Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  It is not really known how the enslavement began. One theory is that the Gypsies came over as chattels of the invading Tartars who made their way along the northern-Crimean route into Moldavia. That is, they were already slaves when they appeared in the principalities and, abandoned on the battlefields by the defeated Tartars, they remained to serve their new Hungarian and Romanian masters. (No explanation is offered for the fact that the Tartars left no such impedimenta in the other Central and East European countries they attacked.) Gypsies were always slaves, it was furthermore claimed; they came from a pariah class in India; slavery was in their blood. Such analysis was elaborated on, especially by Romanian historians: slavery was seen to be an improvement on the Gypsies’ previous station (about which, even now, nothing has been firmly established), because here at least they were usefully integrated into society. A certain Dr. Wickenhauser, who visited the principalities in the nineteenth century, corroborated the view of earlier and later Romanian historians: Gypsies “wished to become slaves, because this would raise them, if not to the level of human being, at least to a par with good, domestic working animals.”

  Some Gypsies did manage to remain free, simply by keeping out of sight. Anyone who could not name his or her master when stopped in the road automatically became property of the Crown. Foreign Gypsies who were just passing through—tourists, let us say—were routinely rounded up. The fact was, though, that in legal terms all Gypsies were construed as foreigners of a kind: within the principalities, claims on land not only determined social and political privilege but were the basis of citizenship itself. To be “native” (pamintean) in the principalities meant literally to be the owner of a piece of land (pamint). Peasants could own land but Gypsies could not. As Harghita County’s public prosecutor had pointed out, some Gypsies now did qualify to receive land—if they could prove uninterrupted attachment to a cooperative for a minimum period of three years. But the elaborate bureaucratic hurdles erected against them (along with the famous “lost application”) persuasively suggest that such provisions were—and are—hollow.

  Current attempts to evict them have much to do, as always, with the scramble for land. And so one has to wonder: are the Gypsies really nomadic by “nature,” or have they become so because they have never been allowed to stay?

  The fate of Romanian Gypsies has been linked to that of Romanian peasants ever since they first shared the same patch of ground six hundred years ago. Together peasants and slaves constituted the lowest stratum of feudal society—creating the impression that there was little to choose from between slavery and serfdom. Indeed, despite the laws against miscegenation, there was a good deal of mingling between them. (Confronted with a particularly racist Romanian, I found that I reached easily for this—to them wildly insulting—explanation of the fact that Romanians on the whole are darker than their Slavic neighbors.)

  But only Gypsies were human chattels who could be separated and sold off at whim, like farm animals. At first glance the documents seemed to be medieval shopping lists. To Corina’s amazement, and to mine, that is more or less what they were. Shopping lists, or records of exchange rates: one Gypsy for one pig; a team of Gypsies for a team of oxen or horses; a newlywed couple for a few barrels of wine; one man for a garden or for the use of garage space; one Gypsy girl fetched “a pair of copper pots,” and another, a defective one perhaps, went for a jar of honey. It was even possible to sell “half a Gypsy,” which meant a woman with half of whatever children she would bear: proof that, despite other laws that expressly prohibited it, Gypsy families were systematically sundered.

  As their value increased there were fewer and fewer unclaimed Gypsies in the principalities, and so the Crown kept up its stock by importing them. They were brought over in large quantities from south of the Danube specifically to be used as forced labor—a practice that alone explains why Romania is still home to by far the greatest number of Gypsies (some 2.5 million) in any single country.

  One hot late summer afternoon in the library of the Nicolae Jorga Institute I sat reading Mihail Kogalniceanu’s 1837 treatise on Gypsy slaves. This dark place, with its smell of old straw and its silent, even-handedly unhelpful librarians, did not seem a likely venue for revelations of any kind. But suddenly I realized something, perhaps something obvious. It seemed inescapable that the trade in Gypsies represented a turning point: from the moment that they were imported en masse, the prejudice against them was sealed. The term “Gypsy” (and its regional variations) no longer signified a broad ethnic group or race—or even, as it sometimes had, a particular profession, such as musician or metalworker. For the first time it referred collectively to a social class: the slave caste.

