about 1,000 houses, and whose population spoke Greek, whereas the neighbouring villages did not speak Greek at all. Another Roman Catholic bishop, Anton Stefanov, refers to Arbanasi in 1685 as a village of Greeks and Albanians which ranks first in Dacia. According to his account, there were Arbanasi merchants trading in Italy, Hungary, Poland and particularly in Muscovy.
Heyday and decline
There is considerably richer documentary material, such as correspondence and chronicler's notes on religious books, preserved from the 17th and 18th century, that evidences that Arbanasi reached its economic blossoming between the second half of the 17th and the end of the 18th century. The settlement had over 1,000 houses at the time, its population consisting mostly of eminent merchant families who traded in Transylvania (mostly Sibiu and Bra?ov), the Danubian Principalities, Russia and Poland. Handicrafts were well-developed, withcopper- and goldsmithing, vine-growing and silk production playing an important part. The homes of the rich merchants, as well as the five churches built in the years of progress, bear record of the economic upsurge and prosperity.
In the 18th century, Arbanasi was regularly donated by the Phanariote rulers of Wallachia, and a number of expelled Wallachian nobles settled temporarily in the village, e.g. Manolachi Br�ncoveanu, Ian V?c?rescu. In 1790, there were 17 Wallachian nobles with their families in Arbanasi. To this day, some of the houses in Arbanasi bear the names of their former Wallachian owners (Br�ncoveanu,Cantacuzino, Filipescu).
As a result of well-organized brigand raids in 1792, 1798 ad 1810, the settlement was pillaged and burnt down. The plague and choleraepidemics further damaged the town's well-being. The richest merchants fled to Wallachia and Russia. A new settlement of Bulgarians began after 1810, when people came down from the Elena and Teteven parts of the Balkan Mountains, but Arbanasi could
