I'm a Cincarka and I'm not ashamed of it

"Language is the only homeland for a people without its own state", is a maxim that we hear from time to time from fewer and fewer speakers. of Tsintsa languages ​​in the Balkans and around the world.

Large Cincinnati the poet Konstantin Belimache wrote a poem at the beginning of the last century Parents' vow (Parental request) feeling already at that time how the native Armenian language is inexorably disappearing and being replaced by the surrounding languages. In the song, he curses everyone who forgets their mother tongue with the heaviest curses. That song of his is sung at all Cincar gatherings as the anthem of the Armenian people. At the end of the last century, some important activists for the affirmation of Cincaro and the endangerment of the language, especially those in the diaspora in Western Europe, launched an initiative to soften some lines from Belimache's poem with less difficult words. However, Parental request is still sung in the original, with all the curses that the poet addressed to his compatriots who "forget their mother tongue". The effects of Bellimache's poetic curses seem to be quite evident.

This leads us to the also very verifiable fact that in Serbia there are fewer and fewer Cincars, i.e. Armenians, who speak the Armenian language fluently, and their descendants, members of the younger generations, although they are deeply aware of their belonging to the Armenian ethnos, do not speak the language, and the institutional opportunities to learn it are on the border of impossible. The situation in other Balkan countries where Armenians live today, with the exception of Bulgaria, that is, in Greece, Albania, Macedonia and Romania, where the concentration of Armenians is high, and the number of speakers is proportionally higher, and what is even more important - the number of young people among them is much higher. And that justifies the sentence at the beginning of the text that for Cincars, language is the only home, homeland, identity.

At a scientific meeting in Trieste in 2017 on endangered minorities and their disappearing languages ​​(according to the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages), there was a discussion about the Armenians and the Istrian Ćići, which have dwindled to less than 100 speakers. As a member of such a nation, I was given the role of a kind of proof that the Armenian language is not some mysterious identity and linguistic category, a language tool used by our ancestors within the family and close relatives. Because now we can speak our language without fear of stigmatization, but, alas, we no longer have interlocutors nearby. Yes, we talk occasionally with relatives and friends, but I regret to say that there is no family in Serbia that communicates in the Armenian, Cincar language.

THIS IS MY STORY

How does a member of the Armenian nation feel in the process of the inexorable disappearance of her language?

I tried to look at this problem from the point of view of someone who considers herself an authentic member of the Cincar people, but at the same time a no less self-conscious member of Macedonia, where I was born, where I was educated and educated, Yugoslavia, which I was proud of, and Serbia, where I have lived for more than 40 years.

I decided to tell my own story. And I leave it to scientists, linguists, socio-linguists and historians to treat this issue in a way that will be based on facts, but also on the overall, global circumstances in which we all survive together, as citizens of one, actually, small world.

I was born in the small village of Dobrošane, near the town of Štip, in eastern Macedonia, which at that time had about 100 houses, most of which were cincar houses, and a smaller part were Turkish. Today, like many other villages, it is deserted and inhabited only by memories of us scattered all over the world. The first school in the Macedonian language was opened in 1957. It was not easy for that teacher of ours, sent there on assignment, as was the case at that time. In one large barn, an improvised classroom, there were about 40 students from 6 to 16 years old. We spoke Chinese and Turkish, and the teacher spoke Macedonian. There were a lot of comical situations.

So, I, as a member of the Cincar community, stepped into a world that was a bit scary at that age. Until then, I imagined that there were only those two languages ​​in the world, Chinese and Turkish. I suffered an even greater shock when they took me to the city for the first time, to Štip: a girl who grew up in a kind of wilderness dominated by the Armani "species", she was faced with the fact that we are not the only ones in charge. My older sister, who had gone to the city a year earlier, constantly warned me not to speak to her in Cincar, because it is a shame to speak a language that the others around us do not understand and who look at us with contempt, because we are not like them. My parents were reserved and I had to draw my own conclusions, in accordance with the given circumstances. In any case, I learned very quickly myself that communication in public places in the mother tongue is not recommended. And now I think about those mixed feelings of a child entering a new unknown world, quite unprepared.

