Polish and gypsy traditions

Getting back from a short vacay to Bulgaria... I see people discussing gypsies....

I have some experience with them. My family were close friends with a family of performers (closer to circus than music) they spoke (weird) German with each other and called themselves Austrian but... gypsies probably from the area where Austria, Slovakia and Hungary meet (several also still knew some Czech/Slovak).

Late in life, my mother was friends with an older gyspy (UK) couple she had met at a writer's club.

And I was on an international project where one of the partners was from ex-Jugoslavia and was a recognized expert on the language and culture.

I've done other reading too.

First, it's been known forever that their language is from NW India. The most likely scenario that I've read was that they were originally camp followers (dovetails with a lot of the professions they're known for, from metal working, petty trade, entertaining and... prostitution.) The idea is they followed a group of soldiers outside the Indian sub-continent who ended up selling them into slavery to raise funds. They managed to escape and began heading west rather than east....

More to follow....

Fairground people are a subset of Romany (at least in the U.K.) with some Romany traditions and some of their own. I went out with one briefly years ago, born in a caravan.


Did you know that Charlie Chaplin had Romany roots?

Rita Hayworth and Elvis Presley too, which is well enough known, and also according to Google, Yul Brynner.

Not so much in the US... carnies are mostly what we call 'white trash' (underclass). Some are more... civilized than others. But of travelling show people carnies are the bottom of the totem pole. (also there is a hierarchy within circuses but that's another topic). Most circus performers in the US are not of gyspy origin but circus people have their own... ways of doing things that are very different from the mainstream.

As for gypsies stealing things....

For gypsies, family is destiny. Your family has a niche and you follow that. I was told that among musicians it's very common/usual for there to be a family specialization - clarinet family, violin family etc. You're not going to be a singer if you're from a violin family (for example).

It's not quite caste... but it's within shouting distance.

Some sub-groups of gypsies steal from non-gyspies and are not ashamed of it or looked down upon within the broader gypsy community. So, it's absolutely paramount that you know who you're dealing with. Some sub-groups are absolutely dangerous to outsiders and even scholars (on the advice of other gyspies) leave them alone.

And even those for whom stealing is not their profession... given the opportunity few much care if a gadjo (non-gypsy) loses something. If they know you that's much less likely to happen.

They are the opposite of Jews.

When a very hard nosed Jew deals dishonestly with someone - he can tell himself - I only fooled a Goy and not another human being.

Gypsies feel they are subhuman to the rest of humanity. "We steal, because we are ****".

"Nazis put us in the oven by the million - we don't complain - lest it attract more attention."

Humiliation means nothing. Dishonor is not a concept. Hatred, is shrugged off.

Truly - the antipodes of the Jews when it comes to strange diasporas.

-//--

I've always been very upset that the world does not spend more time discussing the millions of Slavs, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc that were exterminated by the Germans. But I feel especially upset when I remember and realize that the cruelest things were done to the Gypsies, and they don't even have the ability to give that pain voice. As if the things that were done to them, never happened.

Preteen Gypsy twins tortured and poisoned by Dr. Mengele. A Gypsy mother and her child frozen to death - while observed by German doctors. Etc, and so on.

One group has museums, annual days of remembrance, and commands the piety of the world entire - while the other is treated as if it deserved it.

Not at all.... they look down on gadje (plural of gadjo) as dirty and unclean.... another inheritance from India is their obsession with ritual rather than hygenic cleanliness. There used to be lots of arcane rules about women's clothing (among other things).

If anything, in some ways, their attitudes towards outsiders are closer to conservative muslim ideas of non-muslims: "they may seem nice but are inherently wrong and do nasty things".

They tend to resist schooling as they think it makes children weak and more like gadje (among which even the adults are slow and childlike).

A big problem of gypsy children in school is that within gypsy culture they have lots of autonomy and have little tolerance for being forced to sit in one place all day.

Gadgers round my way. The word (like charver/chavs and a few others) have come into English now. Irish Travellers tend to use the term "country people".

Yes, you're right about Romania perception of non-gypsies. Romany (at least the Angloromani ones I'm used to) have retained some religious purity rules that derive from H8mduism and possibly with influence from Judaism. As mentioned before, gypsies 300 years ago were probably far cleaner than most of either your or my ancestors. The same with Jewish people; the fact that they were ore likely to survive fever epidemics was another of the things that made peasants suspicious of them.


