Moscopole
Moscopole or Voskopoja is a village in Korçë County in southeastern Albania. During the 18th century, it was the cultural and commercial center of the Aromanians. At its peak, in the mid 18th century, it hosted the first printing house in the Ottoman Balkans outside Constantinople, educational institutions and numerous churches. It became a leading center of Greek culture but also with elements of Albanian and Aromanian culture, all with great influence from Western civilization.
One view attributes the decline of the city to a series of raids by Muslim Albanian bandits. Moscopole was initially attacked and almost destroyed by those bandit groups in 1769 following the participation of the residents in the preparations for a Greek revolt supported by the Russian Empire. Its decline culminated with the destruction of 1788 and the flight of its population. Moscopole, once a prosperous city, was reduced to a small village by Ali Pasha of Ioannina. According to another view, the city's decline was mainly due to the relocation of the trade routes in central and eastern Europe following these raids. The decline pushed parts of the population to leave, making Moscopole the original homeland of much of the Aromanian diaspora.
Today Moscopole, known as Voskopojë, is a small mountain village, and along with a few other local settlements is considered a holy place by local Orthodox Christians. Aromanians no longer form a majority of the population, with incoming Christian and Muslim Albanians having further settled in the village, especially after World War II. Still, Moscopole has held a key place within Aromanian nationalism, and many Aromanian writers have written about Moscopole in a mythical and utopian way, mourning the city's destruction, an event which gave rise to comparisons between Moscopole and Jerusalem and potrayals such as a "New Jerusalem", "New Athens" or "Arcadia of the Balkans". Greek historians have claimed the city's population as Greek, while Romanian historians have claimed it as Romanian. However, ethnic affiliations at the time were fluid; when the refugees from Moscopole moved to Austria in 1769, they declared themselves to be Macedonians, which was a geographic identity rather than an ethnic one.
Name
Variations
The town is known as Voskopojë in Albanian. The Aromanian name of the town varies between Moscopole, Moscopoli, Muscopuli, Voscopole, Voscopoli and Voshopole. The Greek name of the town varies between Μοσχόπολις and its vernacular equivalent form Μοσχόπολη. The Βοσκόπολη/Βοσκόπολις variant is also used in various occasions in Greek. The town is called İskopol or Oskopol in Turkish and Москополе in Bulgarian. It is known as Moscopole or Voscopole in Romanian.The forms Voskopolis/''Voskopoja derive from the Greek word Vosko which refers to one of the main professions performed by the Aromanian people. Also the suffix poja/polis from the syntagm can be either linked to the Greek word polis or the Slavic polje'', i.e. plain. Peyfuss strongly supports the latter interpretation, reasoning that this definition fits the configuration of the high plateau type terrain. According to Xhufi, it would be difficult to designate as a “plain” an isolated habitat at an altitude of 1,220 meters above sea level, preferring a link to the Greek word polis.
Use in historical records
The city appears under the Albanian rendering Voskopoja in Ottoman documents from the 16th-17th centuries. In Venetian and French commercial documents, both the forms Voscopolis and Moschopolis, the latter rendering being associated with the Aromanian-speaking population, appear to be used interchangeably. In the edicts of the Patriarch of Ohrid, the city appears under the form Moschopolis. The 18th century, author Meletios Mitros uses the form Voskopolis in his work Geography. In the Codex of the Monastery of St. John the Baptist, the Aromanian rendering Moschopolis is commonly found. This is possibly due to the scribe of the Codex, Michel the former bishop of Gorë, being a native of the neighboring village of Shipskë, itself inhabited historically by an Aromanian population. However, when it comes to archival documents transcribed into the Codex, such as decisions of the Synod of the Patriarchate of Ohrid or even of the meetings of the clergy of Moscopole, Michel seems to have preferred the form Voskopoja. This is also the case regarding the events of the years 1660–1687, in which in the agreements concluded between the monks of the monasteries, the notables and the archons of the three districts of the city, the name of the city is given in the form Voskopoja.Thus, the use of the forms Voskopoja/Moschopolis is not a certain conclusion of ethnic and social belonging, as even in the part of the Codex written by the hand of the Aromanian Michel, we nevertheless find cases where he also uses the form Voskopoja. What can be said with certainty is that both forms experienced cases of interchangeable usage, which is a strong indication of a long cohabitation and a close integration of the two communities. This may indicate that, at the time, except for the religious hierarchy and the documentation it produced, the name "Voskopoja" was very common among the lay population, and even among the lower clergy. Furthermore, Albanian surnames such as Ngushta, Vrusho and Krunde are found among the signatories of the agreement mentioned above, which represented the three districts of the city, perhaps the districts inhabited mainly by Albanians.