What happens to the feelings of a child, a young girl later on, who very soon speaks Chinese mixed with Macedonian with her sisters, relatives, and parents? Nothing. It's just that something in the soul crumbles slightly, nothing terrible, new spaces, knowledge, skills for life and survival are conquered. You become a little less different from the environment, and the environment accepts you a little more. Apart from the fact that in school you have to be much, much better than the others in order to be good, at work as well... Because, in small communities, it is still not forgotten that you are a Vlain woman, not a Macedonian woman. You feel a little sorry, you bite harder and move on. Something crumbles in my soul again, but it doesn't hurt like it did at the beginning. That's life. They teach us that adapting to the social environment is very important, and then we learn it ourselves. They say, Cincars are like chameleons, they appear and disappear. But the essence of identity does not go anywhere, it remains in you and marks you, makes you proud, sometimes sad.

...

YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE

By the way, you remember that you don't really know much about your origin, because you didn't learn it in school books, and there was no need to talk about it at home. You are who you are and that's where the story ends. But, no. It doesn't end. At an early age, I heard from my elders how the Cincars lived in the not-so-distant past. My family and many Cincer families were still living a semi-nomadic life until the end of World War II. They were engaged in animal husbandry and trade. Half the year with the herds in the mountains, and half in the villages near the bigger cities. And then came the communist government, which took away the herds and pastures from those families, and turned them into proletarians overnight. This was not discussed in the house either. Just as there was no talk about the places where my distant ancestors stayed, about Pindu, about Gramosta, where I still find people with the same surnames as mine: Kona.

Armani was sometimes mentioned in the house, as a term for the country where the Armanis live. We even had relatives there, who visited us much later. It is, of course, about Romania, which considered them its own, the Romanians. That's why they didn't feel good. That hasn't changed.

As a student, I traveled by train from Skopje to Paris, the famous Orient Express. I got into a compartment where there were already some passengers from Greece. I was stunned when I saw a cross tattooed on the forehead of an elderly passenger, the same as my mother's, aunt's... She spoke in a low voice to a young man my age in a language I understood. Later in the conversation, I found out that they are from Veria and that they are used to speaking their language in a low voice.

I began to discover the analogies of my mother tongue with French already in the fifth grade when I started learning that language. The teacher praised my quick understanding and I felt proud because my mother tongue is a bit like French. I was even prouder in high school in Latin classes, where I encountered whole phrases that, as I thought at the time, were taken from my native Armenian language. Well, at that time my intention to learn as much as possible about the mother tongue, about who we Cincars are, why we are so different from the majority people in the surrounding area, became more and more firm and instead of studying medicine, which I was prepared for at home, I enrolled in the French language, i.e. Romance philology.

Over time, the feeling of discomfort due to belonging to a people that has to hide its identity, to avoid communication in its own language, slowly receded and gave way to a kind of defiance. Why should I be ashamed of my background? To do better in life? No, I'm Cincarka and I won't hide anymore. In the first population censuses in which I participated, I declared myself as Vlainka. The only one in the family! Of course, I was registered as "undecided", because at that time there was still no section for national minorities.

I became more and more vocal and tried different ways to disclose my origin. My mother, who, even after moving to the city, continued to wear the turban costume with her cross on her forehead, tacitly supported me in this. But that youthful determination of mine to emphasize my origin at every opportunity began to wane soon. The generation of Cincars who, like me, were educated at the University of Skopje became unrecognizable, some of them even ran away from their origins in every possible way and became heroes of the young Macedonian nation within the then Yugoslavia. My studies took me to France, to a world where the differences between peoples and races were visible, but not humiliating. At that time, for my generation that was outside of Yugoslavia, it was more important to be a Yugoslav than something that no one recognized.

...

