Culture
A remarkable aspect of Vlachs found everywhere along the western Carpathian Mountains is that the traditional Romanian culture remained the same despite the evolution in language, especially the traditions regarding sheepherding and rural architecture, essentially identical along the entire belt of the Carpathian Mountains from Moravia to Romania and then along the adjacent mountains into Serbia and Bulgaria. As with those aspects of language associated with animal husbandry, this cultural aspect of the Vlachs likely did not change because there was no competing culture. Although animal husbandry was long associated with agriculture practiced in the lowlands adjacent to the Western Carpathians, the Vlach methods and associated rituals of sheep and goat tending were unique and newly introduced by them, as were the introduction of grazing in the highlands and the emphasis upon the production of milk and cheese (bryndza). Variants of the traditional Romanian costume are still important elements of the ethnography of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. The music of the area was also influenced by the Vlachs (e.g. see Lachian Dances).
A clear example of the influence of the Vlachs on Slovak culture is the 1755 didactic poem Valašská škola (Wallachian School) of the Franciscan monk Hugolín Gavlovič. It offered a Christian-Catholic moral perspective on the lives and the interaction with God and society. Three themes dominate the poem: Slovak national consciousness, eighteenth century religious and secular culture, and pastoral life as a life model. It is in the third theme that the Wallachian legacy appears, giving the poem particular significance.
Read more about this topic: Moravian Wallachia
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)