“A disappearing minority: The Vlach of Vidin Bulgaria”

Marvin will talk about his travels to remote villages collecting songs, dances, and costumes. He will discuss folk clothing and how it changed and was eventually lost. The Vlach people have interesting customs but they are disappearing as well as the Vlach language. Many of the villagers have abandoned the Vlach way of life and have moved to the cities or other countries abandoning their way of life that will be lost forever. Hopefully, the research that Marvin has collected, will be a document of the great cultural life the Vlachs once had.

If time allows, he will show a short film that he made several years ago about the Vlachs in the Vidin villages and introducing Vlach immigrants living in St Louis, Missouri.

Marvin Moehle (Costume Collector Extraordinaire) was born in Granite City, IL (an old Macedonian Immigrant settlement). As a young kid, he began to record Immigrants, walking from house to house collecting folk songs, dances and customs from the early Immigrants.

Marvin started collecting folk costumes in the early 1980's. To date, he has collected costumes from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, China, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Serbia and Turkmenistan. While the majority of his collection is from Macedonia and Bulgaria, he also has costumes of minority groups living in the Balkans including: Aroumanian, Roma, Vlachs, Albanians in Macedonia, Turks in Bulgaria, Pomaks, Torbeshi, etc.

He owns several hundred of these Balkan costumes and artifacts, including a large outdoor cross from the first Macedono-Bulgarian Orthodox church in America. He also has collected books and documented archives, such as a collection of old ethnic 78rpms records. Marvis's book collection includes rare books published and printed in the Bulgarian language in Granite City, IL.

Marvin’s vision for the future is to open a small private ethnographic museum.