described in his (posthumous) The Broken Road, i believe, but he’s only so reliable as a source on the historical and linguistic background.
I’m just so glad to hear that Thubron is alive and kicking. His travel books from the ’70s and ’80s were immensely influential on me, and were partially responsible for the life and travels I’ve led.
Yes, I had a similar reaction.
used by the Ottomans, in reference to those people who dressed in black and fled to the mountains during the Ottoman rule
I would like to see some citation of texts in support of this specific point.
Nowadays one encounters Turkish karakaçan as a colloquial word for ‘donkey’, often used as a name for an individual donkey for lack of any other name. The Turkish Dialect Dictionary gives the meaning ‘donkey foal’ for Bursa province. In children’s books, Nasreddin Hodja’s donkey is sometimes called Karakaçan. (Similarly, every kangal dog is named Karabaş ‘Black-head’. Once when I was visiting my housemate’s village on the upper reaches of the Tigris, there was a friendly dog hanging around my housemate’s family’s land that the men would play with and throw scraps to. I asked the dog’s name, and they answered, ‘Karabaş.’) I consulted some Ottoman dictionaries from before the Turkish language reform, and they did not have any entry for a karakaçan, but then, why would they? They do include خر ḫar (from Persian) and حمار ḥımar (from Arabic), of course.
The etymologies in the various Wikipedias appear to derive proximately from Babiniotis’ dictionaries. Here is etymology for σαρακατσάνος (given with variant καρακατσάνος) from G. Babiniotis 2002, Λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας, 2nd ed., p. 1570 (abbreviations expanded silently):
Romanian indeed has sărac, but I haven’t checked any glossaries of Aromanian varieties for details on the usage of this word in Aromanian itself because I am on holiday for Eid. But Καρακατσάνος is not even an endonym, is it?
However, Babiniotis 2010, Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας, p. 1245, under σαρακατσάνος, doesn’t bother to mention the Aromanian etymon:
For completeness, Nikolaos Andriotis 1967, Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής:
With Turkish kır as the first member of the compound instead of kara. Andriotis cites a Κ. Mladenov in (I think!) Български език 10, pages 248ff. (Not Stefan Mladenov, I guess.). I could not find Български език digitized online, which surprised me.
None of this is satisfactory. Maybe Ottoman archives will turn up something eventually. I have to go to bed now.
Thanks for all that, and Eid mubarak!
Thank you, and my friends thank you!
Should be φεύγει in αὐτὸς που φεύγει στο δάσος (‘he who flees to the forest’) in the quote from Andriotis. Apologies for the OCR error. I hope this has not impeded people’s use of online translators. Correct and delete this comment if you like.
Bareka nɛ di’ema!
Should be φεύγει in αὐτὸς που φεύγει στο δάσος (‘he who flees to the forest’) in the quote from Andriotis. Apologies for the OCR error.
Fixed!