Rome started colonizing the eastern side of the Adriatic as early as 168 BCE with the advent of the Macedonian Wars. The first colony was at what is now Preveza, Epirus, Greece. The phenomenon began in earnest after 146 BCE with the defeat of the local Greek and Illyrian population which led to Macedonia becoming a Roman province1. Latin speakers from all over the Roman Empire including the Italian Peninsula were brought in, while locals became Latinized through military conscription, voluntary service, trade advantages etc.

There were numerous settlements. Constantine was born at what is now Nis, Serbia, for example, the Romanians have the word Roman in their name because they trace to the same phenomenon, Latin speakers east of the Adriatic, which most assuredly is still true of the country to this day. Many historians have argued much of the region between the Black Sea and the Adriatic was Latinized just as Gaul (France) and Hispania (Spain) had been due to Rome10.

My father was born July 23rd, 1955 in Minneapolis Minnesota. He was given the name Kyle, well before the name would be defined by Monster™ chugging self proclaimed “nice guys”. His older brother by three years had been diagnosed early on as “mentally retarded”, although it’s far more likely Ron as he was called merely had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Their father and mother were both from Scots-Irish and German blended families, although Edgar grew up Methodist and Audrey grew up Roman Catholic. They married New Year’s Eve 1954.

Kyle was tasked with taking care of his older brother constantly, and resented his parents for it. He saw himself as smarter than all three of them, and rightly so. Edgar was a machinist who worked the overnight shift. Audrey spent the formative years of her late childhood without a mother. Her mother Grace died due to complications delivering a baby who would die soon after. It would have been her 12th child. Audrey had only recently turned 16 at the time. She would spend the rest of her life prone to bouts of drinking and consistently smoking.

Her father Guy turned to alcohol himself and fell into a heavy depression. Within a year or so, he had lost his job and subsequently became homeless. His five youngest children were then sent to the local orphanage.

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The five of us, my siblings and I will never be able to outline how we felt arriving at the Siler’s. Such a rush of emotions, embarrassment at your family’s failure, but knowing that it’s not your fault, relief at being away from a monster of a person, yet facing the uncertainty of whether we’d be split up further, if our placement with this foster family would be long term… It hadn’t been great before our father’s debilitating stroke, but it became progressively worse, as our mother sank into depressive episodes and physical outbursts that threatened our very lives. Kyle had been the breadwinner, by a long shot: a computer programmer in the ‘80s and ‘90s, who preferred to work on contract. There is code he wrote still keeping pacemakers functioning, based on work he did for 3M nearly 30 years ago.

Schizophrenia and emotional disregulation run high in people of primarily Scandinavian descent, according to a number of studies. Luckily for Kyle, he was genetically diverse, having no trace to the region. Unfortunately for his wife, she was typical of those who trace to rural central Minnesota. Her grandfather had been born to emigrants from Denmark, and he and his descendants had a fondness for Swedes.

Kyle and Sheryl as she was then known, met at a school function, where his band had played a gig. She was 13 and he was 15. By the time she was 18, they were living together. They married December ‘76.

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Audrey’s first marriage began when she was 18, the youngest a person could marry in the state without parental input. She had three children with Albert before their divorce.

She met Edgar while at a bar with a different man. Apparently they had some chemistry from the get go, because she and Edgar exchanged words and she left for the bathroom, climbed out the window, and met him outside. Ron was born July 15th, 1952.

It was apparent from early on that something was wrong with him. The diagnosis was “mental retardation due to ill formed skullcap”, although Fetal Alcohol Syndrome wouldn’t be recognized for another two decades. Edgar’s genetics were viewed as the main contributor to Ron’s condition.

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Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day either. The simplistic view, indistinguishable from propaganda, is that the Roman Empire fell in 476 CE. The fact is that Constantine transferred the capital to Byzantium in 330 CE, renamed the city Nova Roma, New Rome, and soon after the city became Constantinople, “Constantine’s City”4. Odoacer, an Ostrogoth who traced to what is now Southern Ukraine and Romania, deposed and exiled the 11 year old who was overseeing the city of Rome at the time, and asked the Roman Emperor Zeno for his recognition as the overseer of the region west of the Adriatic, which Zeno granted5. The senate from Rome stayed intact, much if not all of the political regime remained unaltered, and the capital administration of the Empire’s holdings west of the Adriatic continued to shift between Milan and especially Ravenna in addition to Rome as it had been doing for the last 150 years6.

Unfortunately, this spelled the beginning of the end of the administration from Rome, which would subsequently be marked by repeated failure after failure. The colonists east of the Adriatic slowly lost political power, or representation in conjunction with the imperial administration, as the Roman Empire transitioned to the use of Greek over Latin3. Slavic peoples crossed the Danube in the 7th century, and the descendants of Roman colonists took to living in the foothills of mountains, centered around the southern Carpathians of central Europe, and the Northern Pindus and Gramos mountains of Greece, well into Thessaly10. They became known to their neighbors as Wallachs or Vlachs, the latter especially for those further south. The regions become known as Great Wallachia and Great Vlachia, respectively2. Southern Romania is still called Wallachia to this day.

The word Vlach is an exonym that has traditionally been used to describe the Latin-speaking population of what is now Albania, Greece and North Macedonia. This word comes from Proto-Germanic “Walhaz”, and initially meant “stranger, foreigner” and quickly came to be adapted as a term for Roman colonists, and consequently Latin speakers, throughout Europe. The word survives through the Welsh in the British Isles who grew out of the fusion of the Celtic and Latin speaking population after the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain in 410 CE. The Walloons of northeastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands carry the root word as well, and grew out of the same phenomenon, a Latin speaking community after the Roman Empire withdrew from the region. The Welsch of Switzerland (referred to as Romansh in English to distinguish them from the aforementioned group in Britain) carry the same word, and descend from the same phenomenon. The Wallachs of Romania carry the same word, and again descend from the same phenomenon2.

