Terms for Romani people,nomads, travellers discussion thread.

[jamiephillips]

In England they are often referred to as "pikies" which I have heard comes from the archaic name for roads, "turnpikes" but how accurate this is I don't know?

Have also heard them called "bockers" in the midlands and apparently a bock is a spell or curse.

 

[oldborn]

Ah, makes sense. And typical for the Romanians to get pissed off by the name

Which reminds me of the ancient discussion between Macedonians and Greeks about the ethnicity of Alexander the Great and the likes. Oh, these Balkan countries crack me up every time...

Check this out, Greeks was ****ed off before couple of months

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I mean it could not get bigger than that, 28m high Alexander the Great in Skopje!

 

[Anonymous]

wow, some nice stereotypes you have all managed to gather so far..

Wonder how many more you can get in before this thread completely deteriorates.

 

[DenisMenchov]

I really like Emir Kusturica & the No Smoking Orchestra who incorporate a lot of elements from gypsy music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpO93jR4kL4

He also made a movie called "Time of the Gypsies" but I haven't seen it yet

Great movie, but main actors are not Roma, also grat movie about Roma people, but with Roma actors is ,,Black cat, White cat'' by Emir Kusturica.

 

[craig1985]

Oldborn should be in politics IMO

 

[RDV4ROUBAIX]

I dated a Hungarian Roma girl when I was younger, good thing at a young age, but they suffer from the same rapid aging affliction that Indian woman do. No matter how good looking they are in their twenties, once they hit their thirties it's all downhill, and quickly.

Tough subject for Europeans, especially Eastern Europe where they are treated as less than 2nd class citizens, unless they're playing a violin or singing on tv.

 

[DenisMenchov]

I dated a Hungarian Roma girl when I was younger, good thing at a young age, but they suffer from the same rapid aging affliction that Indian woman do. No matter how good looking they are in their twenties, once they hit their thirties it's all downhill, and quickly.

Tough subject for Europeans, especially Eastern Europe where they are treated as less than 2nd class citizens, unless they're playing a violin or singing on tv.

That is because they want to be treated like that, and I don't understand why but they like it.

 

[Maxiton]

That is because they want to be treated like that, and I don't understand why but they like it.

Hilarious. They used to say that here about African- Americans. For some reason it turned out not to be the case. Though I'm sure you can find some people, somewhere, who still claim it is.

 

[DenisMenchov]

Hilarious. They used to say that here about African- Americans. For some reason it turned out not to be the case. Though I'm sure you can find some people, somewhere, who still claim it is.

They go around and beg for money, but when they get a job offer they refuse. They get cribs for free, then sell them and go beck to street... They don't pay taxes, electricity or water, not to mention anything else... They can go to University without paying a cent, but they don't cause they are lazy... They quit school and go to street very early.

 

[Maxiton]

They go around and beg for money, but when they get a job offer they refuse. They get cribs for free, then sell them and go beck to street... They don't pay taxes, electricity or water, not to mention anything else... They can go to University without paying a cent, but they don't cause they are lazy... They quit school and go to street very early.

Why don't you post some reliable sources to back all that up?

 

[rhubroma]

Why don't you post some reliable sources to back all that up?

The problem, Maxiton, is that, unlike the American blacks, nobody forced gypsies to live that way. It's interesting how Hugo romantically portrays the gypsy girl Esméralda in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the way in which contemporary Europe views them.

In Italy they live in shanty make-shift communities on the margins of the cities, are street beggars and play music in the piazzas and subways. They don't bath or wash their clothes (which they have picked form the trash or their black markets), or at least very rarely thus they smell, don't send their children to school, though they have every right to and, unfortunately, often make their young children (I'm talking 6, 7 year olds) go begging or playing music on the metro for them. They are extremely dirty with regards to the waste they produce, which has turned their camps in the fields and along rivers into environmental disasters. They don't participate in or go by our code of legal prescrits and civil conduct, even while living among us. They are, by and large, un-presentable in the retail job market and in other sectors, given that a certain aesthetic standard of cleanliness and dress makes them incompatible with contemporary society. In fact, historically speaking, their world hasn't evolved, I'm not saying for better or for worse, just that it hasn't. Period.