  Some masters might even give their Gypsies a bit of land to instill in them a love of agriculture [Kogalniceanu wrote], or—if there was no more field work to be done—allow them to play their music … but they lost their liberty … so that in the two principalities the name Cigan has become a synonym for slave.

  Were the violence and hatred against Gypsies today the legacy of slavery—along, perhaps, with their own difficulty in overcoming low expectations? The idea was certainly widely accepted in relation to others with a similar history, such as African Americans. But then how had the episode of Gypsy slavery been overlooked or dismissed by so many historians?

  Later the same day, after the Institute closed, I walked through a long, leafy park and past Bucharest’s own replica of the Arc de Triomphe and into the city center—the hotels and tourist offices in Bucharest’s smoggy Megheru Boulevard. Here I ran into Nicolae Gheorghe, the Gypsy sociologist and activist who had pointed me towards Potra and the Nicolae Jorga Institute in the first place. As usual he looked exasperated—already wearied by my anxious face, full of questions that only he could answer. But now he opened up. Not only did he agree with this hypothesis; shoulders raised and gesticulating with both hands or pausing to restrain a rogue lock of lank black hair, in the middle of that busy boulevard he offered an interesting proof.

  “Take the Rudari,” Nicolae said. The Rudari were slave woodworkers (who also did gold-sifting and bear-training), and though they no longer necessarily whittle wooden tools, they still constitute a large Gypsy grouping in Romania. From the time they were first imported from south of the Danube, Nicolae explained, the Rudari, like other bondsmen, were called Gypsies. But they spoke no Romani, and apparently they never had. They shared no customs with the Roma, such as traditional dress or pollution codes. So were the Rudari Gypsies? Are their descendants? Absolutely: they were slaves.

  The terms “Gypsy” and “slave” were interchangeable; they described a particular social caste. For example, in the eighteenth century, even though they were not legally recognized, marriages between serfs and slaves were on the rise, and it was written into the law that “the Moldavian who would marry a Gypsy woman would become a slave and the Romanian woman who marries a Gypsy man will herself become a Gypsy.” And once the Gypsies had become a social group it was only a matter of time before they would become a “social problem”—with all the usual connotations of innate criminality.

  Then too, ideas of criminality were also changing. After my first visits to the burnt-out villages I had become increasingly curious about the Ursari—or bear-trainers, as the despised Gypsies of Bolintin Deal were called. With my interest aroused, I found I kept stumbling on related material: a series of advertisements in the Herald Tribune, for example, placed by an animal-rights group. One carried a photograph of a bear cub harnessed and with a chain through its nose, and called for donations to help stamp out the practice in Turkey and Greece (the campaigners were lobbying for the bears, not against the trainers; there was no mention of Gypsies, their likely keepers).

  Poster announcing a slave auction in Wallachia: “FOR SALE, a prime lot of GYPSY SLAVES, to be sold at auction at the Monastery of St. Elias, 9 May 1852, consisting of 18 men, 10 boys, 7 women and 3 girls, in fine condition.” (photo credits 4.7)

  To the p
eople of Central Europe and the Balkans, these brightly colored, thoroughly mangy troupes of bears and monkeys must have been a wonderful sight in the grueling last years of communism. However pathetic, they were also emblems of a past that would not be modernized or made “productive” in the Stalinist sense. And perhaps they supplied a rare avenue for mockery: for some reason, in Ceausescu’s Romania people continued to pay money to see clapping monkeys and dancing bears.

  I had since met some Balkan Ursari who still lived with and off their bears, and now, in my diggings in rural Romanian archives, I found mention of Ursari slaves. It seems that the ruling princes of Wallachia and Moldavia always possessed a good supply of the families who traveled with their bears and monkeys, collecting for the Crown.