Geography
Modern Moscopole is located 21 km from Korçë, in the mountains of southeastern Albania, at an altitude of 1160 meters, and is a subdivision of Korçë municipality; its population in 2011 was 1,058. The municipality of Moscopole consists of the villages of Moscopole, Shipskë, Krushovë, Gjonomadh and Lavdar. In 2005, the municipality had a population of 2,218, whereas the settlement itself has a population of around 500.History
Beginnings
identified Moscopole with the citadel of Museion, one of the 46 fortresses that, according to Procopius of Caesarea, Emperor Justinian I had built in the province of Macedonia to defend against barbarian attacks. However, to this day, there is no trace of ancient construction in this place, albeit the area has not been excavated, not even in archaeological surveys. But, in the absence of the latter, it can be said that Moscopole was an inner trade node which, at least since the Byzantine period, linked the Korça basin to Berat, Vlora and Durrës. It would therefore be difficult to think that Justinian I would not have undertaken military fortifications in the area, which formed a corridor that in the future would be one of the most important passageways through which the migrating Slavic populations coming from Macedonia and moving towards the West entered.The existence of Moscopole should not have escaped the chronicler Gjon Muzaka. Having left Albania in 1478, he describes in detail all the surrounding villages, including Voskop which, at the time of his writing in 1510, was according to him abandoned "una terra che si chiama Vescop, la quale è distrutta". In the case of Voskop mentioned by Muzaka it is probably the modern village with the name, located at the foot of the heights that lead to Moscopole. Muzaka seems to link Voskop to a still flat land when he asserts that Voskop was part of what he calls "paese di Devoli maggiore", therefore the Greater Devoll region. However, in another passage of his chronicle, Muzaka mentions Voskop again, but this time adding to it the name Beci, a village in the Opar zone proper "Voscopebeci". In the latter case, not only the unification with Beci of the heights of Opar, but also the fact of having included it in the same context with other known villages of this area, such as Dushkar, Lavdar, Marian and Opar, suggest that it may be Moscopole and not Voskop. This may represent a typical case of the existence of two nearby settlements bearing the same name, something also observable in nearby Moscopole: Upper Goskova and Lower Goskova, located to the east of the settlement. This theory is further supported by the fact that Muzaka distinguishes several times between agglomerations and individual settlements, sometimes doing this for settlements which in later periods came to form one settlement, such as the case of Drago and Stagna, modern Dragostunjë.
At the current state of knowledge, an ancient existence of Moscopole can only be assumed. As for its appearance in the pre-Ottoman Middle Ages, an affirmation of Johann Georg von Hahn, in which he recounts having read a codex of Moscopole in 1843, during his tenure as consul of Austria-Hungary. In it, he describes having read that the city was founded in 1338 by the head of the Muzaka family. It is unclear as to what codex Hahn is referring to. The Codex of the monastery of Saint-Prodrome in Moscopole, does affirm in its introductory part that the monastery in question was built in 1630, "two hundred and fifty or three hundred years after the foundation of the town of Moscopole itself", indicating that the latter must have been founded around the year 1330. However, this codex does not link the founding of Moscopole to the Muzaka family, as asserted by Hahn, who has probably consulted another unknown and possibly lost codex. Moreover, the fact is that the Codex of Saint-Prodrome, published by Ioakeim Martianos in 1939, makes several mentions of another older codex which he calls "the old codex" or “the great codex”, on the indications of which relied the monk Michel, who wrote in 1779 the second, newer codex known today. Subject to any reservations as to the possibility of an ancient or paleo-Byzantine substratum of the site, it is likely that Moscopole has existed, at least since the 14th century, in its initial function of pastoral agglomeration.
Moscopole continued to retain the appearance of a typically pastoral settlement even when it began to be covered by Ottoman documentation. The register for the year 1568/9 indicates that agricultural activity had already begun alongside that of stockbreeding. However, the Sigils of Berat retain two firmans of Sultan Ibrahim, of the year 1647, where the latter ordered the local authorities of Vlora not to impose arbitrary taxes and obligations on "the rayah of Moscopole" who were, according to him, "nomadic shepherds" and who "since their elders, each year, arrived with their sheep to the winter pastures of the sanjak of Vlora”.