Notable that the Polish word for an Italian to this day is Wloch. The Vlachs, or Armãnji meaning “Roman citizen”, as they still call themselves, are yet another example. This word is rendered as Aromanian in English. In official Greek political discourse, when they are acknowledged at all, they are referred to using a term best translated as “Latin-Greeks”2.

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Sorin passed his medical exams in Minneapolis in October 1953, and was granted his license a few weeks later, allowing him to practice in the United States. It had been a whirlwind of a couple years for him. He had emigrated from Italy in May 1951, where he had studied for the last decade, receiving his bachelors degree and then later obtaining his doctorate from the University of Bologna, which happens to be the oldest continuously operating university in the world. By the time he left, he’d learned to speak 7 languages. He’d gotten married in September ‘52, had a child July ‘53, and was divorced not long after. He was absolutely out of his element in Minneapolis, nothing like Italy or Romania, where he had spent the majority of his adult life, and where he had been born, respectively.

Nobody knows if he is the doctor who told Audrey and Edgar that their son Ron was “mentally retarded”, and that due to Ron’s genetics. What is known is that Audrey didn’t have another child with Edgar. She and Sorin had an affair in the fall of 1954, and she conceived a son, Kyle, which she subsequently passed off as Edgar’s child.

Sorin’s grandfather had been born in Romania to emigrants from Greece.

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It is not until 731 CE, that the connection with Rome was finally severed for the Latin speaking population in what is now Albania, Greece and North Macedonia. It was at this time that the Patriarchate of Constantinople (forebears of what is now the Orthodox church) took over the religious representation and servicing of the region from the Patriarchate of Rome (forebears of what is now the Catholic church)8. Here a new identity begins to emerge, as the church and its services, which amounted to the main form of political and state representation back then, were in Greek. This split was over the use of images and statues of important church figures, which the Patriarchate of Constantinople was against, while the Roman Papacy maintained what was deemed by the former as “idol worship”. This is known as the Iconoclastic Controversy.

By the time the Greek Revolution breaks out, the Latin-Greeks had been in the Orthodox church for over a thousand years, their language had absorbed many Greek loanwords, and many of their names (especially in conjunction with recognition in the church) were Greek, as the status of “Christian” and “Greek Orthodox” were synonymous in the region, while those who were interacting with the neighboring populations as merchants and soldiers were typically at least bilingual, Greek being the prestige language in the region, and so it became the norm to see yourself as a Greek, at least from a political sense. After Greek independence, which many Latin-Greeks had been dear supporters of, the official government policy was hellenization, at times encompassing the banning of teaching of the Aromanian language, banning of independent schools, forced naming conventions etc10.

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It was not until I was in 7th grade that I’d taken a math class. Luckily, much earlier, my older sisters especially would read to me, and fostered an interest in the activity. The eldest taught me the basic alphabet, and did her best to relate some basic math concepts, addition and subtraction, and a touch of multiplication and division. It was after my father’s stroke in the fall of 2001, a little less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, that my reading comprehension started to take off. This was due to sitting around in the waiting rooms of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota, being sick of the tower footage and military push on the televisions, and instead picking up whatever was around. I put together puzzles with my siblings, played chess with a number of elderly people, some of whom would also read to me, and try and get me to read to them, which was slow going, but this was especially helpful because they were so patient while I tried to sound out the words.

Before I could read, about all I could do is stare at the pictures, and no book captured my attention more than a 1947 Illustrated Junior Library copy of Aesop’s Fables, artwork by Fritz Kredel, deceptively simple representations of foxes, rabbits, ravens, donkeys, lions, people and on and on. The topography was inspired by Northern Greece, and I became enthralled by the wit and humor of the stories, and the circular themes, often deadpan delivery, the self-referential and simple nature of storytelling for the sake of storytelling itself. The contradictions, again, delivered knowingly, throughout the “wisdom”.

My father’s favorite story growing up was the Argonautica, or Jason and the Argonauts, or the Quest for the Golden Fleece. I’m not sure where this interest began, but it was certainly very early, and was not assigned as part of some curriculum in school. There is a classic film, Jason and the Argonauts, known for the special effects quality ahead of its time, that came out in 1963, when he was 8 years old. There is most certainly some connection here, according to people he grew up with, he certainly saw the film. At any rate, this fascination endured well into adulthood, as even though he and his wife agreed all their male children would be given biblical names, he snuck in the name Jason for his first born son, admitting it was his favorite character from his favorite story. The name Jason has only two passing mentions in Scripture. Both refer to the same Christian living in Thessaloniki, the city for which the book of Thessalonians is named.

Christianity is a product of Greece. Christianity’s origins cannot be removed from the place. The religion can be summarized as a fusion of Judaic mythology with Hellenic philosophy that sandwich the story of a young woman traumatized by an unexpected pregnancy. The first Christian emperor, and the man who legalized Christianity, Constantine, was born to a Latinized Illyrian father and a Greek mother. The New Testament was written in Greek. Most people who identified as Jewish at the time spoke Greek as their first language. The synthesis was inevitable. Most of the mentions of locations in the New Testament are in Greece. Most of the books are addressed to churches in Greece (what was considered Greece at the time, which included the western half of what is now Turkey).