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Chopes

Torvlaks

by Ivan Sache

Chopes
Aromanians

See also:

Chopes

From Franciae Vexilla #8/54, January 1998, notes by M. Corbic:

In the middle of the XIXth century, along with the revival of Serbian and Bulgarian, appears the idea of a Balkanic Federation. In Bucharest, the Prime Minister Mihail Kogalniceanu, supported by Prince Ion Cuza, designed in 1863 the flag of Romanian-speaking peoples of Southern Danube, a.k.a. Chopes or Torvlaks.

The flag has five horizontal stripes, red-yellow-blue- yellow-black (R/Y+/B-/Y+/N). Red stands for national freedom and culture gained by the Romanians of the North Danube, yellow for the Danubian plain, light blue for Danube which both separates and unifies the same people, and black for the darkness in which the Valach-Romanians of the South-Danube still live.

The flag was used in 1867 by the South-Danube nationalists, in 1877-1878 by the Chop volunteers during the Ottoman wars, and in 1919 for the revindication of the rights of Romanian-speaking peoples of South-Danube during the Paris conference. Later on, its use was clandestine because of Serbian and Bulgarian repression.

[The definition of the Chop people seems to be difficult and controversial and the article is not very clear. It seems that these people are spread over western Bulgaria and eastern Yugoslavia, and have lost the Moravo-Romanian language spoken by their ancestors, and were not recognized as a nationality by the Yugoslav and Bulgarian regimes. However, more objective data are needed, knowing the virulent anti-communism of Franciae Vexilla.]