I'm not sure if all the gypsies, roms and others all have this same belief, however, religiously I know that they believe they are the descendants of Lilith the primordial woman and first wife of Adam, who was created before Eve, according to ancient Babylonian and early Hebrew lore, and, as such, were not cast into the bondage of original sin when subsequently Adam and Eve disobeyed God. For this reason the gypsies believe that they are a type of superior race, and that this legitimizes their right to thievery as pickpockets to all of us, the sinners.

Astounding as this may sound, it's true. Now none of this justifies of course what the Nazis did to them, or their maltreatment in any way, however, any comparison with the Africans as you have done is a misguided metaphor. Nobody forced them into slavery, to move out of their original land, though how could that be given that they are essentially nomadic, to not in short evolve into the mainstream world. They have always regarded themselves as separate and have no intention of becoming like us.

This only makes the situation in Europe with regard to what to do and how to treat them more problematical. And if you don't know what I'm talking about then come to the northern outskirts of Rome, where I live, and about a couple of kilometers from my place you'll find a community of roms, which, I'm told used to be within several hundred meters until a couple of decades ago the developers had the authorities move their camp further out. In any case, theirs is a situation for which it is just as easy to arrive at incomprehension as it is at hypocrisy; the bottom line though is that there are no easy or readily apparent solutions. They are a case for which the only absolute thing is that it exists.

And it's not pleasant.

 

[nobilis]

Where I live in Bordeaux, there are plenty of them. And they live in old houses, in very bad and non-hygienic conditions.

In Lebanon, there are still many of them who live in tents. They're mainly called Arabs or Nomads. Few of them are integrated in the society. I've been told that they all have the same origins as the ones in Europe but i'm not sure about that.

 

[jens_attacks]

romanians.....

 

[bicing]

They go around and beg for money, but when they get a job offer they refuse. They get cribs for free, then sell them and go beck to street... They don't pay taxes, electricity or water, not to mention anything else... They can go to University without paying a cent, but they don't cause they are lazy... They quit school and go to street very early.

I know of Polish people who are like that.
I know of Australians who are like that.
I know of Swiss who are like that.

So you are a racist.

 

[Maxiton]

<snipped for brevity>

And it's not pleasant.

Do you own a mirror? You really ought to take a look at yourself.



A BRIEF ROMANI HOLOCAUST CHRONOLOGY
Ian Hancock


1890 Conference organized in Germany on the Zigeunergeschmeiss ("Gypsy scum"). Military empowered to regulate movements of Gypsies.

1899 The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance is established, and documents begin to be collected on Romani history, and on the Gypsy population in Germany. The Bavarian police create a special "Gypsy Affairs Unit" in the same year.

1909 A policy conference on "The Gypsy Question" is held, and the recommendation made that all Gypsies be branded with easy identification.

1920 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, introduce the notion of "lives unworthy of life," suggesting that Gypsies should be sterilized and eliminated as a people. This notion, with the same name, is incorporated into Nazi race theory in 1933.

1922 (And throughout the 1920s): All Gypsies in German territories are to be photographed and fingerprinted.

1926 A July 16 law is directed at controlling the "Gypsy plague." This treatment is in direct violation of the terms of the Weimar Constitution.

1927 In Bavaria, special camps are built to incarcerate Gypsies. Eight thousand Gypsies are processed in this way.

1928 All Gypsies are placed under permanent police surveillance. Professor Hans Gunther publishes a document in which he claims that "it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe." More camps are built to contain Gypsies.

1930 Recommendation made that all Gypsies be sterilized.

1933 Nazis introduce a law to legalize eugenic sterilization. This is specifically named as written to control "Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color," these latter the descendants of the unions between African soldiers and Europeans from the period of the 1914-1918 War.

1934 Gypsies are being selected from January onwards for sterilization by injection and castration, and being sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. Two laws issued in this year forbid Germans from marrying "Jews, Gypsies and Negroes."

