Krashovani Erotic

The Krashovani are a small Slavic-speaking people who live in seven villages in the limestone country of southwestern Romania, in the valley of the Caraș river above Reșița. What sets them apart from their neighbors is not language first but church: they are Roman Catholics in a region that is otherwise Romanian Orthodox, and that one fact has organized their history for centuries. Catholic priests, Catholic feast days, Catholic marriage patterns, and a long reluctance to marry outside the seven villages kept a community of a few thousand people intact through Ottoman rule, Habsburg administration, the Hungarian Banat and forty years of Romanian communism. The villages are Carașova, Lupac, Clocotici, Nermed, Rafnic, Vodnic and Iabalcea, strung along a gorge cut through porous rock full of caves and sinkholes, and the group takes its name from Carașova, the largest of them.

Their speech is Torlakian, a transitional South Slavic dialect whose nearest relatives sit far to the south in eastern Serbia and western Bulgaria, and which is comfortably neither Serbian nor Bulgarian. Centuries in the mountains have layered Romanian, Hungarian and German vocabulary over it. That linguistic address is the main evidence in a long argument about where the Krashovani came from: the leading proposals are medieval settlers out of the Timok and Morava valleys, or Catholic refugees moving north from Ottoman Bosnia, with Bosnian Franciscan friars usually credited for keeping them Catholic. Nobody has settled it. The question matters because their national identity has stayed genuinely open. Depending on the decade, census takers, Serbian institutions, Croatian institutions and the Krashovani themselves have counted them as Serbs, as Croats, or as simply Krashovani. Since the 1990s most have declared Croatian ethnicity, and they now make up the bulk of Romania's recognized Croat minority, with Croatian taught in local schools and used in the town halls of Carașova and Lupac. Plenty of people will still give you the older answer first: we are Krashovani, and that is the whole of it. The pressure on the community today is economic rather than political. Work in the Reșița mines and steelworks held the villages together through the twentieth century, and when that industry came apart the young left for Austria, Germany and Croatia. They come back in summer and for the kirvaj, the village patronal feast, when the costumes come out of the wardrobe and most of the diaspora is briefly in one place again.