GYPSY GENEALOGY
Through their Traditions
Paul Polanskyy
Books by the author ANTONIN DVORAK, MY FATHER (non-fiction, introduction & editor), Czech Historical Research Center, USA, 1993 BLACK SILENCE, The Lety Survivors Speak, G plus G, Prague, Czech Republic, 1998
LIVING THRU IT TWICE, poems of the Romani Holocaust, G plus G, Prague, Czech Republic, 1997
THE STORM, novel, G plus G, Prague, Czech Republic, 1999
STRAY DOG, boxing poems, G plus G, Prague, Czech Republic, 1998
THE RIVER KILLED MY BROTHER, poems of Romani genocide, Norton Cocker, Prague, Czech Republic, 1999 THE GYPSIES OF KOSOVO, A Survey of their Communities after the War, SFTP, Gottingen, Germany, 2000 NOT A REFUGEE, poems of Kosovo Roma IDPs, Voice of Roma, USA, 2000
THE BLACKBIRDS OF KOSOVO, poems of Kosovo Roma under UN administration, Left Curve Publications, USA, 2001 BEZ DOMOVA V SRDCI AMERIKY, Society for Homeless People, Prague, Czech Republic, 2002
BUS RIDE IN JERUSELEM, poetry, Roma Fund, USA, 2003
TO UNHCR, WITH LOVE, poems of Kosovo Roma asylum seekers, Divus, Prague, Czech Republic, 2003 KOSOVO BLOOD, poems and war reports of the 2004 Albanian uprising in Kosovo, KRRF, Nish, Serbia, 2004 SARAH’S PEOPLE, Jewish cemetery poems and photos, KRRF, Nish, Serbia, 2004
WHERE IS MY LIFE?, poems of Kosovo Roma, Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, 2004
UN-LEADED BLOOD, poetry, reports & photos, KRRF, Nish, Serbia, 2005
SAFARI ANGOLA, poems of big-game hunting with woodcuts, Gafis, Nish, Serbia, 2006
ROMA: verchtet, verfolgt, vergessen, selected poems 1991-2005, Wormser, Bern, Switzerland, 2006
GYPSY TAXI, poetry & drawings, KRRF, Nish, Serbia, 2007
ONE BLOOD, ONE FLAME: the oral histories of the Yugoslav Gypsies before, during and after WWII, Vol. I, KRRF, Serbia, 2007 ONE BLOOD, ONE FLAME: the oral histories of the Yugoslav Gypsies before, during and after WWII, Vol. II, KRRF, Serbia, 2007 ONE BLOOD, ONE FLAME: the oral histories of the Yugoslav Gypsies before, during and after WWII, Vol. III, KRRF, Serbia, 2008 UNDEFEATED, Polansky poetry anthology 1991-2008, Multimedia Edizioni, Baronissi, Italy, 2009
DEADLY NEGLECT, reports on morally corrupt UN administrators & others, KRRF, Nish, Serbia, 2010
BOXING POEMS, Volo Press, Lonato, Italy, 2010
POESIE, Damocle Edizioni, Venice, Italy, 2011
MUSTALAIS TAKSI, Roma poems in Finnish, Savukeidas, Turku, Finland, 2011
LA MIA VITA CON GLI ZINGARI, Datanews, Rome, Italia, 2011
THE SILENCE OF THE VIOLINS, poetry about Roma with Roberto Malini, II Foglio Letterario, Bergamo, Italy, 2012 THE HAND OF GOD, poetry about brothels with Roberto Nassi, II Foglio Letterario, Bergamo, Italy, 2012 KATURAKKI, boxing poems in Finnish, Savukeidas, Turku, Finland, 2012
CRY GYPSY, poetry about Germany’s forced deportation of Gypsies, Volo Press, Lonato, Italy, 2012
HOMELESS IN AMERICA, poems from the heartland, Left Curve Publications, Oakland, USA, 2013
SUMMER CAMP, memoir of a UN camp for Gypsies in 1999 Kosovo, Amazon.com, USA, 2013
BOOK 7 OF DIAMANTINI COLLECTION, selected Polansky poems, II Girasole Edizioni, Italy, 2013
BOKSERSKE PESME, boxing poems in Serbian, Studentski Kulturni Centar, Kragujevac, Serbia 2014
BEZDOMNY PIES, boxing poems in Polish, Wydawnictwo Moon Dog, Warzsawa, Poland, 2014
ROCKETS, poems of Palestine, Albeggi Edizioni, Rome, Italy, 2014
TABOR SMRTI LETY, memoir 1992-1995, Antifasisticka akce, Prague, Czech Republic, 2014
CARMINE VOICES, poems of immigrants & prostitutes in Brescia, Italy, Volo Press, Nish, Serbia, 2015
BOHEMIAN BLOOD, Amazon.com, USA, 2015
THE SEARCH FOR BONG WAY WONG and the Chinese Bullfighters, Amazon.com, USA, 2016
VICENTE HONG, The Artist, A Taurine Memoir, Amazon.com, USA 2017
With a race like the gypsies who have no old traditions, there is only one way of discovering their origins---by studying their language.