1935 Gypsies become subject to the restriction of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor. Marriage with white people is forbidden. Criteria defining who is Gypsy are exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group.

1938 Between June 12th and 18th, Zigeuneraaufraumungswoche ("Gypsy clean-up week") takes place, when hundreds of Gypsies throughout Germany and Austria are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned. Gypsies are first targeted population to be forbidden to attend school. Himmler’s recommendation that certain Roma be kept alive in a compound under the Law for the Protection of Historic Monuments for anthropologists to study, is ridiculed and never implemented.

1939 Nazi party decree states that "the aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the German nation, then the prevention of racial mixing." The Office of Racial Hygiene issues a statement saying "All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population."

1940 The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place in January of this year, when 250 Romani children are used as guinea pigs to test the cyanide gas crystal, at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Employment of any kind is forbidden to Gypsies in this same year.

1941 Gypsies are the first targeted population to be forbidden to serve in the army. Eight hundred Roma are murdered in one action on the night of December 24 in the Crimea. On July 31of this year, Heydrich, "Head of the Reich Main Security Office and leading organizational architect of the Nazi Final Solution," puts the machinery of the Endlosung into operation with his directive to the Einsatzkommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients." The Holocaust begins.

1944 In the early hours of the August 1, four thousand Roma are gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in one mass action, remembered by survivors as Zigeunernacht.

1945 By the end of the war, between 70% and 80% of the Romani population had been annihilated by Nazis. No Roma were called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, and no one came forth to testify on their behalf. No war crimes reparations have been paid to the Roma as a people.

1950 First of many statements over the years to follow, made by the German government, that they owe nothing to the Romani people by way of war crimes reparations.

1992 Germany sells Romani asylum seekers back to Romania for $21 million, and begins shipping them in handcuffs on November 1. Some Roma commit suicide rather than go. The German press agency asks western journalists not to use the word "deportation" in their coverage of this, because that word has "uncomfortable historical associations."


http://romaniroots.webs.com/

http://www.romaniworld.com/

http://www.radoc.net/

http://www.coe.int/AboutCoe/media/interface/publications/roms_en.pdf

http://www.eu-romani.org/

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/health/focus/roma/events/elephant_20091201

http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/articles/future-roma-rights-20011101

 

[El Pistolero]

He never denied the Romani Holocaust. I don't understand what you're trying to point at with that post.

Sadly in today's society if you say something negative against a certain group of people you're automatically a "racist", a "bigot" or what ever... Even if it's completely true. I wish it wasn't true that the Roma people are overly represented in the crime rates of the Netherlands, but it is.

http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/KST133324.pdf

 

[Zam_Olyas]

He never denied the Romani Holocaust. I don't understand what you're trying to point at with that post.

Sadly in today's society if you say something negative against a certain group of people you're automatically a "racist", a "bigot" or what ever... Even if it's completely true. I wish it wasn't true that the Roma people are overly represented in the crime rates of the Netherlands, but it is.

http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/KST133324.pdf

i agree. i once saw a programme made by bbc about gypsy which i thought was interesting., of course i didnt BELIEVE everything that was said on that programme. #must be something to do winter or the off season coz i am startin to agree with the pistol on lotsa things

 

[ramjambunath]

i agree. i once saw a programme made by bbc about gypsy which i thought was interesting., of course i didnt BELIEVE everything that was said on that programme. #must be something to do winter or the off season coz i am startin to agree with the pistol on lotsa things

Panorama, the begging mafia?

From stories here, I can say that it is very real.

 

[Zam_Olyas]

Panorama, the begging mafia?

From stories here, I can say that it is very real.

not panorama, of that i am fairly certain.

 

[ramjambunath]

Ah, I saw a Panorama about that last month.

 

[Zam_Olyas]

Ah, I saw a Panorama about that last month.

oh ok, the one i saw was in 2009. Some gypsies there admit their thieving ways, like it was in their blood. It was kinda uk specpific. I do think the romani/gypsy pickpockets/thieves in italy are just as organised as a good crime family.

 

[rhubroma]

Do you own a mirror? You really ought to take a look at yourself.