They generally have good cause to be wary of it. Some do well at school though.


No bad thing in some ways, however the ones near me tend to be very well behaved as far as I can see.

Speak for yourself.

We had banyas.

We've been steaming ourselves and washing ourselves, since the moment we started living in forests.

-///-

Kind of off topic, but I find their women to be incredibly beautiful. The men - are ugly cavemen.

Kind of the opposite of the Bulgarians and Greeks among whom they emerged. Where the Bulgarian men and Greek men are very handsome, but the women have mustaches and are maximally unattractive.

Russians and Poles got the opposite curse. Men that look like Oompa Loompas, and women that look like goddesses.

Watch some reports about Roma housing estates in the Czech Republic. Then you'll see how degraded a person can become.

Some of the rules probably were functional at one point when you consider that they spent most of their time travelling in wagons. Making sure (possibly menstruating) women bathed down stream from where you got your drinking water = good sense.

It would be interesting to examine how some of the old functional rules were modified into what seem like pointless exercises today.


I was talking with a friend of my mother's, elderly English gypsy permanently in the US by then. I asked about education and language maintenance and she sighed and said (slight paraphrase): The problem is when the kids go to school they're liable to start thinking about right and wrong.... and that's just the end of them as gypsies.

She was mostly likely referring to 'adopt gadjo ways of thinking' which are fundamentally different from gypsy ways of thinking.


IIRC those gyspies were from Slovakia and moved westward (I don't know how much of this was forced and how much was opportunistic) into an urban lifestyle they were utterly unprepared for and unable/unwilling to adapt to. There are similar apocalyptic looking gypsy slums in Slovakia and Bulgaria (the worst being around Plovdiv IIRC).

This is the fatal flaw of gyspy society - they're not self-sufficient and need to live near a host population because there are too many jobs that need to be done that they just won't do. Very orthodox Jews are similar, combining an insular mindset with a non-self-sufficient culture.

Many do still travel in vans so the hygiene rule are still practical.


The men never cut their nails. They only use nail files. Seems to work for them.


Like capitalist 'investors'. Others work, they profit. Like monks and nuns. They pray, others feed them.

That's the case of ultra-orthodox Jews... most live in poverty but the communities are maintained by a few rich benefactors (and those being supported have no interest in how the benefactors became rich enough to support them).

That's basically a community.

Another delicate subject: inbreeding....

Yeah, it happens... a lot. Not so much from fear/distrust of outsiders (like Pakistanis) although that is a factor, but more from just having a small marriage pool (restricted more through caste-like systems in place).

This manifests in lots of.... syndromey looks. They have trouble finding doctors because even settled ones are prone to conditions that doctors cannot even diagnose, let alone treat.

I remember in Budapest once seeing a gyspy woman with a few children on the bus. One of the children, a little girl who looked... shrunk? That is her facial body morphology looked to be a certain age but she was only about 80 per cent that size... normal proportions but... much smaller than usual. Her siblings clearly adored her but it wondered what was going on genetically there.

In this sense, prostitution is, if anything eugenic, since children born from it enrich the gene pool a bit. That's also why you see some very non-typical phenotypes among gypsies (including a blonde girl mistaken for Madeleine McCann in Greece several years ago).

Sometimes the results are tragic... the Romanian singer Denisa Raducu was a major star in Manele (a type of Romanian ethno-pop dominated by gypsies). Born with an internal tumor, it turned malignant in her early-mid thirties and she had a long and difficult death.

Here she is in a typical outing from as year or so before her untimely demise...

youtube.com/watch?v=I-Qq9HJstO8

That's more about keeping property and land in the family.

Among Romany, it's more about a limited choice of suitors.

Not that inbreeding is inherently a bad thing unless there are inherited illnesses present. Something that affects the settled population too, in parts of Wales and parts of the southern USA there are rural communities who have this problem.


Where I'm from, gypsies do not do this, however there is a long history in parts of Europe of Romany adopting abandoned and unwanted children and raising them as their own.

which comes from fear/mistrust of outsiders...

Thinking of how countries.... deal with the presence of gypsies (especially where they are numerically significant) looking for success and not finding much.

I'd read that early on the soviets tried to treat them the same way they treated more settled groups, worked up a written version of their language and housed them.... and the gyspies stripped the housing for materials and moved on down the road at the first opportunity... not sure what happened afterward.

