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Folk Dance Federation of California, South, Inc.
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The Balkans are a unique and very special place with regard to Roma (Gypsies). Despite that the Roma in England, the United States, Spain, and Hungary are better known both by scholars and by the general public, Balkan Roma constitute, in a number of different respects – historically, ethnographically, demographically – the most important Roma community in the world. I would like to demonstrate why I hold this conviction.
First of all, the Balkans are where it all began. The very earliest reports of Roma in Europe all come from the Balkans. Judging by the larger number of Slavic and Greek loan words in contemporary Romanes (the Romani language), they remained there for some time before moving on to Western Europe (Miklosich, 1974:7).
European Roma first arrived and made their homes in the Balkans. By the time that some of their number passed on to the rest of Europe many generations later, they had been profoundly influenced by their long stay there. To refer to the Balkans as some authors have, as the "fatherland of the Roma" is therefore not too far off the mark.
Moreover, this westward movement of Roma out of the Balkans has continued, wave after wave, until the present time, making the Balkans a CONTINUAL source of European Roma. Throughout western Europe, the most recent arrivals in the mosaic of Roma groups are those from Macedonia.
A second distinctive feature of Balkan Roma is their number. Even after many of them moved on to the West, the Balkans remained the largest concentration in Europe. This continues to the present day. The best figures we have indicate that Europe's largest Roma concentrations lie in the Balkan nations. Moreover, the largest single Romani community anywhere is Suto Orizari (a suburb of Skopje, Macedonia), the population of which is over 95% Roma. The community is still growing. The 1971 census had 17,068 Roma living in this single neighborhood. In 1985, the figure is around 40,000.
The third factor that gives Roma in the Balkans their special importance is the degree of cultural heterogeneity (diverse in character or content) to be found there. We will leave aside for the moment the extremes of "modernization and integration" and speak here of only sub-ethnic differentiation. It is true, of course, that Roma nowhere in Europe constitute a single cultural unit – Spanish Roma ARE NOT all flamenco performers and mule traders after all, but the variety of different groups in the Balkans seems more extreme and rivaled in complexity only by the Romani population of North America.
As in many areas where Roma are found, the most important internal division is between nomadic and sedentary. Members of the two groups recognize one another as Roma, albeit with reciprocal negative opinions, and have some social interaction, but very little intermarriage. But the boundaries is not necessarily a shared one. Many sedentary Roma move about owing to seasonal occupations. Nomads usually settle down for the winter months, often in a sedentary Roma neighborhood. Sometimes they will even settle more permanently, only to resume nomadic life several years later.
Another important division lies between those that speak Romanes (and that language is still very strongly maintained in the Balkans) and those that do not. It is sometimes assumed that this distinction coinsides with the boundary between nomadic and sedentary, but although nomads usually speak Romanes as their mother tongue and sedentary Roma do not, this is not as hard-and-fast a difference as some have assumed. Romanes is still maintained by certain tribes and in certain communities of sedentary Roma. All the Balkan Roma utilize some Romanes vocabulary, at least for use in appropriate situations.
Among those that do speak Romanes, there is an important split, for instance, between speakers of the Vlach dialect and the Turkish dialect. Even among non-Romani speakers, different groups are differentiated according to the language adopted.
The most important dimension of Balkan Roma complexity has to do with what most authors call "tribal" divisions, usually linked to occupational specializations. No one has yet developed a comprehensive taxonomy of the many distinct groups of Roma that inhabit the Balkans, though several have attempted to do so for significant portions of the region.
A fourth distinctive feature of Balkan Roma has to do with cultural maintenance. It makes no sense, of course, to say that one group is more traditional or more "Roma" than another. But the fact remains that if we take as an original type those bands of Roma described in considerable detail when they arrived in Western Europe, the nearest approximation today are certain bands of Kalderash nomads in central Yugoslavia, and, in the very recent past, similar groups throughout the Balkans: nomadic, carrying their tents on horseback, or in horse drawn carts from campsite to campsite, subsisting primarily by fortune telling and copper smithery, strongly maintaining Romani language, Romani religion, and Romani social patterns.
The primary reason for this high degree of cultural maintenance lies not so much in the special nature of the Balkan Roma as in the history of the Balkans in general. The Balkans, of all Europe, was where classic peasant society persisted the longest. In many respects, rural areas of the Balkans before and just after World War II were not that much different from most of Europe at the time of the Romani arrival. And in such societies the Roma served very important functions. Their crafts and skills were not only desired but needed; the baskets and sieves and wood wares, the rope and bricks, the iron goods and copper utensils they produced were the stuff of daily life. In the horse market and elsewhere, Roma provided important middleman services. The entertainments they brought to village and marketplace were a welcome relief from the drudgeries of daily life. Even their prophesies and "advice" lent a measure of emotional security in a society where there were neither psychiatrists nor self-help books. All that is now changing, of course.
With the transformation of peasant society, the niches once occupied by Roma are also transformed. With the switch from copper utensils to cheap enamelware, the nomadic coppersmiths who annually came to re-tin are put out of work. When there is television to hurry home to, one pays scant attention to the bear leader in the marketplace. But for the present, remnants of this earlier Roma life endure. Tent nomads still roam the mountains of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Bear leaders are still encountered in central Yugoslavia, in European Turkey, in Bulgaria, and in northern Greece.
A fifth way in which Balkan Roma are the exception has to do with cultural change. If it is true that the most significant Romani universal is their adaptability, then Balkan Roma are very special indeed. On the one hand are "traditional" Roma like those described above, or on the other are those who have found new niches in modern metropolises such as Beograd and Athens. In addition to the blacksmiths and sieve makers and copper-tinners are urbanites who have developed new and different ways of life: middlemen in the Beograd antique trade, professional gold smugglers in Romania, cleaning women and caretakers in any one of a number of cities. Current economic difficulties in Yugoslavia, with attendant shortages, were and are seen as a serious problem or, at best, a source of irritation by most Yugoslavians. But many Roma perceived them as opportunity and promptly took over the street trade of whatever was in short supply. Thus, during the summer of 1983, I found them selling toothpaste, razor blades, and coffee beans at the entrance to Zagreb's central marketplace. There was a common saying in Zagreb at the time: "If you want to know what's going to be scarce next, see what the Roma have to sell!"
Such adaptation to a changing world is hardly unique to Balkan Roma. What IS special about the Balkans is the amount and variety of change that took place there in the post-World War II period. Consider the variety of politico-economic milieus in which Balkan Roma have found themselves. Each regime has meant a different social, legal, and economic context to which resident Roma must adapt. And adapt they have, all the while maintaining their distinctive Roma identity.
The result of these five factors is that the Balkans constitute a laboratory par excellence for Roma studies. Two essays, one focusing on the Roma of Romania and the other on those of Yugoslavia, focus on change and as such demonstrate the most important aspects of Roma life in the Balkans today. The one by Elsie Dunin on Yugoslavian Roma is highly specific, dealing with particular change in dance, music, and celebration in the community of Sato Orizari, Yugoslavia. The other by Beck, deals with social change amongst the Roma of Romania. The two articles complement one another well, and the changes they describe are inextricably intertwined. Taken together, they focus attention on the most powerful process affecting contemporary Balkan Roma.
Printed in Folk Dance Scene, 1989 July/August,
and titled "Balkan Gypsies: an Introduction.
Excerpted from the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings,
Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter,
Joan Grumet Ed., New York, NY, 1985.