Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Rom couple in Bohemia, holding their wedding portrait, 1991 (photo credits 2.2)

  But for half their thousand-year migratory history there is hardly a useful mention of the Gypsies in contemporary accounts—and they never kept records of their own. Dark looks didn’t suggest India as the original homeland in the minds of speculating early non-Gypsy chroniclers either, though “exotic” Eastern lands consistently came to mind. Since their first appearance in print—in the Persian chronicler Hamza al-Isfahani’s History of the Kings of the Earth (950)—the Gypsies have been called many things, nearly all of them insults: Tartars, Heathens, Saracens, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Jats; Athingani, Atzinganoi, Romiti, Bohemians, “Fools Styled Greek Bohemians,” Pharaoh’s People, Egyptians, Luri, Zingari, Zigeuner, Zotts.

  In his 1783 book Die Zigeuner (published in England as a Dissertation on the Gipseys in 1807), Heinrich Grellmann of Göttingen University gave an overview of the rich confusion abroad concerning the origins of the Gypsies.

  Because they were likewise called Gipseys (Cingani), they must immediately derive their origin from the Grecian heretics, called Athingans: then again they must have wandered from the African province formerly called Zeugitana. Another time they are supposed to be fugitives driven from the city Singara, in Mesopotamia, by Julian the Apostate: others again have transplanted them to Mount Caucasus, and made them Zochori; or to the Palus Maeotis, making them descendants from the Ziches.…

  Another brings them from Mauritania, and to corroborate his opinion by the name, calls them descendants of Chus.… Some people fancy they had heard that the Gipseys called themselves More, and often used the name amori among one another (not amori, but Discha more—Get out, Fellow!) and now they are Amorites!… They were sometimes torlaques (Mahometan monks, who, under pretense of holiness, are guilty of the most flagrant excesses), faquirs, or kalendars; sometimes the remains of Attila’s Huns; at other times the Avari, who were vanquished by Charles the Great: then again Petschenegers, who played their last stake in the twelfth century; or perhaps a mixture of all kinds of rascally people gathered together, having collectively no certain country, as their name Zigeuner [as they generally have been called in Germany] indicates, signifying, “to wander up and down”; for which reason, it is said, our German ancestors determined every strolling vagrant Zichegan.…

  Though not the only one to make the India connection, Grellmann was the first to apply rigorous philological analysis to the question of origins, leading the way in the new science that one historian has called “linguistic paleontology.” Grellmann supplied a fifteen-page comparative catalogue of Romani words, along with their “Hindostan” (and English) equivalents, establishing a rate of agreement between them of about one in three, resolving for good any doubt about the provenance of Europe’s Roma.

  And then, as if to make the theory of exotic origins more compelling, Grellmann also helped to install Gypsy stereotypes: of wanton women, of carrion-eaters, and even of those among them who had a “relish for human flesh”—a slander which took more than a century to dislodge. In Die Zigeuner he gave generous space to contemporary reports of events the previous year (1782) in Hont County (then part of Hungary, now part of Slovakia). The case involved more than 150 Gypsies, forty-one of whom were tortured into confessions of cannibalism. Fifteen men were hanged, six broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women beheaded—before an investigation ordered by the Habsburg monarch Joseph II revealed that all of the supposed victims were still alive.

  But the cannibalism libel stuck: as recently as 1929, in Slovakia, a band of Rom robbers was accused of eating their victims, and though the charge was dropped it continued to supply sensational headlines for weeks.

  Early speculation by gadje on the homeland of the Gypsies came mainly in the form of Bible legends—all of them eye-of-the-beholder readings to which the Book has proved lastingly susceptible. And so it was said that the Gypsies were the cursed descendants of Cain, condemned to wander the world. (In Semitic languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and others—cain means “blacksmith,” perhaps the profession with which Gypsies are most closely associated.) “When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (Genesis 4:12). This text has been used as an explanation for the fact that Gypsies have never been much attracted to cultivation of the land—which they themselves may (disingenuously) refer to as their “curse.” Speeches by contemporary Gypsy leaders very often kick off with a mention of the Biblical curse against their people. But such “proofs” mainly reveal how regrettable it is that the Gypsies do not have a Book of their own—although, according to another legend, they once did. I heard nothing of this kind in Albania but, according to a tale from Bulgaria, when God was handing out the different religions the Gypsies wrote theirs down on cabbage leaves, and before long the holy book was a donkey’s dinner. Another weird tale of alimentary blasphemy comes from Romania: The Gypsies built a church of stone and the Romanians built one of bacon and ham. The Gypsies haggled until the Romanians agreed to exchange buildings—and promptly ate their church. The Serbian version has the church made of cheese, and also offers an explanation for Gypsy begging: the reason Gypsies go from door to door looking for money, the fable says, is that the Serbs still owe them for their church; the beggars are only collecting what is their due.

