Genealogy /
Polish and gypsy traditions [140]
more about keeping property and land in the family
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).