LUNNJINA MEANS LIGHT

In the meantime, I learned from various sources about the history and origins of my people, about Moskopol, about migrations to the West, about the role they played in the creation of the civil society of the newly created states in the Balkans, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And kept silent. On rare occasions, I spoke Cincarski with my parents and older relatives, and with my sisters I spoke almost exclusively in the Macedonian language.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Tinsmith Association "Lunjina" which means "Light" was founded in Belgrade. More than 1000 citizens of Belgrade of Cincar origin gathered at the founding assembly of the Society. At that moment, I had lived in Belgrade for almost twenty years and had not met a single Cincar. And then, all of a sudden, so many of them in one place with the desire to emphasize their origin, to discover their identity, to preserve their language, customs, traditions! Most of them did not know the language. They were people of the third, fourth generation of Cincars in Serbia, and the language disappeared a long time ago or was spoken by a grandmother, a distant aunt... And yet, the need to emphasize one's own origin did not disappear, despite the inexorable assimilation.

People still come to the Society today and are interested in the origins of their ancestors. We also opened a Cincar language course. In our small society, the old original Cincar song is cherished, lectures are organized, independently and in cooperation with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, about various aspects of the Cincar people, their history, language and culture. We are trying to bring to the Serbian cultural public the forgotten story of who the Cincars are, how much they contributed to the affirmation of the people and the country that became their new homeland.

Tincars have been living in Serbia since the end of the 17th century. They are the creators of Serbian civil society. They left a permanent and indelible mark in culture, literature (Nušić, Steria Popović, Borislav Pekić), in politics (Nikola Pašić, Lazar Paču, Naum Krmar, Koča Popović...). The city centers of Belgrade, Zemun, Pančevo, and Novi Sad still preserve the pearls of architecture that are the endowments of the famous Cincars. Among them, the most important building of today's Rectorate of the University of Belgrade, the endowment of Captain Miša Anastasijević, the house of knowledge and science, as well as the house of the Spirta family in Zemun, which today is the Native Museum, is certainly the most important.

But what exactly is identity? And how many layers are there? What am I today? Armana, whose daughter deeply feels her Armenian roots, shows interest in culture, customs and traditions, travels to places of origin, but the language is stuttering. And whose granddaughter only knows a few songs that she shyly remembers about the holidays, although when she was very young, when she went to sleep, she used to tell me noapti riot, and to the grandfather who is not Cincarin - good night.

We try to preserve and pass on to our descendants the qualities attributed to Cincars: alertness, adaptability, cooperation, economy, morality, devotion to religion, loyalty to the state. But those same qualities, more or less, were attractive enough for the environment, which, again, as expected, tried to assimilate us as best as possible. That is why now, for example, Ičko's peace is mentioned, but it is not said that Petar Ičko was Cincarin. Alcibiades Nuša is known as an unsurpassed and always up-to-date comedy writer, but not Cincarin, etc. But that's why, if a member of my people makes a mistake in any way, everyone will immediately point out that he is a Cincarin.

Writers from Cincara gathered in the Cincara PEN Center, which is a full member of the International PEN, regularly publish their literary works in their native language on the portal of the Cincara PEN Center and the Balkan Literary Herald. We always try to include translations in Serbian and English along with the originals. This is how we strive to affirm our cultural creativity, but also the culture of the majority people in the countries where we live.

What remains for the few Cincars in Serbia is to fight for their status within the Serbian state, that is, to regain their status as a national minority with the right to establish a national council, like other national minorities in Serbia. Cincars have so far failed to realize their immanent right for formal reasons, because today, although as many as 327 persons declared themselves as us in the last population census, the Cincar minority gathered around the Serbian-Cincar Society "Lunjina" does not show the capacity to grow into the National Council of Cincars. It is the last hour to do something on that front, to reunite the younger generation that will find a way to fundamentally reform the Society and establish a national council that will continue to nurture the language, culture and traditions of the Cincar people and strengthen cooperation in all fields with national Cincar organizations in countries in the region, but also with other minorities in Europe.