“They ring the church bells when they see one of us”
“They ring the church bells when they see one of us”
How we love setting Romani homes on fire
In September 1993, something very ordinary happened in the rural Transylvanian village of Haderani. A fight erupted between two “Gypsy brothers” and a young “local man” and his father. The young local man was stabbed and died.
So far, this is a story of tragedy and violence. What happened afterward — that is the ordinary part.
“In retaliation, other Romanians clubbed the Gypsy boys to death with pitchforks and shovels. A third Gypsy was “carbonized at home” (as the English-language Romanian reports described it).
“A group of villagers then went on to torch fourteen Gypsy houses and to damage thirteen others, and that night the total of some 175 Gypsies, whose families had lived there for seventy years, were hounded out of town.”
In her book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, Isabel Fonseca goes on to describe her visit to Haderani one year after these events. Had any justice been carried out in the past months?
If you ask the locals — which Fonseca did — justice had been carried out on that September night, by torching and chasing away the Roma population. No official investigation followed. In fact, policemen were present during the attack on the Roma houses, guarding the attackers.
The Romani tried to return to what was left of their homes but the villagers kept chasing them away. One Roma woman was among many who told Fonseca she was still afraid for her life:
“They ring the church bells whenever they see one of us,” she said, “and we know what that means.”
A predictable story
One of the most reliable things you can find in European history is this kind of brutality against Romani communities. It is distinct with its sadistic, hungry cruelty, with the desire to punish to the point of complete annihilation.
The tidal wave of violence in Haderani was unleashed by the death of the young man but it had already been boiling and spilling over the edges— not just in this small village, but in the whole country and all neighboring countries.
Fonseca lists out several examples from the early 1990s in Bury Me Standing. Three houses burned in one village, “for no apparent reason,” by Hungarians and Romanians. Six houses destroyed and four Roma killed by Hungarians in another village. A few weeks later, 35 Romani houses were destroyed by Hungarians in the town of Turulung. A few weeks after that, Romani quarters were destroyed in two other towns. Fonseca writes, “in neither case did the attackers claim a motive or even a pretext.”
And two months after that, a coordinated and unprovoked attack was waged against the Roma community in Bucharest:
“An old Gypsy woman had a fatal heart attack after watching her children and grandchildren being dragged from their hiding places under beds and in cupboards and badly beaten.” — Bury Me Standing, Isabel Fonseca
One unusual thing about the Bucharest attack was that arrests were made. The attacked Romani people were “arrested and thrown into Bucharest’s Magurele military barracks, which was being used as a temporary prison.”
Fonseca wrote her book in the early 1990s and attributes the increasing violence against the Romani to the turbulent times after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Eastern Europeans needed a scapegoat, someone to blame for holding them back from the great promise of democracy.
The Romani were swiftly put in the role of scapegoats as has been the norm all over the world for the past ten centuries. People either brutalize them or watch others brutalize them.
Ask anyone. A Hungarian, a Bulgarian, a German, an Italian... Ask them in the 1990s, ask them in the Middle Ages, ask them today. You’ll get the same answer: the Romani are thieves, criminals, and deserve to be either chased far away or destroyed.
It’s not history yet
One day, we might look back on all the violence against the Romani with some sense of accountability and self-reflection.
But right now, we don’t have to look back. We can just look around.
I’m from Bulgaria, the country that shares the label “largest Romani minority” with Romania. I grew up right next to the biggest Roma neighborhood in the capital, Sofia. I was taught to keep my distance, watch my pockets, avoid eye contact.
At age 33, I’m yet to have a bad experience with a Roma person.
In the past year, I’ve been volunteering with a group that works with people in poverty. We go to one of the Roma communities in Sofia organize games for the children.
There are no church bells there. But you can hear the echoes of Haderani. The houses of over 30 Roma families were demolished by the mayor — at the insistence of the surrounding Bulgarian residents — and the families were crammed into what used to be an old Gestapo office building nearby.
They, alongside the rest of the Roma families who still haven’t lost their houses, are soon to be “evicted” by the authorities — but nobody knows where.
During one of our recent visits, it just so happened that an engagement ceremony between two Roma families was taking place out on the streets. Everyone was gathered, the adults dancing hand in hand to the ancient, fierce rhythm of a Roma orchestra, the children watching and playing around.
We wanted to stay and watch, even dance, but we were outsiders to this community after all. We said hello but decided not to intrude. As we walked past, one of the kids approached us and jokingly asked if we called the police. What a stab at the heart that was. To be seen as someone who would try to put an end to this celebration — while I was aching to join it. But it was deserved. My people have been cutting short Romani celebrations and Romani lives for decades.
We were making our way through the crowd but more and more children gathered around us and slowed us down. One little boy asked me to pick him up. I lifted him in the air, he wrapped his legs around my waist and pressed his cheek against mine. In giggles, we danced to the rhythm of the drums.
Then I let him go and we hugged goodbye.
As we walked away from the music, and from this community that everyone around was working so hard to erase, all I wanted was to turn back and stay.
For centuries, people across Europe and the world have persecuted the Romani, destroyed their homes, enslaved them, murdered them, chased them away, and called them thieves.
It was in a Roma neighborhood — the quintessential place of danger I was raised to avoid — where I saw a friend accidentally drop a bunch of coins and the children rushing to gather them and press them back in her hand.
We sure enjoy fearing the Romani — and punishing them for that. But if you want to meet the real thieves, you won’t find them inside a Roma house. They’re outside, trying to tear it down.