Although Ahmet’s assistant confirmed he was a “Gypsy”, upon our arrival in the musician’s neighborhood called Paradise all the men denied they were Gypsies. When I asked their race, they unanimously said they were “wedding musicians.” I tried to explain I wasn’t asking their profession but their race, their nationality. They said they were citizens of Turkey but their race was “wedding musicians”.
Since a member of my Romani film crew was also a part-time musician in Kosovo who often performed at weddings I asked if they could play some of their wedding music together. It didn’t take long to realize they played similar music and certainly looked and acted the same. In the end the local wedding musicians came to their own conclusion that my Romani assistant had to be one of them, somehow related. I then spoke a few words in Romanes to them: nak, kan, muj, bal. Their leader grabbed me by my shoulder and seriously asked: “How do you know our secret language?”
I asked: “What do you call your secret language?”
He replied: “Domaakí.”
Before leaving their village and their hospitality, I was also able to find out that their
ancestors were not only wedding musicians, but also blacksmiths. When we returned to Kosovo, the first thing I did was go online to see if there was such a language as Domaakí. There was! It was an official listed language and one of the world’s experts in Domaakí lived in Germany. I quickly contacted him (Matthias Weinreich) and found that Domaakí was mainly spoken in the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan. This German linguist had lived with these people, studying their language. They called themselves Dom and were wedding musicians and blacksmiths. Unfortunately, he said, the language was dying out. Perhaps only 300 people still spoke Domaakí.5The local Pakistanis had always considered the Dom as Gypsies so these low castes were now trying to assimilate and forget their old traditions including their language. However, this German linguist put me in email contact with one of the local Dom (Shaban Ali) who was a tourist guide. We exchanged several emails as I planned a trip to visit him and the Dom living in Hunza Valley.
4- The Kikans were a most northerly tribe [in Old India] and were celebrated for their horse breeding. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 2, p. 302, July 1908. Kikans are one of the two main divisions of Sansis. They are also known in India as rihluwalas as their women dance and sing rilhus, ditties or love-songs. Russell Vol. II, page 551.
page 551.
Ḍomaakí (Ḍo.) is the language of theḌóoma, a small ethnic minority scattered in extended family groups among larger communities in Northern Pakistan. By the members of their host communities these groups are commonly regarded as outsiders. In former times the Ḍóoma were traditionally working as blacksmiths, musicians and craftsmen. Nowadays they are also engaged in a variety of other professions. In almost all places of their settlement the Ḍóoma have long since given up their original mother tongue in favor of the surrounding Dardic Shina. Only in the Burushaski speaking area, in the former principalities of Nager and
In the meantime, I went back to an 1880 book called Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh by Major J. Biddulph, B.S.C., the former British political officer in Gilgit, to see what other customs and traditions from the Hunza Valley might still be practiced among the Roma I have lived with and interviewed.
To my surprise and amazement I found two Hunza Valley traditions that are still practiced by Roma in Turkey and the Balkans.
The first is the common cure for eye diseases and injuries: to squirt the milk of a breastfeeding mother into the damaged or infected eye. In Kosovo today among most Roma this is still the preferred cure for any eye problem.
The second tradition was even more widely spread: instead of paying a price to buy a bride, the custom is to pay for the milk a mother gave the bride when she was a baby. I found this Hunza Valley tradition still being practiced among Roma in Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and even by Albanian Gypsies who for centuries have called themselves Egyptian.
Unfortunately, I have yet to visit in person the Hunza Valley. With the beheading of several Americans by jihadists in Pakistan I regrettably have delayed my trip there. However, I was able to discover in the British Library map room in London that 1,000 years ago the Hunza Valley in view of the Himalayan snowcaps was part of China!
I hope before it is too late, someone will collect the DNA of the remaining Dom in Gilgit (the main city of the Hunza Valley) and compare it with the DNA of all the Gypsy communities living in view of the snow capped mountains in Kosovo, Turkey, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Spain where wedding musicians and blacksmiths still live!
Hunza (Gilgit District, Northern Areas of Pakistan), has Ḍo. survived until the present day. From a historical point of view Ḍo. is a language of the North Indian plains, affiliated to the Central group of NIA languages (Buddruss 1983). However, due to its long-standing separation from its place of origin and (still on-going and ever increasing) intense contacts with other languages Ḍo. has lost or transformed many of its Central group related features. This now places the language in many aspects much closer to its Dardic neighbours than to its Midland cousins. Presently Ḍo. counts less than 350 (mostly elderly) speakers – approx. 300 of them related to Hunza; around 40 related to Nager – and is thus to be. During his studies in Hunza Lorimer (1939, p. 7) was told that the ancestors of the Ḍóoma had come from Kashmir via Baltistan. A family history recorded by me in Nager also mentions a migration from Kashmir, but through Afghanistan, the Darel Valley and Gilgit. The German ethno-musicologist A. Schmid (1997, pp. 54–76) quotes a number of Hunza genealogies which suggest that the Ḍóoma had been arriving to the Burushaski speaking area over an extended period of time, as individuals or in small groups via Baltistan, Gilgit, Darel, Tangir, Punyal and even Kashghar. The language name is based on the self appellation of the speakers, which in its turn is connected to OIA ddōmba- “man of low caste living by singing and music” (T. 5570) > NIA “musician, craftsman, low caste person”. Another name used by some speakers when referring to their mother tongue is ddomaá, in analogy to Sh.ṣiṇaá “language of the Ṣiíṇ-people”. An extract from Matthias Weinreich’s research paper on the Domaakí language.