Efforts to settle them in larger towns generally led to socio-economic disaster zones in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.

One of the least bad solutions can be found (reached by different haphazard roads) in Spain and Hungary. In Spain especially where they don't stand out as much physically they are able, if they want to, to leave their gypsiness behind and integrate into Spanish society (facilitated by the loss of the language). Simultaneously, there are a few non-gypsy Spaniards who integrate into gypsy society for various reasons.

I've read of a similar process in Hungary, a description of a gypsy not-quite-slum mentioned a few ethnic Hungarians had moved in and lived de facto like gypsies. This, again, was facilitated by greater usage of the national language by gypsies. Unlike Polish gypsies who use their own language with each other in public Hungarian gypsies mostly use Hungarian.

The closes to a self-sustaining gypsy society I, I think, found in a neighborhood in Skopje, Macedonia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0uto_Orizari

In Poland, numbers are much smaller and they mostly live among more settled peoples but seem to still move around a lot. There was a gypsy apartment in the same klatka where I lived a few years and the inhabitants changed fairly frequently.

Close to where I once lived there were several... display houses. That is large houses put up by gypsies to look impressive but which weren't used as houses. In back there were something like (new) barracks and the people lived there, the houses, I assume...., are meant to show off the wealth of the family. These were nowhere near as garish as similar houses built in Romania but they were not built in any Polish style either.

A single large city might have two or three sub-groups who don't really have much to do with each other (or with foreign gypsies from Romania or now maybe Ukraine).

More about self-interest.

It's common across the whole subcontinent and in any society where resources are at a premium and chances in life are scarce.

Fear/mistrust of outsiders is generally a bad thing though; it's the insiders you need to worry about more.


They should have learned really that it's better to help a group than try to force them into a model that isn't theirs.


Yes. This happens. Have you seen any of the gypsy palaces in Poland? They're impressive in a delightfully garish way. Often the best houses in the town and a contrast to the nasty-ass houses that the locals build.

In the U.K. planning laws are crazy strict, so the Angloromani tend to express their taste inside rather than outside. A lot of gold leaf on the ceilings and porcelain ornaments everywhere. Some of their caravans are beautiful both inside and out too; the modern ones, ot the older ones which gypsies tend to restore as hobbies and only use on special occasions like the Appleby Fairl

They live in them? The ones I used to walk by were always empty (the people lived in separate structures in back).

The Romanian ones aren't even attached to the water or power mains as far as I can tell...

From what I understood from my grandparents and parents generation - it was somewhat of a cliche in Soviet times that Gypsies were rich.

My grandma told me that she once borrowed some funds from a Gypsy. When the time came to pay it back, the older Gypsy lady invited her to her apartment. She said she saw paintings with frames like they were from the Hermitage. Racks and racks of fur coats. Persian rugs.

Like the Jews, they had access to hard currency - probably because they would crowd all the foreign tourists flying into the Soviet Union or arriving by train.

They would sell people Rubles in exchange for Marks and Francs. They would buy whatever consumer items the tourists had on them - jeans, cassette players, watches - and then resell them to Soviet people at a 3-4X markup.

Anyway, back to my grandma's story. She said the same older woman would walk around outside in a tired old shawl and wearing galoshes. So the bit about Gypsies hiding their wealth rings kind of true to me.

When I asked my grandma how this Gypsy lady became so rich, she told me that they had been helping emigres drum up cash after the revolution and during the 20s and 30s. All the people that moved to Paris and New York, they sold their property to Jewish and Gypsy "fixers".

This is kind of puzzling to me - since I can understand why the Jews were useful, but I can't see why the Gypsies were. Jews have an international network - and are able to transfer money even between closed systems like the Soviet one and Western ones. You could give property to a family member in Moscow, and then receive payment from another family member in New York.

But how did the Gypsies facilitate this? I think what they did instead, is offered gold and precious stones in exchange for property. The Russian emigres could then trade this gold and stones for whatever they needed in emigration.

Most Jewish people very much do not.


Some, though by no means most, Eastern European Roma have a system where they memorise phone numbers.


Something that pretty well all affluent people do if they're decent. Flaunting wealth is not good.

That sounds like hawala.... not associated with Jews at all (I wouldn't be surprised if they have a similar system like that for themselves but I've never heard of them offering it to outsiders).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala