Rreth emrave të fshatrave të Dropullit e të Vurgut dhe të banorëve të tyre gjatë shekujve
About the villages names of the Dropull and Vurgos valleys and of their inhabitants in the course of centuries

Summary/Abstract: For the place-name of the Dropull valley, which is at present inhabited mainly by a Greek-speaking population partitioned in thirty-three rather small villages, three etymologies have been suggested so far: 1. Dropull < Drin\-polis [“[river] Drino-town”; 2. Dropull < Hadrianou-polis “([Emperor] Hadrianus’s town”; 3. Drvinos-polis “oaken-town”. The first etymology has been sustained by Çabej, who assumes the following evolution: *Drinopull, *Drnopull, *Drropull. The second etymology, which is historically more sustainable, has been supported by such scholars as Hammond, Cabanes etc. According to Hammond, “The name Dhropull has been taken over from the Byzantine name of the Christian bishopric of Druinopolis, itself a corruption of Hadrianopolis.” According to Cabanes, Hadrianopolis was a Roman colony, “which was founded in the second century A. D. near the modern Argyrocastron” Its ruins (the theatre, a necropolis etc.) have been discovered by Baçe at the actual village of Sofratika, near Argyrocastron.. The third hypothesis has been exposed in a manuscript, that Pouqueville obtained from the bishop of Argyrocastron in 1806, and published it at the end of the fifth volume of his Voyage dans la Grèce (1821). According to that manuscript, which had neither beginning nor end and lacked the name of its author, the forefathers of the Greek-speaking population of the Dropull valley, at an ancient imprecise time, had been obliged to emigrate from Athens and had found shelter in the Drino valley, where during sixty-four years they had managed to live on the honey, deposited by wild bees in the oaken forests of that region. And when they managed to build a town there, they called it Dryinopolis, in commemoration of their past hard living. I think that there is no need for any comment regarding this legendary story, which has not any historical background, and that is perhaps the reason why – as far as I am informed- it has not been recorded by any other scholar, including Hammond and Cabanes.

• Details
• Contents