Romania— Tattoo scenes & cities

In Dobrogea, Aromanian women who came from the Pindus mountains in the interwar years wore a tattooed cross on the forehead, between the eyebrows, or on the hands. In 1936 the magazine Realitatea Ilustrată saw it as a sign meant to protect young girls from Ottoman harems and to display a Christian identity. A curator at the Tulcea museum of ethnography looked into the custom.

In his work Tatuajele în România, Nicolae S. Minovici noted that the Romanians of Macedonia tattooed a cross on the hands of children mistreated by the Turks, so that they would be known as Christians. An Aromanian woman in Greece, interviewed in 2002 by an anthropologist, explained that the ink came from lampblack and that only women did the tattooing. These crosses have now almost disappeared.