Polish and gypsy traditions

What's the Gypsy situation in Poland?

A long tradition. Differences linguistically between the groups in the north and in the south. Many/most settled.

This is Don Vasyl, a King of Gypsies.

He's a musician as are members of his family. His son, Vasyl Junior is good too.

Do they still support themselves primarily through begging and petty crime, even though settled?

No.There are people who come from further south to do that, however the stereotypes are usually wrong.

If they are wrong - then what do they do instead?

In Russia - if they are honest - they engage largely in vegetable sales (retail), and woodwork.

I know one who works in finance for a well known multinational, another one who is a public sector engineer and another two who are teachers, one a textbook writer too.

Some work in construction and a few other fields. Some are entertainers. Some are farmers.

Oh stop it...

He must be a half breed. Never saw a genuine Gypsy in finance.

Why not? Poland isn't r*SSia.

@jon357

Ok, maybe I'm wrong. I know plenty of people that lead normal lives that are half or quarter or whatever, but never a full blown representative of the people.

As far as I know that guy is,

There's quite a strong culture in Poland. Music festivals etc.

Never saw a Gypsy at work...Stealing or lying...no sweat...tax-free...

Hitler was right when he asked them kindly to self-deport.

I don't know to be honest - I personally don't know any and the only ones I've met were ladies doing fortune telling in the streets in the city centre, but that was years ago. In my city a more recent thing has been them going around blocks of flats and playing an accordion and singing songs - people then throw them money from the windows. When RuSSia's full scale invasion of Ukraine started they were playing "Hej, sokoły!", for example :)

Those who get into spotlight are usually in the music industry. For example, our most famous diva is Edyta Górniak who's Polish-Roma. Mother - Polish, father - Polish Gypsy. Her father was a guitar player in Don Vasyl's band and a bricklayer. From young generation of singers Viki Gabor is Roma:

viva.pl/kultura/muzyka/viki-gabor-rodzice-kim-sa-ewelina-i-dariusz-gabor-to-oni-zarazili-corke-pasja-do-muzyki-zdjecia-143672-r1/

• 
  Vikiparents.webp
  

She won Eurovision Junior in 2020, btw :):




Please die already.

The very definition of parasites. That money was pity money, not a fair trade.


Why would Germans, the most creative and well organized society ever, want Gypsies? What's the upside?

Name two societies that are less compatible if you can.

In Warsaw, you used to get that about 25 years back. Very popular, everyone came out to listen. The6 always played Besame Mucho.

As I remember, those musicians were often Romanian.

Music by day. Stealing and prostitution by night...Real human treasure...

More people should adopt your lifestyle - sleeping by day, trolling by night

Which makes sense.

Using modern gene sequencing and linguistic analysis, scientists have narrowed down the origins of Gypsies to northwest India. Specifically Gujarat and Rajasthan.

It's speculated that it took them several hundred years to arrive in Europe (entering Europe through the Bosporus and through the northern Caspian Steppe).

But before we had DNA sequencing and other things, we had the story from the Shahnameh. The story is a mix of fact and legend, but it clearly shows they were initially called for their musical talents:

According to a legend reported in the Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh, the Sassanian king Bahram V Gor learned towards the end of his reign (421-439) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and so he asked the king of India to send him ten thousand luris, lute-playing experts. When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox, a donkey, and a donkey-load of wheat so they could live on agriculture and play music for free for the poor. However, the luris ate the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks hollowed by hunger. The king, angered with their having wasted what he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags and go wandering around the world on their donkeys.

To me it's mind blowing, that before airplanes, and ships, and trains, several tens of thousands of people managed to walk from India to Portugal - in what in historical terms - amounts to the blink of an eye.

There are certainly large gypsy populations in the Middle East. The country with the most Romany is Turkey.

What relation do your English, Welsh, and Irish "Gypsies" have to our gypsies?

I always thought that the "travelling folk" were basically English, Welsh, Irish in dress costume. That you don't have real gypsies?

They are all blood relations and Angloromani keep some of the traditions handed down even now. Scottish and Welsh gypsies use the term Kale (you'll hea4 that in Sweden too) to u decline their descent from a particular one of the four Roma tribes. Angloromani are also descended from that tribe.

