“They ring the church bells when they see one of us”

How we love setting Romani homes on fire

Image by wendy CORNIQUET from Pixabay

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 — whic…