Roma - a long history of suffering

If you have been in Romania for a while (no more than a few days are required), you may have discovered that "regular" Romanians fear and avoid a certain segment of the populace. The people they look upon with such awe are called Gypsies, sometimes Tzigani, other times by their official name - rromi.

This part of the populace is made of slightly tanned-skinned people with black hair and they are known to walk together in great numbers. People also say they have the reputation of thieves. I think the truth is there are thieves amongst all denominations, colours and beliefs.

One cannot generalise. People steal because they are hungry, frustrated, poor or just plain evil, not because they belong to a certain group. Sure, milieu has a say in this but I think that people are just too lazy, or lack interest to look beyond the obvious.

The Roma, as Gypsies are actually called, have a long and painful history that may cast some light on motifs and actions of our days' people. While history is not an excuse, it can serve well as explanation.

The Roma, or "Gypsies," entered southeastern Europe in the last quarter of the 13th Century, caught up in the Ottoman expansion westwards.

Originating in India as a composite military population assembled to resist the Muslim incursions led by the Ghaznavids, they left through the Hindu Kush during the first quarter of the 11th Century, moving through Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine Empire towards the West.

Early accounts of the Romani presence in mediaeval Europe are scant, but it appears that the first Roma in the Balkan principality of Wallachia arrived as free people, who found an economic niche based upon the skills they had brought from India and the Byzantine Empire - mainly metal-working, carpentry and entertaining.

In part because of the depleting effects of the Crusades in earlier centuries, the Wallachian society first encountered by the Roma was technologically backward and agriculturally-centred, but as this peasant economy gradually shifted to a market-oriented one, it came to depend more and more upon the artisan skills of the Roma.

Roma, who had at first established a loose working relationship with the feudal landlords, became associated with particular estates and by the early 1300s were being included in parcels of property given by one owner to another and to the monasteries.

The condition of slavery so defined, however, emerged later, out of the increasingly stringent measures taken by the landowners, the court and the monasteries to prevent their Romany labour force from leaving the principalities.

The Code of Basil the Wolf of Moldavia, dated 1654, contained references to the treatment of slaves, including the death penalty in the case of the rape of a white woman by a Rom (the same offense committed by a non-Rom warranted no punishment, according to the same Code).

By the 1500s, the terms rob and tzigan had become synonymous with "slave," although the latter was originally a neutral ethnonym applied by the Europeans to the first Roma.

House slaves were forbidden to speak Romany, and their descendants, today have a variety of Romanian, a Latin-based language, rather than Romany, as their mother tongue.

Female house slaves were also provided to visitors for sexual entertainment; the half-white children of such unions automatically became slaves.

In the 16th Century, a Romany child sold for the equivalent of 48c. By the 19th Century, slaves were sold by weight, at the rate of one gold piece per pound.

Treatment of the slaves included flogging, the falague or shredding the soles of the feet with a whip, cutting off of the lips, burning with lye, and wearing a three-cornered spiked iron collar called a cangue.

Slaves were able to escape periodically and take refuge in maroon communities in the Carpathian mountains; these are called netoti in the literature.