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Volume 1, p. 299
CONTENTS
GYPSIES! 5
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION 6
Chapter 1 - THE SNOWCAPS 9
Chapter 2 - MT. ATHOS AND MATEJEVAC 12 Chapter 3 - THE SUN AS GOD 14 Chapter 4 - THE NINE BROTHERS 16 Chapter 5 - THE CURE FOR EAR ACHE 18 Chapter 6 - GYPSY GENEALOGY, VILLAGE BY VILLAGE 20 Chapter 7 - THE KALE 22 Chapter 8 WHAT’S IN A NAME: ROMA AND ASHKALI 24 Chapter 9 - WE ARE GREEKS! 26 Chapter 10 - KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH COUSINS 28 Chapter 11 - GADJO AND THE RED SCARF 30 Chapter 12 - PIEBALDISM 31 Chapter 13 - THE NOMADIC GYPSIES 32 Chapter 14 - THE ROPE MAKERS 33 Chapter 15 - STEALING SPOONS 35 Chapter 16 - THE GOND OF CENTRAL INDIA 36 Chapter 17 - THE HOUSE SNAKE 39 Chapter 18 - THE GYPSY LANGUAGE 40 Chapter 19 - GYPSY DNA 42 Chapter 20 - MAKING SENSE OUT OF A FAMILY ORAL HISTORY 45 Chapter 21 - GYPSY PILGRIMAGES 46 Chapter 22 - FEAST OF HEDERLEZ 48 Chapter 23 - TRADITIONAL COOKING 49 Chapter 24 - DIFFERENT KINDS OF GYPSIES: AN EXAMPLE 50 Chapter 25- THE DOM TRIBE 52 Chapter 26 - CONCLUSION AND FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS 53 A SELECTION OF POEMS FROM “GYPSY TAXI” BY PAUL POLANSKY AFTER THE WAR 55 FAMILY FIGHTS 56 HEIRLOOMS 57 BEGGING 58 EPILOGUE 59 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 63 SOURCES 64 GYPSIES!
Driving some young Roma back from a birthday party I got stopped
at a police checkpoint.
From his shoulder patch I saw the UN cop was from Bangladesh.
I felt pretty safe
seeing he was as dark-skinned as my passengers.
When he asked
if they were Serbs, they all cheerfully yelled out in English, “We’re Gypsies!”
“Get out!” the cop screamed, reaching for his gun.
“In my country,
all Gypsies
are thieves!”
It took the police half an hour
to search my van. They found only
bubblegum wrappers and sunflower seeds.
“Be careful,”
the UN cop warned me. “I know Gypsies
better than you do.”
A poem from the book “Gypsy Taxi” By Paul Polansky 2007
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION Since 1963, I have been with Gypsies: Kale, Gitanos, Roma, Sinti, Ashkali, Egyptian, Dom, Gond, Lohari, Sansis and many of their associated groups. Some of them feel it is an honor to be called a Gypsy while others believe it is a derogatory term. In my books I usually use the word Gypsy to cover all the distinct groups, but when making reference to a particular one I use the word they prefer to call themselves.
In the 19th century most Czechs got very upset if you called them a Bohemian. Almost without exception they and many others in the Austro-Hungarian Empire considered “Bohemian” a low class peasant, even a Gypsy... until the famous composer Antonín Dvořák (whom I believe had Gypsy ancestors) took great pride in referring to himself as a Bohemian. It was only then, following Dvořák’s example, that most Czechs finally took pride in calling themselves Bohemian.
I started this book with a poem about an event that took place in UN-administered Kosovo in 2001. The poem GYPSIES! is actually about Roma in their war torn-country, taking pride in a term usually used by KFOR/NATO soldiers and UN police in a derogatory way.
It is not my intention to offend anyone by calling them Gypsy. I always call them by how they want to be identified. But referring to all of them as a group (and there are more different kinds of Gypsies than there are different kinds of Europeans), I conform to the historical term which many take pride in.