  The Gypsies themselves have no heroes. There are no myths of a great liberation, of the founding of the “nation,” of a promised land. They have no Romulus and Remus, no wandering, battling Aeneas. They have no monuments or shrines, no anthem, no ruins. And no Book. Apart from just over a hundred words and phrases noted by three non-Gypsies in the sixteenth century, there are no samples of early spoken Romani. But they do have myths of ancestry and of migration. Or at any rate such myths have been attributed to them.

  Like those of many other nations, the Gypsy tales lay claim to a Biblical lineage, however undistinguished. They tell of being condemned to wander for having denied succor to Joseph and Mary on their way out of Egypt; for having “told” Judas to betray Christ; for being descendants of the miscreants who murdered the children of Bethlehem (baby-killing always surfaces as the ultimate slander against the most hated groups; the Jews and the Gnostics were also accused of it); for having forged the nails used in the Crucifixion. These tales were spread even by the Gypsies themselves, perhaps to reinforce the myth of an Egyptian homeland that at first had seemed so useful.

  The following tale, about the forger of Christ’s nails, was recorded by Konrad Bercovici in Macedonia in the 1920s. Though this translation is not particularly evocative of the Gypsy manner of tale-telling, I cite it at length here. During most of the story not one Gypsy appears (and when he does he is a figure of last resort, an afterthought pitched up outside the gates of Jerusalem), but it is, in its various forms, perhaps the best-known of the early legends, and the only one which was occasionally recognized by Gypsies I met.

  When the Roman jailers were given the person of Yeshua ben Miriam, whom the world later called Jesus, that they should crucify him, because he had talked ill of the Emperor of Rome, two soldiers were sent out to get four stout nails. For every man to be crucified, the soldiers were given eighty kreutzer to buy nails from some blacksmith. And so when these soldiers were given their eighty kreutzer with which to buy nails, they first tarried at an inn and spent half of the coppers drinking the sweet-sour wine the Greeks then sold in Jerusalem. It was late in the afternoon when they remembered the nails again, and they had to be back in the barracks by nightfall.…

  Soon they stumbled out of the inn hastily, not altogether sober, and coming to the first blacksmith, they said to him loudly, so as to frighten him into doing the work even if there was not enough money to pay for the iron and the labour:

  “Man, we want four big nails made right away, to crucify Yeshua ben Miriam with.…”

  The blacksmith was an old Jew who had seen the long pale face and the l
ight brown eyes of Yeshua ben Miriam, when he had once looked into his shop. So the man stepped out from behind the forge at which he had been working, and said:

  “I will not forge nails to crucify Yeshua ben Miriam.”

  Then one of the soldiers put down the forty kreutzer and yelled loudly:

  “Here is money to pay for them. We speak in the name of the Emperor!” And they held their lances close to the man.… The soldiers ran him through with their lances after setting his beard on fire.

  The next blacksmith was a little farther away. It was getting on in the afternoon when they arrived there, so they told the man:

  “Make us four stout nails and we shall pay you forty kreutzer for them.”

  “I can forge only four small nails for that price. I have a wife and children.”

  “Jew,” the soldiers bellowed, “make us the nails and stop talking!” Then they set his beard on fire.

  Frightened out of his wits, the Jew went to the forge and began to work on the nails. One of the soldiers, who tried to help at the forge, leaned forward and said:

  “Make them good and strong, Jew; for at dawn we crucify Yeshua ben Miriam.”

