Val Demone
The Val Demone is a historical administrative unit in northeastern Sicily .
Val is not an abbreviation from Italian la valle = the valley, but from il vallo , a name that is said to go back to the predominance of the Saracens over Sicily , cf. Arabic wilaya (ولاية) = administrative district. The Kingdom of Sicily comprised the three administrative units Val di Mazara (west), Val Demone and Val di Noto (south-east). These remained in place until 1818 when a new division into seven provinces was carried out.
The Val Demone had an area of about 5,000 km² and was therefore the smallest of the three Valli. Its territory corresponded to the area of today's metropolitan city of Messina and the northern part of the metropolitan city of Catania .
The Norman conquest of Sicily began in Val Demone: the mountain town of Troina was chosen by Roger I as his residence and made the first newly founded diocese. There was a particularly high proportion of the Greek population here; the majority of the Greek monasteries in Sicily are located in the Val Demone ( San Filippo di Fragalà , San Salvatore di Messina ). The Greek language and the Greek rite were able to hold their own longest in northeastern Sicily. Even today there are a number of family names of Greek origin in this area.
The name Demone goes back to the city of Demenna, which, according to the report of the Chronicle of Monemvasia, was founded by settlers from the Peloponnese who fled here at the time of the Slavic occupation of the Balkans . Demenna is attested with this name in Arabic and Hebrew sources up to around 1400; the exact localization is controversial in recent research.
literature
- Ewald Kislinger: Regional history as a source problem. The Chronicle of Monembasia and the Sicilian Demenna. A historical-topographical study . (Austrian Academy of Sciences, phil.-hist. Class, memoranda, volume 294 = publications of the commission for the TABULA IMPERII BYZANTINI, edited by Johannes KODER, volume 8), Vienna: Verlag der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften 2001; on the meaning and word history of Val, especially pp. 151–154.