Technically, I suppose Gypsies should be called Indo-Europeans... except that so many now live outside of Europe that even that definition would no longer be practical.
One last word about derogatory terms. Many scholars today, esp. in the West, refuse to even consider using the
word “caste” to describe Gypsy origins. But all Gypsies did have a caste in Old India and it is through their caste traditions that it is possible to trace their origins. Perhaps many Indians fled from India to escape their low-caste stigma, but consciously or unconsciously most took pride in their traditions and profession and continued to follow the ways of their ancestors, often accepting the rigid practice of not associating or marrying outside their “group.” So once again I apologize if I offend anyone by referring so often to “caste” and “caste traditions”, but it is impossible to do Gypsy genealogy without identifying the castes and sub castes of these people.1
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Twenty years before I was known as a poet, novelist, historian and Romani rights activist, I was a professional genealogist. From 1969 until 1995 I worked as a genealogist in the archives of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Poland, Ukraine and the United States on my own genealogy and the genealogies of many clients. In the end I took on only genealogy jobs that others considered hopeless. Professionally, I was known as the genealogy doctor.
1- Caste in Old India was a system of social stratification, and referred to four social classes which existed in Vedic society, namely Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Before the Gypsy Diaspora from Old India, the caste structure was based on profession. The concept of outcaste and untouchables mainly came later under British rule. Traditions were very important for each caste and usually strictly adhered to. That is why today it is possible to trace back to Old India certain traditions to certain groups of people that usually shared the same DNA. The Gypsies who arrived in the Middle East and Europe from the 10th to the 14th centuries would seldom recognize in India today the traditions they brought with them eight hundred years ago. But those old traditions and professions have been documented in books so it is still possible to identify the group/tribe/caste the different kinds of Gypsies belonged to before leaving Old India.
My work with Gypsy genealogy started with records in the Mormon Church Family Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.2 I was there to review microfilm records on births, deaths and marriages for a Roma family I had lived with in Czechoslovakia. Since they were sure that their ancestors had always baptized their children (often several times for good luck) I was looking for their records. It was only when another genealogist, a professor at a local university, heard I was looking for Gypsy records, that I was warned my efforts would lead to nothing. This scholar claimed that Gypsies had no history.
I replied that I had found not only church records on Gypsy families, but also many oral histories and thousand-year-old traditions that usually led me back to their castes in Old India. I asked this scholar how far back he had traced his ancestors. He proudly claimed he had researched both his paternal and maternal families back to the 17th century.
I replied that I had through their traditions traced many Gypsies back more than a thousand years, and for one caste I had a written record going back almost 3,000 years. That record had been carried by the Gypsies orally to almost every country where they could be found today. I asked what the oldest oral history his family had retained. He just shook his head and walked away, embarrassed.
For more than 54 years I have lived and/or associated with Gypsies. I have been with them in more than 30 countries, which has given me an overview of their culture, traditions and origins which unfortunately most Gypsies have little knowledge of.
This book is not about the history per se of the Gypsies, but a review of their traditions and the origins of those traditions.
In the early 1960s as a young journalist I interviewed a Catholic priest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I was attending university. His name was Fr. James Groppi. He was also a civil rights activist. I found him living in a black ghetto, in a slum apartment with several young black men. My first question was: “Why are you living with these people, esp. in such terrible conditions?”
His reply: “If you want to help people, you have to know them. And to know them, you have to live with them.”
Fr. Groppi’s words have been my guide ever since. When I first found Roma and Sinti WWII concentration camp survivors back in the 1990s in the Czech Republic, I realized I had to live with some of them to get their real stories… and to experience the discrimination/genocide they were still living under. After that, I lived with Gypsies not only as a human rights activist but also as an anthropologist, collecting their stories and traditions.
I have always been amused at so-called gypsyologists giving their interpretations of Gypsy history. I see no need to use my imagination to create a history for the Gypsies. Their story can be found in their own words, in their own traditions. Unfortunately, it is a piecemeal story with each family and group retaining only a fraction of what their ancestors remembered. And since the Gypsies have been scattered across the world to every single country, so has their story been scattered like pellets coming out of a shotgun. But for me since I have lived with so many different groups and families, I have been able to piece together an overview that I hope will help Gypsies to investigate their own genealogy.
