page_title: Nicolae Constantin Batzaria
section_title: Early life and activities
hierarchical_section_title: Nicolae Constantin Batzaria / Biography / Early life and activities
caption_attribution_description: Български: Румънски училища в Македония през 1899 година. Deutsch: Rumänische Schulen für Aromunen und Meglenorumänen im Osmanischen Reich (1886). Rumänische Schulen für Aromunen und Meglenorumänen im Osmanischen Reich (1886) als Beispiel für die Durchdringung Makedoniens durch Schulen der Nachbarländer. English: Map showing areas with Romanian schools for Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians in the European side of the Ottoman Empire (1886). Esperanto: Rumanaj lernejoj por arumano-anoj kaj meglenorumano-anoj en la Otomana Imperio (1886). Français&#160;: Carte de 1886 montrant les zones où fonctionnaient des écoles roumaines pour les aroumaines dans l'Empire ottoman. Română: Şcoli româneşti în Imperiul Otoman (1886). Русский: Школы для арумын и мегленорумын в Османской империи (1886). Türkçe: Osmanlı İmparatorluğundaki Aroman ve Megleno-romanlar (1886).
context_page_description: Nicolae Constantin Batzaria, was a Macedonian-born Aromanian cultural activist, Ottoman statesman and Romanian writer. A schoolteacher and inspector of Aromanian education within Ottoman lands, he established his reputation as a journalist before 1908. During his thirties, he joined the clandestine revolutionary movement known as the Young Turks, serving as its liaison with Aromanian factions. The victorious Young Turk Revolution brought Batzaria to the forefront of Ottoman politics, ensuring him a seat in the Ottoman Senate, and he briefly served as Minister of Public Works under the Three Pashas. He was tasked with several diplomatic missions, including attending the London Conference of 1913, but, alerted by the Three Pashas' World War I alliances and the Young Turks' nationalism, he soon after quit the Ottoman political scene and left into voluntary exile.
  Batzaria eventually settled in Romania and became a prolific contributor to Romanian letters, producing works of genre fiction and children's literature. Together with comic strip artist Marin Iorda, he created Haplea, one of the most popular characters in early Romanian comics.
context_section_description: Batzaria was a native of Kruševo (Crushuva), a village in Ottoman-ruled Monastir region, presently in North Macedonia. His Aromanian family had numerous branches outside that region: migrant members had settled in the Kingdom of Romania, in Anatolia, and in the Khedivate of Egypt. Nicolae grew up in Kruševo, where he studied under renowned Aromanian teacher Sterie Cosmescu. He later attended a high school sponsored by the Kingdom of Romania in Bitola, and later the Faculties of Letters and Law at the University of Bucharest. The young man became a dedicated disciple of Romanian nationalist theorist Nicolae Iorga, who was inaugurating his lectures in History during Batzaria's first year there. He notably shared Iorga's belief, consolidated with time, that the Aromanians were not an isolated Balkan ethnicity, but part of larger Romanian ethnic community. As he himself explained, "the Romanian people [is] a unitary and indivisible body, regardless of the region wherein historical circumstances have settled it", and the "Macedonian Romanians" constituted "the most aloof branch of the Romanian trunk".
  Lacking funds for his tuition, Batzaria never graduated. Instead, he earned his recognition as a journalist, educator and analyst. A polyglot, he could speak Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and French, in addition to his native Aromanian and the related Romanian language. Literary critic and memoirist Barbu Cioculescu, who befriended Batzaria as a child, recalls that the Aromanian journalist "spoke all Balkan languages", and "perfect Romanian" with a "brittle" accent.
  While in Romania, Batzaria also began his collaboration with Romanian journals: Adevărul, Dimineața, Flacăra, Arhiva, Ovidiu and Gândul Nostru. Also notable is his work with magazines published by the Aromanian diaspora. These publications depicted the Aromanians as a subgroup of the Romanian people. They include Peninsula Balcanică ("The Balkan Peninsula", the self-styled "Organ for the Romanian interests in the Orient"), Macedonia and Frățilia ("Brotherhood"). The latter, published from both Bitola and Bucharest, and then from the Macedonian metropolis of Thessaloniki, had Nicolae Papahagi and Nushi Tulliu on its editorial board. Batzaria made his editorial debut with a volume of anecdotes, Părăvulii (printed in Bucharest in 1901).
  Batzaria returned to Macedonia as a schoolteacher, educating children at the Ioannina school, and subsequently at his alma mater in Bitola. In 1899, he and his colleagues notably persuaded Take Ionescu, the Romanian Education Minister, to allocate some 724,000 lei as a grant to Macedonian schools, and virulently protested when later governments halved this annual income. He afterward became chief inspector of the Romanian educational institutions in the Ottoman provinces of Kosovo and Salonika. Historian Gheorghe Zbuchea, who researched the self-identification of Aromanians as a Romanian subgroup, sees Batzaria as "the most important representative of the national Romanian movement" among early 20th century Ottoman residents, and "without doubt one of the most complex personalities illustrating the history of trans-Danubian Romanianism". Batzaria's debut in Macedonian cultural debates came at a turning point: through her political representatives, Romania was reexamining the scope of her involvement in the Macedonian question, and asserting that it held no ambition to annex Aromanian land.
  From Macedonia, Nicolae Batzaria became a correspondent of Neamul Românesc, a brochure and later magazine published in Romania by his mentor Nicolae Iorga. At that stage, Batzaria, with Tulliu, Nicolae Papahagi and Pericle Papahagi, founded the Association of Educationists in Service to the Romanian People of Turkey (that is, the Aromanians), a union of professionals based in Bitola. They were on mission to Romania, where their demand for more funding sparked lively debates among Romanian politicians, but Education Minister Spiru Haret eventually signed off a special Macedonian fund, worth 600,000 lei (later increased to over 1 million). The group
caption: Map showing the distribution of Romanian-sponsored school in the Balkans, 1899. Regions with 20 or more such institutions are colored in dark green, and concentrated around Monastir region
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