The Vlachs (; ) are a recognized ethnic minority in Serbia. According to data from the 2022 census, there were 21,013 Vlachs living in Serbia (constituting 0.3% of the total population), although unofficial estimates by members of the community range from 150,000 to 300,000. They are concentrated primarily in the Timok Valley, and speak an archaic variety of the Romanian language alongside the official Serbian.
The Vlachs are characterized by a culture that has preserved ancient elements in matters such as language or customs. Although ethnographically and linguistically related to the Romanians, within the Vlach community there are divergences on whether or not they belong to the Romanian ethnicity and whether or not their minority should be amalgamated with the Romanian ethnic minority in Serbia."The situation of national minorities in Vojvodina and of the Romanian ethnic minority in Serbia" , at the Council of Europe, 14 February 2008
History "Vlach" is a word of Germanic origin, originally used by the Germanic tribes to refer to the Romans. It would later be adopted by the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire and virtually all Slavs to refer to the Romance languages-speakers in the Balkans that remained following the various migrations into the area. These peoples never referred to themselves as "Vlachs", but as some variant of "Roman". Today there are several peoples that are still commonly referred to as Vlachs, these including the Vlachs of eastern Serbia.
There are hypotheses about an autochthonous origin of the Vlachs in the area in which they currently live. Such an idea was supported by Vlach schoolteacher, minority rights activist and Romanian irredentist Atanasie Popovici. However, most researchers agree that the Vlachs of eastern Serbia originate from areas in present-day Romania and settled in land in which they live today as a result of migrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. These migrations occurred due to the difficult living conditions in Hungary, Moldavia, and Wallachia. Strong migrations were recorded between 1718 and 1739 after the Austro-Turkish War of 1716–1718; during this time, eastern Serbia was part of the Banat of Temeswar. Migrations to eastern Serbia continued after this period, albeit on a smaller scale. More precisely, migrations were recorded in the periods of 1723–1725, 1733–1734, 1818 and 1834. These were directed to the settlements of Jošanica, Krepoljin, Laznica (), Osanica (), Ribare, Suvi Do, Vukovac, Žagubica ( or ). These migrations increased the number of houses in the area around the Homolje Mountains (; or ) from 80 in 1718 to 155 in 1733. Furthermore, the two latter waves led to the foundation of the settlements of Bliznak, Breznica, Izvarica, Jasikovo, Krupaja, Milanovac, and Sige. According to the place of origin of these new migrants, the Vlachs of eastern Serbia were divided into (originating from the Kingdom of Hungary, or more precisely, from Banat and Transylvania proper) and (originating from Moldavia and Wallachia). The Vlachs are still divided into these two groups according to the Romanian dialect they speak; the have a speech closely related to the Banat Romanian dialect while the dialect of the is closer to the Wallachian one. Dialectally, there are two other groups of Vlachs, the and the , but these are largely assimilated into the former two.
Before the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, the Vlachs in eastern Serbia were officially known as "Romanians". On the other hand, the country of Wallachia (the name of which was derived from "Vlach"), was known in Serbian as "Vlaška". Furthermore, in ethnographic studies of the 19th or early 20th century, the Vlachs of eastern Serbia were regarded as Romanians in an undisputed way. However, after 1859 and the formation of the first modern Romanian state, this practice was reversed, with the name of "Vlach" being imposed over on the community of eastern Serbia to break similarities with the Romanians; this was intensified after the creation of Yugoslavia.
The alleged 'assimilative power' of the Vlachs in eastern Serbia, as well as their resistance to assimilation, was also written about by Tihomir Đorđević at the beginning of the 20th century. He attributed to the Vlachs an 'inherent hatred toward other ethnicities, including Serbs.' As for other ethnicities, their existence was not denied as such, but they were deprived of minority rights. This applied primarily to the Vlachs of northeastern Serbia and to the small number of Aromanians in Macedonia. Regarding the Vlachs in Serbia, the prevailing opinion was still that they were not only resistant to assimilation, but that they were also assimilating the surrounding Serbs, thereby expanding the reach of their own ethnic group. For political reasons, they were denied a Romanian ethnic consciousness.
Between 1945 and 1949, the People's Front of Yugoslavia's Zaječar () branch published as its official organ Vorba noastră ("Our Word"), the first publication in the Vlachs' local Romanian variant, written by Vlachs for their own community. Written in Cyrillic, Vorba noastră had 40 issues of it published. According to an article by Ivan Miladinović for Večernje novosti, at the end of 1946, Yugoslav Partisans leader Josip Broz Tito presented a proposal to allow Romania to annex the Vlach-populated areas in eastern Serbia since "Romanian comrades, Gheorghiu-Dej and Ana Pauker, think it is their people and their territory"; Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Serbia, Blagoje Nešković, would have expressed strong opposition to this proposal.
