Gypsy Genealogy

by Paul Polansky

  A few weeks after the end of the 1999 war in Kosovo, I interviewed the leader of the Ashkali neighborhood in Gjakova, Jashar Kosova. He was an old man who asked me to find aid for his people. The local Albanians had turned against them because they were considered Gypsies and the Gypsies had supposedly collaborated with the Serbs during the war. In the end I was able to get them much needed food and hygiene products from UNHCR and their NGO partners. But before that, I was able to get this Ashkali’s oral history of his own people.

  He said his ancestors had come with the Turkish army about five generations ago to Kosovo. They had been “servants” to the Turks who along with the Albanians called them majupi.18 Yes, he remembered that his grandfather could speak Romanes, the Gypsy language, and he himself also knew some words. But living with Albanians, you were only allowed to speak Albanian. Hence, their original language had died out among most of his people. They now considered themselves Albanian.

  That reminded me of a book I had read in the British library by an English travel writer visiting Kosovo about 150 years ago. He wrote that many Gypsies were settling down in Albanian villages and losing their own language. He predicted that within a generation or two very few Gypsies would be speaking their original tongue in Kosovo.

  Although this Ashkali leader could not tell me much more, I did find in the British Library map room an old gazetteer about the town of Ashkale in eastern Turkey. According to the gazetteer, the population of Ashkale several hundred years ago was more than 70% Gypsy.

  A few years later on my visit to eastern Turkey to film the oral histories of the Gypsies in the area, I made a side trip to Ashkale looking to confirm my theory that the Kosovo Ashkale had originated there before migrating or being taken to Kosovo.

  Much to my surprise there were only seven Gypsy families living today in Ashkale and they were all new-comers. None had been born there. They had only arrived in the last few years.

  So what had happened to the large population of Gypsies that once lived in Ashkale? Obviously they had moved but they had not followed the Gypsy tradition of half leaving, half staying. Since the Ashkali leader in Gjakova remembered the oral history that his people had come with the Turkish army to Kosovo five generations ago, perhaps they were escaping or were being evacuated from Ashkale town which was in the path of the advancing Russian army during the war of 1870. Hence, as was their tradition, they either named themselves or were called by where they had last come from... Ashkale.

  Whatever the reason or the history I hope someday the story will be investigated further. Supposedly there is even more information about them in the book "Askal" by Nikolai Ostrogorski published in 1905, but to date I have yet to find this book.

  Ostrogorski published in 1905, but to date I have yet to find this book. The Greeks carried on calling themselves “Roman” and still do. The seat of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul has a notice in English that says it is the office of the Roman Patriarch. Thomas Acton.

  Istanbul has a notice in English that says it is the office of the Roman Patriarch. Thomas Acton.

  Majupi (maghup) is an old Turkish word meaning “settled Gypsy.” Although there are about 14 different kinds of Gypsies in Kosovo, the Kosovo ethnic Albanians in 1999 had only two words for all Gypsies: Majupi and Gabeli. The Gabeli were supposedly the nomadic Gypsies.

  Chapter 9 WE ARE GREEKS! After many years of living with Roma in Kosovo and Serbia, I returned to Spain where I had once lived for almost 30 years. My younger brother Ric was still living in Mojacar (Almeria), and still following the bullfights as an aficionado and photographer. During my visit, he insisted I join him for an annual bullfight festival in the small town of La Peza in the province of Granada.

  The village had no bullring. They just put up wooden bleachers around the village square and let the bull run loose. But what was more interesting to me than the annual bullfight was the fact many people in the crowd were Gitanos. I asked a Spaniard sitting next to me if many Gitanos lived in this town. He replied that maybe half the population was Gitanos.

  Before the bullfight started I sought out one of the oldest Gitano couples sitting across the plaza and went over to interview them. Because I knew a few words of Kalo, the old Gitano language of Spain, I was readily accepted by them.