Chapter 2 MT. ATHOS AND MATEJEVAC One of the oldest Romani oral histories I heard was from a Kosovo refugee displaced by the 1999 war. Although he had lost his home and job during the war and had to take refuge in Serbia before returning to Kosovo, to seek a new life, he was an optimist man and believed his people still had a future, that despite the war and prejudice they would survive just as their ancestors always had in the past.
Although this Kosovo Kovachi Rom was an avid reader (Dostoevsky was one of his favorite authors), he didn’t believe the Roma had come from India just because he had read that story in a book. He believed his people had originated in India because his grandfather had told him that story.
According to his grandfather, his ancestors had traveled from India to Armenia looking for work. Then one day some men in black robes came to visit them and offered them jobs if they would change their religion. The Gypsies agreed and went with the black robes to Greece, to Mt. Athos, where they became construction workers building the monasteries. But their work was not paid. In fact, they were made slaves by the Orthodox church and from time to time they were sold to build other churches and monasteries throughout the Balkans. Some Roma escaped but the majority remained as slaves, owned by the Orthodox church.
Djepi was not sure how his ancestors arrived in Kosovo. He had heard they came from Greece as blacksmiths and in the end gained their freedom from the church after the Turks arrived.
Djepi ’s oral history made some sense to me. I had read about documents found in the monasteries in Mt. Athos which proved that Gypsies were there. And since I had also read that at one time Mt. Athos had the largest population of Gypsies anywhere in the world,6 and having visited Mt. Athos (from the sea) and had seen with my own eyes that Mt. Athos must have at one time been one of the largest construction sites in
Europe when the monasteries were being built, I believed Djepi’s story.7
But it wasn’t until I mov ed from Kosovo to Serbia in 2006 and bought a home in the small village of Knez Selo seven kilometers outside of Nish that I heard a similar story from the Roma community in the next village of Matejevac.
According to these Roma, their ancestors had been brought to Matejevac as slaves to build the nearby church. Well, the church turned out to be an 11th century Byzantine church on a high hill overlooking the Serbian village of Matejevac. The closest thing to the church was the Gypsy graveyard, and then their homes. Further down the hill were the Serbian homes.
From then on, whenever I visited a Byzantine monastery or church in the Balkans I often discovered that the closest homes were always a Gypsy community and that they usually remembered the same story; that their ancestors had been brought by monks as slave labor to build the local Byzantine monastery and/or church.
The story of the Romanian Gypsies not being freed from slavery until 1856 struck a bell with me. Most Gypsies in servitude in Romania at that time had been Orthodox Church property, and it was the church that mainly fought against the legislation that at last freed the Romanian Roma. 8 Was this then the trail that took the Gypsies throughout the Balkans, from Greece to Romania: to build the Orthodox religious sites from Mt. Athos through the Balkans to Romania? Certainly, Romania from the 15th century onwards always had the largest population of Gypsies anywhere in Europe.
6- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 3, p. 227, 1909
6- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 3, p. 227, 1909
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 2, 1923: in an article “on the origins and early migrations of the Gypsies” p. 167, a Georgian monk of Mount Athos writing about 1100 refers to the gypsies as wizards and famous rouges. By the end of the 14th century the Gypsies had established themselves widely throughout the Balkan provinces.
8- Only because the churches were allowed to hang onto their slaves 8/10 years after the nobles. Thomas Acton.
Chapter 3 THE SUN AS GOD In 1999, when I lived in the Kosovo UN Gypsy IDP camp by Obilich, I accidently collected my first oral history in the camp when I cursed the hot August sun.
For one instant our corner of the camp with screaming children and shouting parents became so quiet I could almost hear their hungry stomachs rumbling. Then, as if I were a child who had just broken the most expensive antique in a millionaire’s home, I was taken aside by a Gurbeti woman and told that I would have a life of bilatchi bah (bad luck) if I cursed the sun. She said: “We are big believers in the sun. We think it is the same as God.”
Since that time I have collected several Gypsy proverbs that many Kosovo Gypsies remembered from their ancestors about the sun. These are some of them:
When a Romani woman takes her bread out of the oven and it looks especially good, a neighbor might say, “It looks so good, the sun must have made it.”
If you hate someone, you can say, “I hope the sun kills you.”
When a child dies and a visitor asks about him, the mother may say, “He was as happy as the sun; his face was like the sun.”
If a Gypsy tries hard to do something, but fails and is saddened by that failure, you can say, “He cannot beat himself with the sun.”
If you hate someone, you can ask the sun to burn him.
Every evening the sun goes to its mother, every morning the sun is reborn.
If you want a crying child to shut up, you can yell out “zajdisalo,” but you can never use this word against the sun, only bad people do that.