  When that name was mentioned, the hand of the Jew remained poised high with the hammer.… “I cannot forge the nails you want to crucify Yeshua ben Miriam with,” the Jew cried out, and stretched himself to his full height. “I cannot. I cannot.”

  Both soldiers, furiously, drunkenly, ran him through with their lances again and again.

  The sun was low behind the hills and the soldiers were in great haste. They ran to a third blacksmith, a Syrian. They entered his shop while he was getting ready to leave off work for the day. Their lances were still dripping blood when they called to that man:

  “Khalil, make us four stout nails, and here are forty kreutzer to pay for them. And be quick about it!”

  The Syrian looked at the bloody lances and returned to his bellows.… The man cast his hammer aside. And he, too, was run through with the lances.

  When I tried this story out on Gypsies in Macedonia, they corrected me at this point: “Khalil” was an Albanian, of course; and in Bulgaria he had become Todor—as in Todor Zhivkov, the former dictator.

  Had the soldiers not drunk forty of the eighty kreutzer, they might have returned to the barracks and told what had happened, and thus saved Yeshua’s life. But they were short of forty kreutzer, so they ran out of the gates of Jerusalem, where they met a Gypsy who had just pitched his tent and set up his anvil. The Romans ordered him to forge four stout nails, and put the forty kreutzer down.

  The Gypsy put the money in his pocket first, and then set to work. When the first nail was finished, the soldiers put it in a bag. When the Gypsy had made another nail, they put it in the bag. And when the Gypsy had made the third nail, they put it in the bag. When the Gypsy began to forge the fourth nail, one of the soldiers said:

  “Thank you, Gypsy. With these nails we will crucify Yeshua ben Miriam.”

  He had hardly finished speaking, when the trembling voices of the three blacksmiths who had been killed began to plead with the Gypsy not to make the nails. Night was falling. The soldiers were so scared that they ran away before the Gypsy had finished forging the last nail.

  The Gypsy, glad that he had put the forty pieces of copper in his pocket before he had started work, finished the fourth nail. Having finished the fourth nail, he waited for it to grow cold. He poured water upon the hot iron but the water sizzled off, and the iron remained as hot and red as it had been when held between the tongs in the fire. So he poured some more water upon it, but the nail was glowing as if the iron was a living, bleeding body, and the blood was spurting fire. So he threw still more water on it. The water sizzled off, and the nail glowed and glowed.

  A wide stretch of the night-darkened desert was illumined by the glow of that nail. Terrified, trembling, the Gypsy packed his tent upon his donkey and fled.

  At midnight, between two high waves of sand, tired, harassed, the lone traveller pitched his tent again. But there, at his feet, was the glowing nail, although he had left it at the gates of Jerusalem. Being close to a waterwell, the Gypsy carried water the rest of the night, trying to extinguish the fire of the nail. When the last drop had been drawn out of the well, he threw sand on the hot iron, but it never ceased sizzling and glowing. Crazed with fear, the Gypsy ran farther into the desert.

  Arriving at an Arab village, the blacksmith set up his tent the following morning. But the glowing nail had followed him.

  And then something happened. An Arab came and asked him to join and patch the iron hoop of a wheel. Quickly the Gypsy took the glowing nail and patched with it the broken joint of the iron hoop. Then he saw with his own eyes how the Arab drove off.

  The Arab gone, the Gypsy drove away without daring to look around. After many days, still not daring to look around, afraid to open his eyes when night fell, the Gypsy reached the city of Damascus, where he set up his forge again. Months later, a man brought him the hilt of a sword to repair. The Gypsy lit his forge. The hilt began to glow, from the iron of the nail upon the hilt. The Gypsy packed, and ran away again.

  And that nail always appears in the tents of the descendants of the man who forged the nails for the crucifixion of Yeshua ben Miriam. And when the nail appears, the Gypsies run. It is why they move from one place to another. It is why Yeshua ben Miriam was crucified with only three nails, his two feet being drawn together and one nail piercing both of them. The fourth nail wanders about from one end of the earth to the other.

