Gergei

Gergei is a village that changed province twice in fifteen years, and one of the two provinces it never saw. The regional law of 2001, the one that set up the new Sardinian provinces, provided that Gergei, then in the province of Nuoro, should pass to the newly created province of Medio Campidano; but a later law, of 2003, decided instead that it should go to that of Cagliari, where it stayed until the reform of 2016. It is the last chapter of a history made almost entirely of changes of hands. The territory was inhabited in nuragic and Roman times — there is a small nuragic village and there are Roman tombs — but the first records of the village are medieval and say it belonged to the giudicato of Cagliari, in the curatoria of Siurgus, with a stable local economy.

Then the waltz begins. When the Cagliari giudicato fell, Gergei passed to that of Arborea; on the death of Mariano II of Arborea, in 1297, Pisa obtained by inheritance the third of the former giudicato of Cagliari that had gone to the Arboreans, and so the village ended up among the lands managed directly by the Republic of Pisa — a village inherited by a republic. After the Aragonese conquest it was turned into a fief and granted to the Carroz family; in the second half of the thirteen hundreds the Sardinians of the giudicato of Arborea took it back, but in 1404 it was definitively acquired by the Crown of Aragon. It was then joined to the marquisate of Mandas, which became a duchy under the Maza and then under the Tellez Giron of Alcantara, from whom the village was redeemed in 1839 with the abolition of the feudal system. Today the economy rests on farming — cereals and above all the olive — and on herding, and the language is western Campidanese.