If you always have bad luck, you must ask yourself, “Did I ever offend the sun?”
Gypsies love the sun as they love their own children.
If you want a Gypsy to promise he is telling the truth, you must get him to say, “Yes, I swear that on the sun.”
As with all of their traditions and customs, the Gypsies in our camp did not know the origin of these sayings about the sun. They only knew that it was one of their biggest sins to curse the sun. In most of my several hundred interviews with Gypsy survivors of WWII, they admitted their ancestors always swore their oaths on the sun, that the sun was the same as God.
So where did these sayings come from?
From my research, the most obvious place was Multan, the ancient capital of the Punjab and until 985 AD the site of one of the most famous sun temples in India. Historians and anthropologists should carefully consider Multan (today in southeastern
Pakistan) as the origin of one of the Gypsy Diasporas in the 10th century.
When gypsyologists in the 18th and 19th centuries traced the origins of European
Gypsies back to Old India many scholars believed that Multan was the area of origin since many
Gypsies in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Armenia and Turkey called themselves Multani (i.e. from
Multan). 9
However, after the Englishman Edward O’Brien of the Punjab Civil Service published “A
Glossary of the Multani Language” in 1881, many linguists immediately dismissed the idea of
the Gypsies originating from Multan because their language was so different from O’Brien’s book. But O’Brien’s “Multani” was nowhere known among its people by this name. It was usually called Jatki and was known as the language of the Jagdals or Jats. It had mainly an
agricultural vocabulary.10
Unfortunately, these linguists weren’t historians or anthropologists and so they missed
the fact that in and around Multan there were many different tribes and castes that didn’t
speak O’Brien’s “Multani”.
Better research would have revealed that in O’Brien’s day some of the tribal and caste
languages in and around Multan were Panjabi, Rajasthani and Gujarati, and some of these
dialects were somewhat associated with today’s European Gypsy tongues.11 There were few
countries in the world at that time with such an immense variety of languages as in Old India. Also overlooked by these linguists was the history of the Hindu Sun Temple in Multan
and its destruction in 985 AD.
Ever since Multan was conquered by Osiris, King of Egypt, as recalled by Herodotus, the
city maintained a link with Egypt. No one knows for certain who built the Sun Temple in Multan
but when the Karmathians (exiled Muslim fundamentalists from Egypt) took over the Punjabi
capital at the beginning of the 10th century AD, the Sun Temple was already a popular Hindu
pilgrimage site. Every year thousands of rich Hindi pilgrims from every corner of India made
their way to Multan to make offerings of gold and precious stones to the statue of the sun god
Mitra. Following the pilgrims from all over India were many poor pilgrims and beggars, not to
mention the hundreds of local beggars who permanently resided in Multan because of the
pilgrims. Begging in Hindu India (even today) was an honorable profession, since the beggar
was providing a shortcut to heaven for an alms giver.
Although the donations made to the Sun God in Multan provided the Egyptian
Karmathians with a substantial portion of their revenue, in the end they destroyed the Sun
Temple in 985 AD as an idol against their Muslim religion. The rich Hindi who lived in Multan
fled east to Bikaner. But it appears the poor mainly fled west to Kabul where they became
known as the Multani.
To this day the Brahmins of Bikaner remember the exodus of their ancestors with their
servants and others from Multan to Bikaner in 985 AD. And those poor castes that fled west
not only called themselves Multani but also said (according to their oral traditions) that they
came from “Little Egypt”; which I believe Multan was called since it was common practice in
those days for exiles such as the Karmathians to name their new abode after
their homeland. Today throughout central Asia and as far west as Georgia and Armenia and even in
eastern Turkey there are Gypsies who call themselves Multani and say that their ancestors
came from “Little Egypt.” Thus many Gypsies called themselves Egyptians long before their
migration into Europe.
9- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 1, 1888 in the article Turkish Gypsies. The Lui of Armenia call themselves Multani, after Multan (India) their original dwelling place.
10 - History of Multan by Dr. Ashiq Muhammad Khan Durrani, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan. 11- The Multan region in Old India was the only place where brides were bought. In all other places in Old India, a dowry was paid by the bride’s family to the groom’s family.
Chapter 4 THE NINE BROTHERS For some unknown reason, or just by pure coincidence, I have usually ended up living with or associating with Gypsies whose ancestors were blacksmiths. But it was in Kosovo, in the village of Preoce, where I heard in detail the story that all Kosovo Roma blacksmiths were descended from nine brothers. (Ashkali and Egyptian blacksmiths in the UN IDP camp in 1999 had already told me this story, handed down by their ancestors; but without details as if they were embarrassed to repeat it.)
Since these nine brothers couldn’t all make a living working in the same village, only one stayed while the rest spread out across Kosovo going to villages and cities where they usually were the only local blacksmith. When I asked when this had happen, I was told it occurred several hundred years ago after the Roma arrived in Kosovo.
Whenever I hear a story such as this one, I add it to my list of questions I always ask when making an interview with Gypsies in other countries. So when I filmed my oral history interviews in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia, I got the same answer. All their Gypsy blacksmiths were descended from nine brothers.
Gypsy Genealogy Page 2