Quite a few words 8n English come from the Roma languages.


You're thinking of Irish Travellers, a distinct group who are unrelated to Romany but have some things in common.


They don't wear special clothes unless it's at The Appleby Fair. The men sometimes wear hats as a tradition. Irish travellers' dress is the same as anyone else, except for brides on their wedding day who wear such big and heavy dresses that they have a wheeled frame under them to support the weight of the fabric and the car battery used to light them up. Worth looking at.

Same group we have in Russia.

Crazy that they managed to maintain commonality from Russia to UK.

Ours came from further west and from Scandinavia, mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however most of yours and all of ours and most in northern Poland are from that same tribe. Traditionally they worked with metals, especially making/mending pans and doing small repairs. The ones from Romania wh9 play music are generally from other tribes.

Some of ours still do.

Yes, not proper gypsies at all, just a small sub-set of nomadic, ordinary Irish who generally wandered around doing a bit of horse-dealing and so on. Used to be known as tinkers, as in itinerant tinsmiths. A very rough lot and a bit of inbreeding naturally due to the smallness of the community.

We were in a hotel over Christmas with some Travellers (visiting family at a local camp who didn't have room for them in the vans, sort of the same as us).

Great people, very friendly to us, a little on the boisterous side. The women (all very young) were dressed like pop singers on stage. Those people know how to have fun.

The person I was with didn't pick up that they were Travellers and just thought they were party people. I found them to be fine.

One of them (as camp as a row of tents, btw) was telling us about how many times he'd been arrested in Hudddersfield!

In the city where we were, there have been Romany gypsies for 500 years and many have houses that they use as winter quarters. It's partly due to there being a lot of common land where they can graze horses. Plenty of Irish Travellers too; there are two council sites next to each other, one for each group, and there's never any trouble. They're part of the community, albeit a separate part.

If you want to go down a fun internet rabbit hole, have a look on YouTube for "traveler rants". Some are great fun. My favourite is Martin 'puff daddy' Ward. Camp, very openly gay and seems to love fighting.

Traveller - a human tumbling weed...every living creature hates...

Name one town that would want them...

Only a few surnames, as I recall.

Generally very nice people in my experience.

A relative concept.

On the scale of Russian crime - they are a nuisance more than anything else.

Pickpocketing, palm readings, scam games, livestock theft - that's the extent of their criminality.

They're not selling anyone into sexual slavery. They're not bringing in shipments of heroin. They don't do murder for hire, or extortion. They don't assist rogue regimes in smuggling arms or radioactive materials.

They still irritate me. Especially their men. Sitting on their ass all day, smoking cigarettes and sipping on tea - while their wives and children beg on street corners. What kind of man is that?

What kind of man - melts away into the crowd - at the first sign of danger, and lets women and children handle his matters for him? This is what happened in that Paris incident that happened with me and my friend.

Ten beers deep, and several double whiskies - we were hoping to cause a ruckus. My friend threw the guys game into the river (and was arrested shortly afterwards), while I was just lollygagging about hoping they would escalate. Sure enough, the "uncle" of the group tried some cheap intimidation tricks on me, but then when he understood that he is dealing with a completely disinhibited person simply vanished. Then the rest of the boys vanished. All that was left were hysterical women screaming into my ear and slapping away at my back, and tearful children.

When the Gendarmes arrived, it looked like we were trying to beat up a bunch of women and children.

Disgusting.

That's r*SSians for you, and says a lot about that society.

Ours don't do that. A lot of Romany and Irish Travellers are in the scrap metal business or in construction.

What special provision is made for educating the kids there? A family friend used to work as a peripatetic Teacher, employed by the county to follow the families around as they move.

They are surprisingly polyglot-ish.

The "uncle" who first confronted me - first spoke English to me. Then Italian. Finally he spoke Russian.

Amazing language skills.

When I heard his Russian accent, I knew immediately he was not from Romania or Bulgaria, but from Moldova, or somewhere in Odessa Oblast. Asked him if he's proud of himself, and whether the family back home knows how he feeds himself. Mentioned the name of a couple famous tabors that settle around Odessa and Chisinau.

He immediately sh*t his pants.

They're only good at scaring Western tourists. When confronted with somebody from the home country, they are meek as mice.