The first real research into Gypsy history was begun by a Dutch theology teacher trying to discover the origins of the Gypsies through their language. But with so many different kinds of Gypsies that linguistic research has always perplexed me. It is so obvious that there are
2- The largest center in the world for genealogical records. many different kinds of Gypsies with different dialects and often even different grammar. They usually don’t socialize and hardly ever intermarry. And when they do get together or rather are put together or are forced together by outside parties, the result is usually a big quarrel about anything and everything. Just like their different castes back in Old India!
Chapter 1 THE SNOWCAPS When I used to do genealogical research for Americans, I was always amazed that in nine out of ten cases their ancestors from the old world sought out land in the new world that reminded them of home. Czechs came to northeast Iowa and the soft rolling green landscape that reminded them of their fields in Bohemia. Nordic pioneers sought out the cold lakes of Minnesota. Bavarian Germans immigrated to the green forests of Wisconsin.
On my Gypsy genealogical trips from Spain to Sicily to Poland and Slovakia, to Bulgaria and Greece and finally to eastern Turkey on the Iranian border I often found the oldest Gypsy communities in view of a snowcapped mountain.
The Gypsies in their caves below the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, had one of the best views of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. So did the Gypsies in Sicily near Mount Etna, and in Poland and Slovakia on both sides of the Tatra Mountains, and in Rozlog overlooking the Rila Mountains in Bulgaria, and Mount Olympus in Greece and of course Mount Ararat between Turkey and Armenia.
Yet most gypsyologists have always considered the plains of Punjab and the desert of Rajasthan as the homeland of the European Gypsies. I’ve asked many Gypsies about this relationship with snowcapped mountains. Many just said that the mountains and the Gypsies had the same soul. That the old Gypsies worshiped mountains along with the five kings: sun, moon, wind, fire, and mist.
Years later I came across an interesting attempt to find the origins of Gypsies published in the 1912 issue of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. An Englishman in 1886 had written a letter to an American Christian missionary in Armenia (today eastern Turkey) asking him to interview the Gypsies in his area and to ask where their ancestors came from.
This American missionary serving in Van near the Iran bordered wrote that there were no nomadic Gypsies in his area. The only Gypsies (about 250) lived in the city itself in about 50 homes. The men mainly made their living by making sieves and rough tambourines. Some were also singers and clowns. The women worked at fortune telling by throwing beans on the floor and seeing how they fell and the pattern they made. The women also danced with castanets, and told people how to ward off the evil eye. Some women were also beggars and liked to steal hens. Their language had many words that resembled Sanskrit. Regarding th
eir origins, they called themselves Doom and said they had two traditions regarding their origins. Some of their ancestors came from India... the others from China.3
When I read this 1912 article in the British Library in London I wasn’t surprised to hear of an origin in China because in a small town north of Prague I had lived with a Gypsy family that had several cousins with Mongolian features. But where in China did Gypsies come from? Over the next ten years I asked every Gypsy I interviewed if they ever heard of Gypsies coming from China. I never got a positive reply. Only that some relatives had slant eyes!
In 2008, I took my Romani film crew to southeastern Turkey to interview Gypsies in Urfa and in the countryside near the Syrian border. I mainly wanted to visit several Kurdish communities to see if I could track down any oral histories of a Gypsy tribe called Kikan that had once lived in Lahore, Punjab, in the 10th century.4 They were well-known horse breeders and in the end some of them reputedly followed the visiting Kurds back to Kurdistan. Not only did the word Kikan sound like Cikan (one of the first words in 15th century Europe to describe Gypsies), but in most Gypsy dialects there were many Kurdish loan words such as dai (mother) and vordon (wagon). Just as the Gypsies ended up using several Kurdish words in their language, so did the Kurds adopt the word Kikan for a village in Kurdistan Iran; and in SE Turkey near Mardin is a Kurdish tribe that calls themselves “Kikan.”
3- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 6, p. 327, 1912/1913: In an article by George Fraser Black entitled “The Gypsies of Armenia,” the Rev. George C. Reynolds, d.d. an American missionary in March 1886 sent this note to Mr. A.T. Sinclair who had written to several missionaries in Turkey asking them to interview their local gypsies about their customs and origins.
I was not able to find much information on the Kurdish Kikan on that research trip, but while in Urfa I did meet the local director in charge of issuing Turkish IDs. He too was a poet so we not only had poetry in common but he confessed that his first love as a young man had been a Gypsy girl in his neighborhood. Although their culture did not allow them to associate, this man, Ahmet, always felt a bond with Gypsies and when possible he hired one or two to work in his office. In fact, he now had an assistant who came from a village of only Gypsy musicians. I didn’t have to ask twice for Ahmet to arrange for his assistant to take us to this village called Bozova.
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