AthinganoiIntroduction1

INTRODUCTION

The Gypsy TRIBES

By Chuck Todaro

Many people have been asking me why the Gypsies? What had begun as a simple curiosity soon grew into a couple investigative articles on the subject; an intrigue developed. As I began chipping away at the glacier of stereotypes there began to appear before me a fascinating people quite unlike any other. The questions grew fatter and thus heavier grew the burden for knowledge. I trudged on. What I found most fascinating about the Gypsies was a culture based on an inherent order of poverty and expulsion that had been hanging over their heads as though accursed by God, all the way back to their lowly pariah standings as the untouchables of the ancient Indian caste system of which some, if not all, the Gypsies originated

For close to a thousand years Gypsies have been in diasporas. They have traveled over time through various civilizations, religions, cultures and military conflicts. The ancient Indian caste system that they departed was so firmly held in place that even after they were to break away from many of the old customs, they would still retain this conception of divisions amongst them. The Gypsy tribal system of today is a microcosm of the ancient Indian caste system with the traditional groups on top (Brahmin) � followed by the tradesmen (Sudra) � ending with the untouchable class of unskilled and scavenging Gypsies� This book tells the story of the world�s thirty-five major tribes of the Gypsy people and the divisions between them. There no longer exists a Gypsy people � but many Gypsy peoples.

�You can�t understand our present if you don�t know our past,� an elderly Gypsy once taught me. Like many of the old-timers, he neither knew how to read nor write, but he knew life. It was from the roots on up where the pieces of the puzzle began coming together.

Though the time and cause of the Gypsy exodus is uncertain most scholars believe that they left Hindu India about a thousand years ago at the time of the Muslim invasion of northern India (1018 AD). The Gypsies either successfully fled the carnage and thus began their journey west or were part of the 53,000 prisoners that the Afghan raiders sold off to Persia .

This book begins at Byzantium where lays the crossroads of modern-day Gypsy origins. It was at this point in their travels where formed the three major linguistic families: the Dom, Lom and Rom.

The Early Split �

     The First division of the whole began at the doorsteps of Byzantium where the Dom halted their westward movement and headed south into the Middle-Eastern nations. Today they are found in Israel , Jordan , Syria , and with communities still hanging on in Iran and Iraq .

     The Lom settled into historical Armenian territory, today Eastern Turkey . Incursions by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century scattered them and they today turn up in remote areas of Eastern Turkey and the Caucuses.

     The Rom, meanwhile, moved further west into Greek speaking Byzantium . Byzantium �s influence over the nomadic Gypsy was powerful, evident by an absorption of the Greek language into their own until Greek loan words became second only to Sanskrit.

    In Byzantium the trade in the supernatural would become their most outstanding feature thus linking these exotic wanderers to the ancient Athinganoi, a heretical sect that had been driven out centuries earlier for dealing in the black arts. A corrupted pronunciation of this cult, Atsinganoi, became the mark of the Gypsies. The label stuck and would transform over time into the Romanian Tsigani, French Tsiganes, Italian Zingari, German Zingeuner, and Hungarian Ciganyok. Other nations found different means to identify them such as the Dutch Heydens (heathens). The Spanish Gitanos and English Gypsy evolved from their clams of Egyptian origins.

     The later incursions of the Turkic tribes into Byzantium territories would drive the Rom north into the Balkans and from where they would spread throughout Europe .

     Romania has a very special place in the history of the Gypsy people; it is the only nation that legally adopted slavery. The system would form an integral part of Romanian society with slaves living under the domain of state, church and the private sector. The first record of the Gypsy people in the Romanian territories appears in 1385 as a donation of forty Gypsy families to a monastery. Three years later another 300 Gypsy families were handed over in chains to remain property of our monastery for all their life and the life of their children and grandchildren and descendents of their descendents for all eternity.

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