  Of course, my first question was: when did your people arrive in this village? The old man was quite willing to talk. He said his ancestors had arrived in this village several hundred years ago. He thought they might have come over from Murcia, a rich agricultural province in southeast Spain. But for at least the last five generations his people had lived in this community. He said the profession of his ancestors was basket makers. But he had been the last one to carry on that tradition. His sons and grandsons now work in construction.

  I asked if he knew where his ancestors had come from before Murcia. He nodded. Then said they were Greeks. His grandfather has always told him they were really Greeks.

  I asked if he remembered any traditions. He told me his people had lost most of their traditions long ago. They were now more Andalusia than the Spanish. He said if I wanted to find Gitanos who still spoke good Kalo19 and still remembered their old traditions I had to go to Aragon where the Gitanos still stole their brides. His wife laughed.

  “I should have kidnapped her,” the old man said. “It would have been much cheaper.”

  The old couple invited me back to their home after the bullfight but unfortunately we had a three hour drive ahead of us.

  Later, on the same visit to Spain, I met a retired banker from Marseille. His Gitano ancestors had originated in the nearby town of Vera and he was now doing his Gypsy genealogy in his retirement. He showed me pages and pages of civilian records he had obtained from the local town hall when the Gitanos had to settle in villages and become registered in the 1780s under a decree from Carlos III. He gave me copies of his research which showed the name, age and profession of each Gitano. He was now retired in the town of his earliest documented ancestors. He had built a nice home and was now dedicated to his Gypsy genealogy.

  He also had an interesting oral history. From Vera and Cuevas del Almanzora in the province of Almeria his ancestors had gone to North Africa to sell horses to the French army. There they joined other Gitanos and founded small communities near Oran. After a few generations his ancestors moved to Morocco, passing themselves off as French. Later they moved to Marseille where he went to university and later became a bank manager.

  I asked if he knew anything about the Gypsies of North Africa, if any of them had migrated from Egypt across North Africa. He said all the Gypsies in North Africa had come from Spain like his ancestors. They all spoke Spanish and all cooked Andalucian food. He of course had heard that his ancestors had originally come from Little Egypt but ironically called themselves Greek. He couldn’t explain those stories.

  Ironically, I had heard the same stories a few years earlier in Calabria, in southern Italy. Because I often gave poetry readings in Italy and sometimes in Calabria, I had introduced myself to many Gypsies there. At first I sought out the oldest Gypsies to see if they had experienced the holocaust during WWII. In central and northern Italy I did find Roma and especially Sinti who had been rounded up and put in concentration camps near Bologna and Agnone. But in Calabria no Gypsy had been bothered by the war, except for a lack of food. No one arrested them or even threatened them. But why should they. They weren’t really Gypsies, they were Greeks. At least that is what their ancestors had called themselves. They were basket makers and blacksmiths and agricultural workers. They had the same marriage customs as the Spanish and Balkan Gypsies. One of their most prized traditions was keeping the wedding sheet as an heirloom to show everyone that the bride had been a virgin. In every home I visited I was shown the wedding sheet even if it were 30 or 40 years old.

  The first documented Gypsies to Spain arrived by ship to Barcelona in 1447. Upon arrival the Gypsies declared they were Greeks but called themselves Kale. In Calabria, Sic
ily and Sardinia I heard the same story from the old local Gypsies. Their ancestors were Greeks.20

  One September in Calabria I took part in the annual Italian-Gypsy festival at Riace, a small hilltop village near the southeast coast of Italy. For as far back as Gypsies in southern Italy could remember, their ancestors had been coming to celebrate the saint days of Cosmas and Damian, two early Christian Greek physician-martyrs whom the Gypsies believe could cure any physical aliment dealing with limbs. In early September a statue of the twin brothers is carried out of the local Catholic Church by the Italian congregation and solemnly carried halfway down the village hill to an intersection where Gypsies who have come from all over southern Italy wait to receive the statue to take to a nearby hermitage. Although the Italian procession is a solemn affair, almost like a funeral cortege, once the Gypsies receive the life-size stature their procession to the hermitage is lead by musicians and dancers celebrating as if it were a Gypsy wedding. Many Italians are involved in their cortege from the church but hundreds of Gypsies march in happiness and celebration once they receive the statue.