A BRIEF ROMANI HOLOCAUST CHRONOLOGY
Ian Hancock


1890 Conference organized in Germany on the Zigeunergeschmeiss ("Gypsy scum"). Military empowered to regulate movements of Gypsies.

1899 The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance is established, and documents begin to be collected on Romani history, and on the Gypsy population in Germany. The Bavarian police create a special "Gypsy Affairs Unit" in the same year.

1909 A policy conference on "The Gypsy Question" is held, and the recommendation made that all Gypsies be branded with easy identification.

1920 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, introduce the notion of "lives unworthy of life," suggesting that Gypsies should be sterilized and eliminated as a people. This notion, with the same name, is incorporated into Nazi race theory in 1933.

1922 (And throughout the 1920s): All Gypsies in German territories are to be photographed and fingerprinted.

1926 A July 16 law is directed at controlling the "Gypsy plague." This treatment is in direct violation of the terms of the Weimar Constitution.

1927 In Bavaria, special camps are built to incarcerate Gypsies. Eight thousand Gypsies are processed in this way.

1928 All Gypsies are placed under permanent police surveillance. Professor Hans Gunther publishes a document in which he claims that "it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe." More camps are built to contain Gypsies.

1930 Recommendation made that all Gypsies be sterilized.

1933 Nazis introduce a law to legalize eugenic sterilization. This is specifically named as written to control "Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color," these latter the descendants of the unions between African soldiers and Europeans from the period of the 1914-1918 War.

1934 Gypsies are being selected from January onwards for sterilization by injection and castration, and being sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. Two laws issued in this year forbid Germans from marrying "Jews, Gypsies and Negroes."

1935 Gypsies become subject to the restriction of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor. Marriage with white people is forbidden. Criteria defining who is Gypsy are exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group.

1938 Between June 12th and 18th, Zigeuneraaufraumungswoche ("Gypsy clean-up week") takes place, when hundreds of Gypsies throughout Germany and Austria are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned. Gypsies are first targeted population to be forbidden to attend school. Himmler’s recommendation that certain Roma be kept alive in a compound under the Law for the Protection of Historic Monuments for anthropologists to study, is ridiculed and never implemented.

1939 Nazi party decree states that "the aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the German nation, then the prevention of racial mixing." The Office of Racial Hygiene issues a statement saying "All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population."

1940 The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place in January of this year, when 250 Romani children are used as guinea pigs to test the cyanide gas crystal, at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Employment of any kind is forbidden to Gypsies in this same year.

1941 Gypsies are the first targeted population to be forbidden to serve in the army. Eight hundred Roma are murdered in one action on the night of December 24 in the Crimea. On July 31of this year, Heydrich, "Head of the Reich Main Security Office and leading organizational architect of the Nazi Final Solution," puts the machinery of the Endlosung into operation with his directive to the Einsatzkommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients." The Holocaust begins.

1944 In the early hours of the August 1, four thousand Roma are gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in one mass action, remembered by survivors as Zigeunernacht.

1945 By the end of the war, between 70% and 80% of the Romani population had been annihilated by Nazis. No Roma were called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, and no one came forth to testify on their behalf. No war crimes reparations have been paid to the Roma as a people.

1950 First of many statements over the years to follow, made by the German government, that they owe nothing to the Romani people by way of war crimes reparations.

1992 Germany sells Romani asylum seekers back to Romania for $21 million, and begins shipping them in handcuffs on November 1. Some Roma commit suicide rather than go. The German press agency asks western journalists not to use the word "deportation" in their coverage of this, because that word has "uncomfortable historical associations."


http://romaniroots.webs.com/

http://www.romaniworld.com/

http://www.radoc.net/

http://www.coe.int/AboutCoe/media/interface/publications/roms_en.pdf

http://www.eu-romani.org/

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/health/focus/roma/events/elephant_20091201

http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/articles/future-roma-rights-20011101

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I meant unpleasant in the fact that there is no solution to the rebus, because having hundreds of thousands of people who live on the fringes of civilization that way and who have no intention of living differently, is a social problem of immense proportions, but for which there is no apparent solution our society can provide. In fact we are woefully unprepared to treat such a matter, as evidinced by the only "resolutions" our world, in all its infinite humanity and enlightenment, has ever come up with; which are the infamous ones you mention above. I also stated that maltreating roms, as if it even needs to be mentioned, isn't right and is just criminal. But so too is minority abuse and pickpocketing bearing in mind relative proportion.

