Sunday, December 16, 2007

Romanian Enslavement - 400 years

This from "Bury Me Standing" - look up the importing of slaves to Transylvania and other areas, including Sibiu, 1445, and including by Vlad Dracul, see Romania Road Ways, Vlad Tepes sites. He brought in 12,000 "Egyptians" to Wallachia, where he ruled, and as slaves. Pope Sixtus IV awarded Stefan the Great with more, as booty for Stefan's contribution to crusades against the Turks. Page 174.

Long history of Gypsy slavery there. Then, after the Sultans prevailed and occupied the ports at the Black Sea, it was slave labor that strengthened the areas. Romanian rulers gift each other with Gypsy families, including Mircea the Old, and including Kalderash gypsies. P.177. Did it begin with Tatars, who perhaps already held them as slaves? Any "unclaimed" Gypsy person on the road, read un-owned, could be taken. Page 178.

Then read of the memory of all this in the present social structure of Romania. See Romania Road Ways. After World War II, refugees seeking asylum in West Germany - say 4% from the Gypsy areas - were let in, but of those, only .02 percent were actually Gypsies. The rest got deported back. Page 213. The statelessness of Gypsies. Page 217.

Holocaust: Little mention of Gypsies. See 243. Some 10,000 t0 80,000, p.253, - many never recorded, happened out in the woods, at ridges, no birth records, death records. Just vanished, with eye-witnesses sometimes by chance left to tell. Contemporary politics and structure: see 246. How forced inhumane conditions, plus cultural re-prioritizing, led to mutual exasperation - p.280 ff

The Kalderash. Need to find out more - a dominant group. Sibiu, other, see p.291. More politics 295 ff. Transnational nature of problem, p. 302

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