  Of course, the celebration reminded me of the Gypsies carrying the black Madonna at Saintes Maries de la Mer21 in southern France and also the annual weeklong celebration of the Balkan Gypsies at Letnica in south Kosovo, where tens of thousands of Muslin Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians venerate the black Madonna at the Orthodox Croatian church. Although Muslim since the Turks conquered Kosovo in the 14th century, some of the Gypsy women wore under their blouses a gold cross passed down generation after generation that their ancestors had worn to Letnica when they were Christian 600 years ago.

  All of these Gypsy celebrations resemble the worship of Kali, the black Hindu goddess in Old India. Once again, the Gypsies themselves do not really know the origin of their celebrations but it has not been difficult to see the parallel in Old India. For the Gypsies who celebrate in Riace and Letnica their ancestors were also involved in a Christian Orthodox tradition that probably came from their years of slavery at Mt. Athos in Greece. “We are Greeks” is still their call sign after 1,000 years.22

  19- In Catalunya a deep Catalan-Romani mixture is spoken, and in Portugal and Brazil a grammatical Calo/Kalo survives. Perhaps also in the Basque region. Thomas Acton.

  20- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 6, 1912/13 p.305: Catalan and Dutch records in 1459 and 1460 respectively registered the Gypsies as “Greeks”, i.e. what they called themselves.

  21- The ceremony goes back to the 16th century, Romani involvement only to the 19th. Thomas Acton.

  22 - Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 1, 1888-89, p. 35: an interesting article on Catalonia Gypsies and how they spoke Greek with a Morea accent back in 1540.

  Chapter 10 KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH COUSINS When I was filming my Roma oral histories in Bulgaria I traveled in an old caravan I had from my days in Spain. One day when I drove into a Roma neighborhood in a small town in Bulgaria I was surprised to be immediately surrounded by hundreds of Gypsies clamoring for a ride back to Spain.

  All pleaded that if I could take them it would save them 100 Euros in bus fare that they “always” had to pay. Always? Yes, every year it was their custom, their tradition, to go to Spain and work in the agricultural fields.

  For how long had they been doing this? One 80-year-old woman who said she had been born in Spain claimed her ancestors had always gone to Spain “for hundreds of years.”

  I couldn’t get over the connection except for the fact that in the Gitano Kalo language there were many Bulgarian loan words, such as “dosta” which meant “enough”. I don’t speak Kalo but I know a few words and I do have a Kalo dictionary. So I did see there was an obvious connection between these Balkan Gypsies and their “cousins” in Spain. 23

  Of course, many if not most of the traditions and customs of the Spanish Kale and the Bulgarian Roma are the same: homemade cures, bride stealing, wedding customs, etc, etc. But how in the olden days did the Bulgarian Gypsies get to Spain? Ship, wagon and walking were the obvious answers. Today it was by bus, hitchhiking or for the better off, an airplane. But why go such a long distance?

  “Our ancestors had relatives there,” was the common reply. “Today we can get a job picking grapes for 40 euros/day. The same job in Bulgaria pays seven euros, sometimes only five. You can make more in three months in Spain than you can in one year here.”

  And they were not talking about working in northern Spain which was 600 kilometers closer. They were all talking about southern Spain which is almost a 7,000 kilometer round trip. And then the story came back to “Greek” cousins the old timers had there.

  “Greeks?”

  “Of course. We are all Greeks. That’s where all Gypsies come from, originate from. It is a lie our ancestors came from India. That is a new story. The real story is that all Gypsies once came from Greece.”

  Actually, it was not only in this town of Peshtera that I heard this story. Not of Bulgarian Gypsies necessarily going every year to work in Spain like their ancestors but that every Roma I met in almost every Bulgarian town said their ancestors originally came from Greece.

  Perhaps an even better example of how Gypsies have kept in touch with unseen but not forgotten “cousins” is the remarkable experience I had in Erzurum a few years ago. I met a Posha Gypsy who admitted his ancestors called themselves Dom, but then went on to describe his profession as cock fighter.

