Gypsies In The Ottoman Empire

The Roma presence in the European part of the Ottoman Empire - the Balkans - is centuries old and it is not by accident that this regions has often been called the second motherland of the Gypsies. From this region Gypsies moved westwards taking with them inherited Balkan cultural models and traditions. This book explores the history, ethnography, social structure and culture of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire. It is based on archival sources, mainly detailed tax registers, special laws, guild registers and court documents. Notes on Gypsies in books by foreign travellers are also included.

Includes statistics.

This illustrated text traces the origin of the Gypsies in India and their journey westward to their arrival on the shores of the Thames. It also looks at their distant relatives who stayed in India or dropped off on the way west and who carry on a nomadic life in Persia and neighbouring countries

Vilified and marginalized, the Romani people—widely referred to as Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers—are seen as a people without place, either geographically or socially, no matter where they live or what they do. In this new chronological history of the Romani, Another Darkness, Another Dawn demonstrates how their experiences provide a way to understand mainstream society’s relationship with outsiders and immigrants. Becky Taylor follows the Gypsies, Roma, and Travelers from their roots in the Indian subcontinent to their travels across the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to Western Europe and the Americas, exploring their persecution and enslavement at the hands of others. Rather than seeing these peoples as separate from society and untouched by history, she sets their experiences in the context of broader historical changes. Their history, she reveals, is ultimately linked to the founding of empires; the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; numerous wars; the expansion of law, order, and nation-states; the Enlightenment; nationalism; modernity; and the Holocaust. Taylor also shows how the lives of the Romani today reflect the increasing regulation of modern society. Ultimately, she demonstrates that history is not always about progress: the place of Gypsies remains as contested and uncertain today as it was upon their first arrival in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. As much a history of Europe as of the Romani, Another Darkness, Another Dawn paints a revealing portrait of a people who still struggle to be understood.

Using an oral history approach, this book draws on Gypsy and non-Gypsy narratives to tell the story of Gypsy forced dislocation from Bayramic, a northwestern town of Turkey, in 1970. Gül Özatesler examines memory construction, the categories of Gypsyness and Turkishness, and the different perspectives and positions that emerged, considering all in relation to underlying socioeconomic structure. The book reveals how ethnic and other identities can be deployed to conceal socioeconomic and political inequalities.

One of the greatest challenges during the enlargement process of the European Union towards the east is how the issue of the Roma or Gypsies is tackled. This ethnic minority group represents a much higher share by numbers, too, in some regions going above 20% of the population. This enormous social and political problem cannot be solved without proper historical studies like this book, the most comprehensive history of Gypsies in Romania. It is based on academic research, synthesizing the entire historical Romanian and foreign literature concerning this topic, and using lot of information from the archives. The main focus is laid on the events of the greatest consequence. Special attention is devoted to aspects linked to the long history of the Gypsies, such as slavery, the process of integration and assimilation into the majority population, as well as the marginalization of Gypsies, which has historic roots. The process of emancipation of Gypsies in the mid-19th century receives due treatment. The deportation of Gypsies to Transnistria during the Antonescu regime, between 1942-1944, is reconstructed in a special chapter. The closing chapters elaborate on the policy toward Gypsies in the decades after the Second World War that explain for the latest developments and for the situation of this population in today's Romania.