First and foremost our family matters to us. We might fight among ourselves, even physically, and the language we use even as young kids might shock a lot of gadjes/gorgers/gaujis/gorgios (we’ve got lots of names for non-gypsies) but we’re family and we stick together.
Only just below our love of family comes our passion for freedom. Freedom is the air we breathe, the rat (blood) that flows in our veins, the thing we prize above everything else. Take our possessions, take our money, all our worldly goods, but leave us our freedom!
For all our freedom we follow a strict code of laws. They govern how we dress, how we behave in public, who we can be friends with, how we prepare food, how to keep ourselves and our homes clean and even our bodies. No Roma will willingly go a single day without at least a strip wash if not a shower and will bathe at least twice a week..
Of all the lies and insults we face, the words ‘dirty gypsy’ hurt me more than most. As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m obsessional about cleanliness and I’d rather be called almost anything other than a ‘dirty gypsy!’
I'll talk a bit about the history of the Romani people.
The origin of the Romanies go back to the Banjala tribes in India. Their first recorded appearance in the West was during the sixth century A.D. where they were mentioned by Byzantine chroniclers.
At the beginning of the new millenium a wave of them spread out of India into Persia, Syria, Egypt and what is now Turkey but at the time was still the Byzantine Empire. The Romani exodus from India was one of the largest mass migrations before the nineteenth century. It was caused by the persecution of the fanatical Indian Muslim ruler Mahmood of Ghazni. His attempts to force the overwhelmingly Hindu Romanis to convert to Islam met with resistance and wave after wave of them abandoned India and moved westwards.
Many of the men were soldiers and plied their trade as mercenaries, mainly fighting for the Byzantine Empire but some also fought for the Turks. Many settled in the Sulukule area of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and that lasted for a thousand years as a continuously inhabited Romani settlement before Erdogan demolished it to make way for his building projects.
As the Byzantine Empire slowly crumbled, many Romanies went westward, arriving in Eastern Europe around the fourteenth century. Over the course of their sojourn in the Middle East and Byzantium they had acquired a smattering of Christianity and Islam but remained overwhelmingly pagan.
Most of the new arrivals in Europe quickly developed at least a veneer of Christianity. That did not stop them falling under suspicion from the Inquisition, especially with the large number of Romani women who earned their living through palmistry, cartomancy and other forms of divination. Many of them were burnt at the stake as witches and many others were hung. In several European countries Romanies were sold into slavery, a lifelong condition of bondage which their children also inherited. It was three centuries before this practice finally ceased.
From Eastern Europe they gradually spread out into the relatively more tolerant lands of Russia to the east and France to the West. By the early sixteenth century the first recorded mention of gypsies in England appears though they had almost certainly arrived much earlier.
A number of features marked them out as different and led to suspicion and hostility. One was the belief that they were pagans at heart and only paid lip-service to Christianity. (There was probably a lot of truth in that especially in the early years of their arrival.) Another was their dark skin and their foreign, secret language. Most of all, though, was their reluctance to integrate and insistence on maintaining their traditional culture and lifestyle.
In some parts of Europe, particularly Britain and Spain, they were able to reach some kind of accommodation with the authorities that allowed them to preserve most of their traditional way of life. That was much less true in other European countries. Britain in particular saw a high degree of intermarriage with the gorgia (non-gypsy) population and slowly the language declined. The once pure Romanes tongues, primarily Sanscrit in origin, was either totally lost with many Roma in Britain becoming 'lalleri' - non-Romanes speaking - or, more commonly, morphing into a dialect known as Anglo-Rom, Romanichal or (in Romanes) 'poggerdi jib' - broken language.
Anglo-Rom bears the marks of its long travels out of India, with Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Spanish, French, Basque, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and of course English all having been mixed together into a heady linguistic casserole. Anglo-Rom is about the least pure dialect of Romanes there is and sometimes when I've talked to European or Turkish Roma we've used quite different words for things.
I'll talk about my family beginning with my grandparents.
Only just below our love of family comes our passion for freedom. Freedom is the air we breathe, the rat (blood) that flows in our veins, the thing we prize above everything else. Take our possessions, take our money, all our worldly goods, but leave us our freedom!
For all our freedom we follow a strict code of laws. They govern how we dress, how we behave in public, who we can be friends with, how we prepare food, how to keep ourselves and our homes clean and even our bodies. No Roma will willingly go a single day without at least a strip wash if not a shower and will bathe at least twice a week..
Of all the lies and insults we face, the words ‘dirty gypsy’ hurt me more than most. As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m obsessional about cleanliness and I’d rather be called almost anything other than a ‘dirty gypsy!’
I'll talk a bit about the history of the Romani people.
The origin of the Romanies go back to the Banjala tribes in India. Their first recorded appearance in the West was during the sixth century A.D. where they were mentioned by Byzantine chroniclers.
At the beginning of the new millenium a wave of them spread out of India into Persia, Syria, Egypt and what is now Turkey but at the time was still the Byzantine Empire. The Romani exodus from India was one of the largest mass migrations before the nineteenth century. It was caused by the persecution of the fanatical Indian Muslim ruler Mahmood of Ghazni. His attempts to force the overwhelmingly Hindu Romanis to convert to Islam met with resistance and wave after wave of them abandoned India and moved westwards.
Many of the men were soldiers and plied their trade as mercenaries, mainly fighting for the Byzantine Empire but some also fought for the Turks. Many settled in the Sulukule area of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and that lasted for a thousand years as a continuously inhabited Romani settlement before Erdogan demolished it to make way for his building projects.
As the Byzantine Empire slowly crumbled, many Romanies went westward, arriving in Eastern Europe around the fourteenth century. Over the course of their sojourn in the Middle East and Byzantium they had acquired a smattering of Christianity and Islam but remained overwhelmingly pagan.
Most of the new arrivals in Europe quickly developed at least a veneer of Christianity. That did not stop them falling under suspicion from the Inquisition, especially with the large number of Romani women who earned their living through palmistry, cartomancy and other forms of divination. Many of them were burnt at the stake as witches and many others were hung. In several European countries Romanies were sold into slavery, a lifelong condition of bondage which their children also inherited. It was three centuries before this practice finally ceased.
From Eastern Europe they gradually spread out into the relatively more tolerant lands of Russia to the east and France to the West. By the early sixteenth century the first recorded mention of gypsies in England appears though they had almost certainly arrived much earlier.
A number of features marked them out as different and led to suspicion and hostility. One was the belief that they were pagans at heart and only paid lip-service to Christianity. (There was probably a lot of truth in that especially in the early years of their arrival.) Another was their dark skin and their foreign, secret language. Most of all, though, was their reluctance to integrate and insistence on maintaining their traditional culture and lifestyle.
In some parts of Europe, particularly Britain and Spain, they were able to reach some kind of accommodation with the authorities that allowed them to preserve most of their traditional way of life. That was much less true in other European countries. Britain in particular saw a high degree of intermarriage with the gorgia (non-gypsy) population and slowly the language declined. The once pure Romanes tongues, primarily Sanscrit in origin, was either totally lost with many Roma in Britain becoming 'lalleri' - non-Romanes speaking - or, more commonly, morphing into a dialect known as Anglo-Rom, Romanichal or (in Romanes) 'poggerdi jib' - broken language.
Anglo-Rom bears the marks of its long travels out of India, with Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Spanish, French, Basque, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and of course English all having been mixed together into a heady linguistic casserole. Anglo-Rom is about the least pure dialect of Romanes there is and sometimes when I've talked to European or Turkish Roma we've used quite different words for things.
I'll talk about my family beginning with my grandparents.
