Dear friends,
We are offering 25% off our paid subscriptions for the year ahead! You can choose between:
Monthly subscription (and will still be free to cancel any time).
Annual subscription, which comes with a gift: Our two digital books!
As a paid subscriber, you will get:
Full access to our paywalled content: the behind-the-scenes truths about Romani life and culture we include in every article but do not share freely with the public.
Full access to our archive: four years worth of articles and materials.
The Romanes lyrics and English translation of each one of the 100+ Romani songs we have translated so far (and continue translating).
If you choose to support us with an annual subscription, you will also receive our two digital books:
When The Truth Does Not Sound True (priced at 14,99 EUR)
What do you believe about the Roma?
This question sits at the heart of When The Truth Does Not Sound True, a collection of essays that dismantle the myths surrounding Europe’s most stereotyped people.
Co-written by cultural consultant and writer Martina Mustafova together with Pepi Mustafov, a Romani insider with lived experience of poverty, displacement, and survival, this book offers rare insight from lived experience.
Across these essays, behaviors often dismissed as “lying,” “theft,” “aggression,” or “irresponsibility” are placed back into their real context: structural exclusion, chronic insecurity, and tight-knit tribal systems built to endure them. What emerges is not a defense, but an explanation—one that asks the reader to reconsider where moral judgment begins, and where it quietly replaces understanding.
The book moves fluidly between cultural analysis, memoir, and psychological observation, revealing a social logic that often sounds implausible to outsiders precisely because it is never explained to them.
In addition to the essays, the book includes nearly 20 full-color photographs taken from within Pepi’s tribe which turn it into a form of visual ethnography, grounding the text in lived reality.
This is a book about how stereotypes are born, why they persist, and what they obscure.
For readers interested in: Romani culture beyond headlines and clichés; Anthropology, social psychology, and lived-experience writing
When The Truth Does Not Sound True is an invitation to sit with discomfort, resist easy narratives, and listen more carefully—especially when the truth doesn’t sound the way you expect it to.
A Crown for Every Woman (priced at 24,99 EUR)
This photo book documents the makeup and hairstyling traditions of women from one of Sofia’s largest Romani communities.
The women featured in these pages belong to the same extended tribe, connected through family, marriage, friendship, and neighborhood ties. While each woman expresses her own personality and style, common aesthetic traditions can be seen throughout the photographs: carefully sculpted hairstyles, dramatic eye makeup, elaborate jewelry, decorative hairpieces.
The stylist behind every transformation in this book is Asen, a member of the community and a relative of many of the women he works with. His salon is located in Zaharna Fabrika, where this community has lived for over a century. For years, women from the community have come to him before weddings, engagements, baptisms, birthdays, and other important occasions.
To an outsider, some of these women may appear dressed like brides or beauty queens. Yet many are neither. They are sisters, cousins, friends, mothers, daughters, and guests. The care devoted to their appearance is not reserved for a single central figure. Beauty, celebration, and self-presentation are shared values, and like we love to say, “the Roma share their thunder.”
This idea inspired the title of the book. In these communities, a crown does not belong only to the bride. It can belong to a guest, a sister, a cousin, a mother, or a friend. The desire to look beautiful, to mark an important occasion, and to present oneself with pride is not limited to one woman at the center of the celebration. It belongs to everyone.
The photographs in this book are not intended to present a single standard of beauty. Rather, they document a living aesthetic tradition.
Thank you to everyone who supports us by subscribing and sharing our work!
Love,
Martina and Pepi