Historical references On the Balkan Peninsula, within medieval feudal states, the assimilation of the older pre-Slavic population—Illyrian in the west, Daco-Thracian romanized population in the east—took place. Over time, under the socio-economic conditions of that era, these people evolved from ethnic Vlachs into a distinct social class of Slavic livestock herders known as vlachs, settled in permanent, predominantly mountainous communities. Given the uneven socio-economic conditions across different parts of the Balkans—a feature particularly characteristic of both Serbian and later Ottoman feudalism—this process was neither uniform everywhere nor was it completed everywhere. In the northern regions of Serbia, where Serbian feudalism never established state-building centers capable of shaping overall cultural development, this process continued into the era of Ottoman feudalism. Because autonomous territories with local self-governance under direct sultanic authority existed within this system, these autonomous regions held special importance for the still primitive Vlach population, whom the Ottoman authorities encountered along their assimilative ethnic boundary. Serving the sultan, this population carried specific duties (such as martoloses and soldiers) alongside considerable rights. Beyond historical records, a vibrant oral tradition regarding the status of this population in eastern Serbia persists to this day.
Given that the region of Eastern Serbia lies near the so-called northern Balkan ethnic Romance core, the process of complete Vlach ethnic integration with the Serbian population was slowed down by the subsequent immigration of fresh Romance-speaking populations (Ungureani, Țărani) from the north during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and possibly from the south, particularly during the first decades of Ottoman rule. Furthermore, this area is geographically and culturally tied to the Carpathian region, a key defining characteristic of which is a population that, by genesis, partly originates from a very early Thracian-Dacian-Slavic symbiosis. In that area, the Danube was no barrier to migration for the entire Carpathian population, as evidenced by recent Serbian archival data. Consequently, since Eastern Serbia forms an integral part of this broader geographical and cultural area, its present-day Vlach population—along with a portion of the Serbian population (the native inhabitants)—would essentially be indigenous in the broadest sense of the word. The only difference is that through migrations both within the area as a whole and into its narrower sub-regions, they settled across various historical periods. Thus, the Vlach settlement in Eastern Serbia represents an internal population movement within the wider Carpathian-Balkan region, driven by historical circumstances.
As early as the 1920s, the Dutch Slavist van Nikolaas van Wijk proposed a theory suggesting that, during the Early Middle Ages, Serbs were separated from Bulgarians by a belt inhabited by a Vlach population. It was only later – after these Romanians partially migrated to other regions and partially succumbed to assimilation – that the western and eastern branches of the South Slavs came into direct contact. This perspective harmonizes with the findings of linguistic geography which (long after van Wijk) established a very strong concentration of isoglosses along the demarcation line between the two large blocks of the South Slavic ethnic group. From the mouth of the Timok River, across the eastern foothills of the mountains along the Serbian-Bulgarian border to Osogovo, and further to Ovče Polje and south of Tetovo, there exists a bundle of isoglosses that must be at least a thousand years old. In addition to linguistic evidence, anthropological and archaeological research also shows that during their settlement, the Slavs found southwestern Serbia almost completely deserted, while significant groups of the indigenous population (Romanoi/Romans) survived in the north and east of the country. The process of Slavicization and population mixing was not instantaneous; although the Slavs permanently settled in the 7th century, intensive anthropological mixing with the locals only began at the end of the 11th century. Over time, the indigenous population either migrated toward the territory of present-day Romania or was assimilated through the expansion of the medieval Serbian state's borders.
The aforementioned Romance belt, previously a part of Moesia, became part of the Morava region in the 9th century, while in the 11th century, it was part of the Byzantine Theme of Bulgaria.
The codex of the Mount Athos St. Panteleimon Monastery states, among other things, the following: "Those who lived around the Danube – Bulgarians, Moravians (Serbs and Vlachs), and the Slavs of Illyria – were finally enlightened by holy baptism during the 9th century [the year 864] during the reign of Autokrator Michael and the glorious Patriarch Photios." In 1020, Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer established a separate bishopric for the Vlachs with its seat in Vranje, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Ohrid. Specifically, the chrysobull reads, among other things: "Likewise, all towns that were omitted by the charter of my majesty shall nevertheless be subjected to the authority of the same most holy archbishop, who shall collect taxes from everyone, including the Vlachs living scattered throughout the whole of Bulgaria." In his Strategikon, written around 1078, Kekaumenos says regarding the origin of the Vlachs (Aromanians): "For these are those who are called Dacians and Bessi. Formerly they lived near the Danube and the Saos River, which we now call the Sava River... Having departed from there, they [the Vlachs] were scattered throughout all of Epirus and Macedonia, while most of them settled in Greece. The Vlachs in the Danubian region are mentioned by Anna Komnene in The Alexiad when the Cumans crossed the Danube around 1094. In 1154, the Arabic geographer Al-Idrisi referred to the entire region from the Morava River to the Osam River – which encompasses Pomoravlje and part of western Bulgaria – as Getulia, meaning the land of the Getaj or Nomads, as the Sicilian merchants called them. The inhabitants were Slavs and Vlachs.