  Animal dancing is now dying out from a combination of pressure for animals’ rights, war (the bears were big earners in Yugoslavia), and loss of interest among young Ursari. Nevertheless, in some parts of the Balkans you can still see them, loping along roads to the old tune of fiddles, concertinas, and bells. In Jagoda, a small wooded hamlet near Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria, there are a couple of dozen shaggy brown bears, tethered to trees around which they churn mud into moats. But the Ursari and their bears only stopped here in winter, when they’d meet to plan their summer routes and to squabble over the Black Sea resorts of Varna and Burgas; by Easter they were on the road.

  Campaigners decry the cruel treatment of dancing bears. But the bears I saw, bought—or rescued—from East European zoos, were clearly loved by their keepers. As the primary bread-winners, and expensive to replace, they were also the best-fed members of the clan. Natasha, one of the Jagoda Ursari, wore a mismatched pair of cheap rubber slippers that had cracked open and had been “darned” with copper wire. That’s how careful they were of their possessions; and that’s how poor they were. Nevertheless, and though the Ursari in Jagoda indignantly denied it, the Pavlovian training consists of burning the paws of cubs to the sound of music, and offering tidbits of meat. The campaigners also believe that the dancing itself is degrading—the equivalent, say, of forcing men to perform for crowds on all fours.

  Indeed, only 150 years ago, Gypsies were themselves dancing bears of a kind. Del Chiaro, the Italian secretary to Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, wrote in his memoirs about entertainments involving Gypsies:

  In some courts they were painted with soot and with their hands behind their backs, standing before a bowl of flour in which a few coins were hidden, they were obliged to duck for the coins with their teeth.… Or else they would be made to catch in their mouths, while running, an egg suspended in the air … or to remove from a candle a coin lodged in the wax, without extinguishing the flame. Naturally they burned their lips and hair.

  Gypsy slaves were made into clowns, but they were also status symbols, and an essential part of any halfway decent dowry. The haul of Mariuta, the niece of the very same Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, would have been typical for a society wedding: she received from him “Mogosoaia village together with the land; the vineyards, the lake and the mills, and 19 Gypsy families.” Without Gypsies even the fairest among well-born maidens might never wed. A letter dated 1785, from Zmaranda Zalariu, the wife of a nobleman, was sent to Prince Alexandru loan Mavrocordatos, begging “with tears in her eyes” for a special dispensation of Gypsies so that her only daughter might be “saved” from spinsterhood. The merciful Prince complied, with a deed of four Gypsy families. Similarly, Gypsies were passed from father to son. The will of Prince Brâncoveanu provided that: “The Gypsies … from Potlogi village shall go to Constantin [his son], the ones in Mogosoaia village to Stefan; those in Obilesti village to Radu, and the ones in Doicesti village shall be for Matei.”

  Natasha, a member of one of the many Ursari families who spend their winters in the wooded village of Jagoda, in central Bulgaria, before taking their bears on the road in spring. Behind her is Todor, named for the former dictator. 1992 (photo credits 4.5)

  At work in the center of Sofia, Bulgaria, 1992 (photo credits 4.6)

  Though not regarded as quite human, Gypsies nevertheless made good concubines. A pretty girl could fetch a much higher price than a merely hard-working one, or than even a fit and skilled young man. Whereas it was illegal to prostitute one’s slaves (the punishment for the boyar was incarceration in a salt mine), it was acceptable to give the girls away. In addition to his daughter’s dowry, a nobleman might welcome his new son-in-law with a separate gift of “a small Gypsy girl.” Nothing of the kind could have befallen a peasant girl, who along with her family was attached to—and in a sense safeguarded by—the land.

  Masters always had the power to manumit their slaves, but in special cases the Crown established freedom as a right. If a slave had served as a concubine, and her master had failed to free her before his death, she and her children automatically walked free. This law, which provided such excellent incentive for homicide, was no doubt unknown to the child concubines. It was more likely that, in her capacity as a mistress, the girl would not usefully outlive the needs of her master.