I don't need to look at myself in a mirror, or, at least, not in this case. There is just more to this history than the brutality and barbarism you cite. These are the most glaring and painful aspects of it without a doubt, however, there is also everyhting I mentioned above and this is what is being lived presently.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

History is not black and white.

Many ghettoized or isolated groups have lived on the fringes of society for time immemorial, and the Roma and their offshoots are one of these groups. They made convenient scapegoats in times gone by, and they still can now. There are of course many Roma who live in these seemingly closed communities, living the same itinerant lifestyle, but there are others who have married or moved out of the lifestyle into wider society. And among those I can count some of my own ancestry.

What we need to remember is that this 'lifestyle' is for many not a choice. For some maybe it is a stylistic choice, but for many it is not. Certainly it wasn't choice that started many of the actions that have caused these stereotypes to develop, but simply a way for a poorly-educated, ostracised community to survive. Habits, customs and traditions can be hard to break, especially in an community which is ostracised, because that makes the bond to that community stronger. And certainly, some of those customs and traditions, they should be hard to break. I would be upset if the Romani language, for example, would cease to be, and some of the handicrafts and music are great traditions that deserve to live on.

 

[rhubroma]

History is not black and white.

Many ghettoized or isolated groups have lived on the fringes of society for time immemorial, and the Roma and their offshoots are one of these groups. They made convenient scapegoats in times gone by, and they still can now. There are of course many Roma who live in these seemingly closed communities, living the same itinerant lifestyle, but there are others who have married or moved out of the lifestyle into wider society. And among those I can count some of my own ancestry.

What we need to remember is that this 'lifestyle' is for many not a choice. For some maybe it is a stylistic choice, but for many it is not. Certainly it wasn't choice that started many of the actions that have caused these stereotypes to develop, but simply a way for a poorly-educated, ostracised community to survive. Habits, customs and traditions can be hard to break, especially in an community which is ostracised, because that makes the bond to that community stronger. And certainly, some of those customs and traditions, they should be hard to break. I would be upset if the Romani language, for example, would cease to be, and some of the handicrafts and music are great traditions that deserve to live on.

I agree with everything you said.

How is it that humans believe they have any choice over there lives, when they didn't even have the choice to exist? Where? And under which circumstances?

This is what the philosophers have pondered when attempting to reason between the power of "choice" and "ineluctable destiny." Lot is simply one of the ineffable aspects of our existence.

 

[L'arriviste]

History is not black and white.

Many ghettoized or isolated groups have lived on the fringes of society for time immemorial, and the Roma and their offshoots are one of these groups. They made convenient scapegoats in times gone by, and they still can now. There are of course many Roma who live in these seemingly closed communities, living the same itinerant lifestyle, but there are others who have married or moved out of the lifestyle into wider society. And among those I can count some of my own ancestry.

What we need to remember is that this 'lifestyle' is for many not a choice. For some maybe it is a stylistic choice, but for many it is not. Certainly it wasn't choice that started many of the actions that have caused these stereotypes to develop, but simply a way for a poorly-educated, ostracised community to survive. Habits, customs and traditions can be hard to break, especially in an community which is ostracised, because that makes the bond to that community stronger. And certainly, some of those customs and traditions, they should be hard to break. I would be upset if the Romani language, for example, would cease to be, and some of the handicrafts and music are great traditions that deserve to live on.

I agree with a lot of this. This thread has - perhaps inevitably - turned into a "Roma problem discussion" rather than "Roma discussion". Moreover, as I said upthread, most of the "travellers" in the region where I was raised were of Irish origins and did not - as far as I know - do flamenco and balkana music, so the thread is also a bit narrow.