  This really intrigued me because some Gitanos in the old neighborhood of Triana in Seville, Spain, still raised fighting cocks that their ancestors had brought with them from “Egypt.” I knew these Triana Gitanos well because several were also engaged in bullfighting, the assistants of well-known Spanish bullfighters. In the 1970s, I was a promoter of bullfights in southern Spain and North Africa, so I got to know these Triana bullfighters and later I even bought some of their fighting cocks. Like the famous bull breeders of Spain these Gitano cock breeders and cock fighters also kept blood records on their stock and often the records went back many decades if not centuries. But of course what intrigued me the most was that their ancestors had brought their cocks with them.

  In Erzurum, in eastern Turkey, I was not only told a similar story, that this Posha’s ancestors had arrived centuries ago with their fighting cocks from India, but that even today these Gypsies bought new breeding stock from “cousins” in India.

  The Indian fighting cock is so different from all other breeds that it is readily recognizable by its height, long neck and blue feathers.

  So once again I was faced with a long-distance tradition and contact. But after so many centuries, maybe more than 1,000 years? It doesn’t seem possible yet one of the strongest traditions among all Gypsies is keeping in touch with relatives. And going to visit them... or to return home.

  I once heard the story of a Rom visiting India who came across a camp of nomads who spoke Romanes. Now there has never been a caste of “Roma” in India and “Romanes” as we know it today is definitely not a language in present-day India. But this guy knew Romanes and these people spoke Romanes. He was so dumbfounded that he didn’t enquire as to where they or their ancestor had come from. Probably they were European Roma who had decided to “return” to the land of their ancestors.

  From my experience, Gypsies can cover a lot of ground in life... and in history!

  23 The Slavic word “dosta” (meaning “enough”) is used in almost every Romani dialect all over the world, which indicates the Roma spent a lot of time in the Balkans before moving on in many different directions.

  Chapter 11 GADJO AND THE RED SCARF Many so-called gypsyologists have wondered about the origins of the word gadjo which the Gypsies in the Balkans and many other countries call a non-Gypsy. According to my Indian caste books, the word gadjo originated with the Sansis caste as káĵá meaning “stranger.” If one word can identify the caste that the ancestors of many European Gypsies originally had contact with, then this is the word. Some Indian scholars contend that the word “káĵá or
gadjo” is actually a Bhantu word, more than a thousand years old, meaning stranger. But the Sansis are a sub caste of the Bhantu. Along with many other Sansis traditions that the Gypsies in European retain today, I believe the Sansis deserve the credit for passing on this linguistic tradition… along with the red scarf that a Gypsy bride is supposed to wear when she is taken from her own home to her new husband’s home on her wedding day.24

  And one last old Dom/Sansis wedding tradition (not practiced today in India but still seen at Roma weddings in the Balkans): the act of the groom and bride drinking a glass of water together… to honor the water-god of Old India.

  24- The Indian sociologist Mr. Sher Singh Sher claims the Sansis were originally Rajputs who were dispossessed of their lands in Rajasthan by the Muslim invaders in the 13th century. They then roamed about in Northern India eking out a miserable livelihood as pastoralists, field servants and genealogists of the landowning Jats. However, Gypsies with Sansis traditions were already in the Balkans by the 11th and 12th centuries.

  Chapter 12 PIEBALDISM It didn’ t take me long to realize that in almost every Gypsy community that I have lived in or visited, in more than 30 countries, there is often a family that is identified by a lock of snow-white hair, usually just above their forehead. And if you see them with their clothes off, you will notice white blotches on their skin, esp. in the chest area. In medical terms, this is called piebaldism. It is an inherited disease of inbreeding.

  When I became aware of this phenomenon in almost every Gypsy community, I wrote to a world expert on piebaldism Dr. Mats J. Olsson in Uppsala, Sweden. He replied that he had never heard of Gypsies having this disease, but he wasn’t surprised. In a normal population, one out of about 14,000 people have this disease. Yet among the Gypsies who seldom intermarry outside their “group” it obviously is much more prevalent.25