  The diary of Erimiten von Gauting, a German tourist who passed through Craiova on his way to Constantinople in 1836, gives a chilling account of such relationships:

  In the evening when the heat went down, I went out into the city, and there I saw a scene that I could not have thought of, not even in my imagination. Along with a bunch of animals, the wife of some boyar had a few gipsies, among them a very beautiful girl of 15, whom she sold to a man for two gold coins.

  The girl was to be taken at the very moment that I passed in front of the miserable house where she stood with her family, crying. Her parents, brothers and sisters were all crying, but still she was wrested from the arms of her mother and taken away.

  I went up to the barbarian man and told him that I would buy her back, but he was very rich and laughed at my offer of 50 gold coins. He bragged that he had bought her for his pleasure … and if she would not obey him he would beat her until she did. He told me that if I wanted to buy gipsies, he had 500, and among them some very beautiful girls. He said he wouldn’t mind selling those ones as they had already served him, but with this girl he was really in love and could not part for any price.

  I went to the police and have gone and talked everywhere, but they all laugh at my stupidity: “Gipsies are our property and we can do with them what we like.”

  In Bucharest, von Gauting saw many Gypsy beggars with their hands cut off and heard that their masters were responsible: “One of these told me that his father had killed his master who had wanted to cut off his hands and for that his father was hanged.

  “Sometimes the boyars would allow their children some ‘fun’ by whipping these begging gipsies,” von Gauting concludes his Craiova diary, “and they claim that this is part of their daily education. Parents kill and maim as they please; children are taught to take their pleasures from very early on. The gipsies are treated worse than animals.”

  More than 150 years later, one still sees neatly maimed beggar children (not just Gypsies) in the streets of Bucharest. But now the police and the directors of the main children’s shelter in the capital routinely claim that it is the children’s parents, always Gypsies, who mutilate them, to improve their earnings (or, as one policeman explained to me, to “give them a profession”). However, a Romanian reporter who was investigating the stump children in 1990 established that these little beggars were organized not by their fathers—in equipes voleuses, as the Francophile head of the children’s home referred to the Gypsy families—but under professional pimps. These pimps—sometimes Gypsies, sometimes not—also ran the child prostitutes at Bucharest Nord station; and for their trouble they kept them all in candy and glue.

  The uniform ignorance among Gypsies, even Romanian Gypsies, about their slave past was striking. Under Ceausescu, of course, history was deposed by myth. But the Gypsies may also feel that slavery—like their fate under the Nazis—is just another episode in a more or less conti
nuous narrative of persecution. Romanians knew nothing about it either. This is an indication of the status of Gypsies here and in the wider world: an indication of their invisibility.

  Near the Black Sea resort of Constanta lies the town of Mihail Kogalniceanu, the scene, in October 1990, of one of the first of the postrevolutionary purges of the Gypsy population. The residents of Mihail Kogalniceanu do not seem to know who Mihail Kogalniceanu was. He was an eloquent liberal statesman and an ardent and influential abolitionist. More than twenty-five years before emancipation in the principalities, he wrote:

  [Europeans] form philanthropic societies for the abolition of the slavery in America, even while in the bosom of their continent, in Europe, there are 400,000 Gypsies who are slaves and 200,000 others who are buried in the gloom of ignorance and of barbarism!

  One hundred and fifty years later, in the town named for the great man, slavery is gone, but the gloom of ignorance and barbarism persists.

  No Place to Go

  AN OBELISK IN the old center of Constanta—a four-hour drive from Bucharest—commemorates Ovid’s exile and death on the Black Sea. It was from here that the poet sent verses of appeal to Rome, describing the horrors of the land, its barbarity, its chill.

  Two thousand years later, Constanta’s oily beachfront gives way to its oily harborfront. Constanta was and is a major port town, and like all places with boat traffic it attracted not only regional transients and derelicts but an admixture of rank foreigners. The beach retains a seedy seaside charm; everyone was making the best of it—the old men listening to transistor radios on the promenade benches, the picnicking families on the pebbly sand, and the preening teenagers sprawled over the rocks of the jetty.