  The tale is not, as it at first seems, about the Gypsy as opportunist, for he is merely and unsuspectingly getting on with his work (the finishing of the fourth nail only bespeaks the artisan’s pride, for the lancing Romans by then are gone). Whatever justifications for the peripatetic tradition of the Gypsies such a story may offer, it still has the Gypsy busily plying his trade all over the Middle East. It doesn’t tell us how he got there, where he came from, or why he left India.

  No one can know for sure when or why the ancestors of the European Gypsies left India for Persia. But language is memory, and the presence of the Gypsies’ ancestors in Persia is marked by the many Persian words in modern Romani. Baxt, Romani for luck, comes from the Persian; sir is garlic, mom is wax, zor is strength, and zen is saddle.

  Most agree that the exodus began in the tenth century. In 950, however, the Persian historian Hamza wrote (in Arabic) of Bahram Gur, the Shah of Persia between 420 and 438, who, “full of solicitude for his subjects,” imported twelve thousand “Zott” musicians for their listening pleasure (although “Zott” is the term that the Arabs then used for all Indians). Sixty years later, in 1011, a similar account appears in the Persian poet Firdausi’s epic Shah Nameh, or Book of Kings. Firdausi expands the story to supply an explanation of the subsequent fate of the “Gypsy” musicians.

  Bahram Gur’s local governors each reported to him that discontent was mounting because the rich drank to the accompaniment of music while the poor could not.… The wise Shah immediately despatched by dromedary a letter to [his father-in-law] Shengil in India, asking for 10,000 Luris, men and women, expert in playing the lute. When the Luris arrived the Shah received them, and gave each one a donkey and an ox, and to the whole group a thousand donkey loads of corn—all in the hope that they would settle down and farm in his Kingdom. The Luris promptly ate the corn and their oxen, and left the capital.… With wan cheeks, they returned at the end of the year and the Shah met them with reproach: “You should not have wasted the seed-corn. Now you have only your donkeys. Prepare your instruments, attach to each a silken cord, and load them upon your donkeys.” These Luris even now wander through the world, begging a living, sleeping alongside wolves, living like dogs, always on the road, stealing day and night.

  This story, though no doubt apocryphal, has particularly excited Gypsiologists because in Eastern Europe the Roma (as well as others) still play stringed instruments such as the gudulka, which is like th
e lute though played upright and with a bow. I never saw a single one of these pear-shaped instruments, however. Gypsies had all kinds of wind instruments, notably the long, wooden double-reed conical-bore zurla, as well as guitars and violins, on which they puffed and picked and sawed their Lambadas—the Brazilian hit which seemed to have wiped out folk music in the Balkans. (At least one academic was excited by this trend—a ginger Croatian giant called Svanibor Pettan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland. He was writing his dissertation on Kosovan Roma and the Lambada.)

  Most scholars believe that the Gypsies left India sometime in the tenth century. A considerably earlier departure date is favored by those who seek a heroic portrait of the early Gypsies: a group of “Zotts” arriving circa 700 in Persia (then part of the Arab Empire). According to this theory, which is based on the work of a nineteenth-century Dutch historian, M. J. de Goeje, the Gypsies came not by land but by sea. And they came by force.

  The new Arab rulers, so the account goes, brought tens of thousands of Indian peasants over from the delta of the Indus, across the tip of the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf. They were settled on the marshy banks of the Tigris, along with several thousand buffalo. Although these Zotts came as captives, within a century they were levying taxes of their own on all merchants who passed through their canals and along their roads. This Zott community was clearly regarded as a threat by Baghdad, for in 820 the Caliph sent in troops against them. They resisted for fourteen years: perhaps the only time in history when the Gypsies (or proto-Gypsies) have had their own mini-kingdom or even independent colony. In 834 the next Caliph succeeded in damming their canals and flooding their fields and thereby wiping out “Zottistan.” After a gruesome battle in which more than five hundred were beheaded, twenty-seven thousand Zottistanis were captured. They spent three days on display to the jeering crowds of Baghdad; then the entire Zott population was dispatched to the northeast. It was a portion of these who (according to Donald Kenrick) moved north into Armenia and eventually to the Balkans and Europe. Such unskilled, displaced Indians would no doubt have met up with other Indians moving west from Persia with their traditional trades, and, together, they would become the European Romanies. By this account, the earliest Gypsies would have left India at least by 720 A.D.