Romania; Red Croatia;

Today the name of Montenegro is Crna Gora (Black Mountain). However, historical evidence shows that the old name of Crna Gora was Crmna Gora, that is Red Mountain, derived from the name of Red Croatia. During the Hunnic invasion in 375 AD, a group calling themselves the White Croats (as opposed to the Red Croats, who remained on the Don) retreated northwest over the Carpathians. There the White Croats intermingled with the Slavs of the central Slavic regions and adopted their language. Even today the descendants of the White Croats live in Bohemia (Münster).

The origins of the Croatian name are Iranian. The earliest mention of the Croatian name as Horovathos can be traced on two stone inscriptions in Greek language and script, dating from around the yeare 200, found by the Black Sea (more precisely in the seaport Tanais on the Azov sea, Krim). Both tablets are held in the Archeological museum in St Petersburg, Russia. One of the confluents to Don river near the region of Azov is called Horvatos. The Croatian name can be traced to different sites in Ukraine, also around Krakow in Poland, in Bohemia, and Austria, thus showing migrations of the Croatian tribes to their future homeland. In the Bavarian geographon (written in 666-890) there is a description of various tribes in the north of Karpatian and and Sudetian mountains, where the Croats are also mentioned.

The Slavic tribes called the Croats and the Serbs are recorded to have migrated from the Balkans of classical antiquity, southwards from areas of today's southeastern Poland into the Dinaric Alps between 610 and 641. The names Croat and Serb are not of Slavic origin; origins of the Croatian name are Iranian. Similar names have been found along the path of the migration of the Alans, a tribe of Iranian origin. According to various modern theories based mainly on philological and etymological evidence, these nomadic warriors probably subdued groups of Slavs and became their ruling caste or merged into them, with the resulting group retaining the Iranian name.

The Dinarides are a mountain chain in southern Europe, spanning areas of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro and Albania. Along the coast of the Adriatic Sea (northwest-southeast), from the Julian Alps in the northwest down to the Šar-Korab massive, where the mountain direction changes to north-south. The highest mountain of the Dinaric Alps is the Prokletije, located on the border of eastern Montenegro and northern Albania, with the peak called "Lake Crest." The Dinaric Alps comprise the most rugged and extensively mountainous area of Europe outside of the Swiss Alps. Many people prefer the term Southeastern Europe instead of Balkans, while the most commonly used Danube-Sava-Kupa northern boundary is arbitrarily set as to the physiographical characteristics; the Danube-Sava-Krka-Postojnska Vrata-Vipava-Isonzo line ignores some historical and cultural characteristics; it assigns all the Karstic and Dinaric area to the Balkan region.

During the Middle Ages, lingua franca was Greek in the East (the Byzantine Empire) and Latin throughout Europe. The Roma arrived in Europe and afterwards spread to the other continents. The great distances between the scattered Romani groups led to the development of local community distinctions. The arrival of the Croats to the Balkan peninsula at the beginning of the 7th century, the period of Croatian Dukes and Kings of native birth (until 1102). Croatia sharing with Hungary a new state under common Hungarian and Croatian Kings (1102-1526), Croatia ruled by the Habsburgs, as a member of the Habsburg Crown (1527-1918, Austrian-Hungarian Empire from 1867 to 1918), parts of Croatia under Venice, Turkish Ottoman Empire and France.

By the late 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Bulgaria extended to Epirus and Thessaly in the south, Bosnia in the west and controlled the whole of present-day Romania and eastern Hungary to the north. A Serbian state came into existence as a dependency of the Bulgarian Empire. The Arabs began to attack the Croatian coast in the 9th century. A Croat from Dalmatia, known under the Islamic name Djawhar ben Abd Allah (911-992), was taken as a slave to the court of caliph Al-Khaim in Tunisia. Later he made a great career becoming the supreme general. He conquered the land of pharaohs, thus extending the Empire of Fatimids from the shores of the Atlantic to the river Nile. He founded the new Egyptian capital Al-Qahira (Cairo), the future second largest Islamic city after Baghdad. In 970 he built up the mosque named Al-Azhar (the Brightest).

Bohemia

Constantine Porphyrogenitus (905-959), a Byzantine emperor and writer, mentions the state bearing the name of White Croatia. His description shows that it occupied a wide region around its capital Krakow, in parts of Bohemia, Slovakia, and Poland. The state disappeared in 999. St. Adalbert (Vojtech, 10th century) was a descendant of the White Croats, son of the White-Croatian duke Slavnik. He was spreading Christianity, education and culture, and to this end founded the Benedictine monastery in Brevnov in 993. Also St. Ivan Hrvat, who died in Tetin in Bohemia in 910, was a son of White-Croatian King Gostumil. It is interesting to add that according to some American documents from the beginning of this century there were about 100,000 immigrants to the USA born around Krakow (Poland) who declared themselves to be Bielo-Chorvats, i.e. White Croats by nationality.

When most people think of Bohemia in the Czech Republic, Pilsen (Plzeñ in the local language), the fourth largest city in the Czech Republic, has long been the recognized cultural centre for the entire Bohemia. The district of Pilsen has impressed many visitors to this part with its beautiful countryside, deep forests, rivers, lakes and wealth of cultural monuments.

The Roma migration began shortly before 1000 A.D., when the Roma make their first appearance in recorded history in the Shahnameh, or Persian Book of Kings. It is known that the period of time around 1000 AD was one of great turmoil in the northern part of the Indian Subcontinent (Laurasia). Between the years 1001 and 1026, the Muslim Afghans and Turks known as Ghaznavids made seventeen invasions in the Punjab and Sindh areas, fighting against the local Hindus. The Rajputs played a major role in the resistance. The Romani language sustains the claimed Rajputic ancestry: most of the words related to war are of Indo-Aryan ancestry. A polyglot is a language that is a combination of other languages, for Persian was official and there were many Persian loanwords in Romani from no earlier than the division of the Indian Subcontinent or Laurasia. It cannot be linked to a certain area, but it includes words from all across the northern Subcontinent. The Seljuks (who defeated the Ghaznavids in 1038), also defeated Armenia in 1071 and conquered eastern Anatolia related to subsequent movement of populations from Central Asia to eastern Anatolia. The original status of Romani as a lingua franca is supported by the vocabulary of Indo-Aryan origin.

In the Romani language, Rom (man) derives from the Sanskrit dom (man). The Indo-Aryan Romani language should not be confused with either Romanian (spoken by Romanians), or Romansh (spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland), both of which are Romance languages. Romani (or Romany) is the language of the Roma and Sinti, peoples often referred to in English as "Gypsies". The Romani language is usually included in the Central Zone languages together with Western Hindi, Bhili, Gujarati, Khandeshi, Rajasthani etc. Analysis of Romani vocabulary indicates that the Romas' ancestors were not originally nomadic. A long-standing common categorisation was a division between the Vlax (from Celtic Vlach) from non-Vlax dialects. Vlax are those Roma who lived many centuries in the territory of Romania. Many Roma no longer speak the language or speak various new contact languages from the local language with the addition of Romani vocabulary. Romani, Punjabi, and Pothohari share some identical words and similar grammatical systems.

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