Central Europe > Country Info > Travel

Few visitors to Eastern Europe are aware that this region is home to millions of people who migrated here from India 1,000 years ago and still speak a language closely related to Hindi and Urdu.

These millions are the Gypsies, Europe's largest and most invisible minority. There are some 8 million Gypsies spread across the continent, and most live in Eastern Europe. They no longer travel in caravans, but they still camp on the fringes of society -- most are unemployed, illiterate, and living in tenements and villages, shunned by their neighbors.

Just how invisible this minority is can be judged by the fact that in all of Europe there is just one functioning museum where a visitor can discover the Gypsies' history and culture. The museum, known as the Ethnographic Museum, is in the small southeastern Polish town of Tarnow, about an hour-and-a-half by bus or car from Krakow.

The small museum, opened by the Polish government in 1979, offers a chance to learn more about the Gypsies in an hour than most Eastern Europeans, and many Gypsies themselves, learn about Gypsy history in a lifetime. This is due partly to the efforts of the museum's director, Polish ethnologist Adam Bartosz, who has collected photos, prints, and artifacts of Gypsy life from across Eastern Europe and provided a guidebook in English and Polish. But it also is due to the fact that very few people in Eastern Europe, including Gypsies, are curious about the Gypsies' past.

The collection starts with the migration of the Gypsies -- or Romas as they call themselves (from Sanskrit word for 'man') -- out of northwest India around 1000 A.D., or roughly the time of the Norman invasion of England. It traces their centuries-long progress through Persia, the Middle East, the Balkans and, by the 15th century, on across the rest of Europe.

Neither Bartosz nor any other scholar of Roma history knows why these wanderers originally left India, but there are many colorful theories. One ancient Persian historian has some 12,000 Roma originally leaving India for Persia at the Shah's invitation. As a caste of musicians, they were paid to stroll his empire, playing music in a kind of bread-and-circuses plan to pacify his subjects before they eventually spread farther west. Another theory has the Romas migrating as indentured laborers to the Persian Gulf region until the Arab states expelled them northward.

Once in Europe, the Roma stayed on the move, usually working as itinerant blacksmiths or entertainers. That was one of the few ways they could be useful in feudal Europe without being tied to the land as serfs. But wandering did not always keep them free. In Romania, the Roma were enslaved by the land-owning nobility and for 400 years, until 1856, bought and sold as chattel at public auctions. The museum's slave-auction posters from Romania are identical to those for African slaves in the New World.

Over the centuries, Romany life in Eastern Europe has alternated between periods of tolerance and pogroms, culminating with the extermination of some 500,000 Roma by the Nazis just 50 years ago. But it was not until the 1960s that the Romas' wandering came to end throughout Eastern Europe as communist governments forcibly settled them to help work heavy industries. The experiment severed the Roma from their traditional itinerant professions and, with the collapse of the state factories after 1989, has left them as the poorest of the region's new urban poor.

Such a troubled past might be enough to explain why many Eastern Europeans rarely look into Roma history and why Bartosz says his state-supported museum receives "only a small number" of visitors every year. But the real reason may be that the Roma have always lived in isolation from other Eastern Europeans -- both culturally and physically. Even today, Bartosz says, Roma children come to school speaking Romany, quickly run into problems with their teachers and schoolmates, and leave school by age 14 or 15. Dropping out does not just mean the Roma never integrate into the mainstream. It also means the Roma community itself has almost no intellectuals, and no one with any curiosity about, or the ability to make outsiders curious about, their past.

The Ethnographic Museum raises the possibility that one day things may change. Across the front of the museum hangs a Romany flag adapted by the First World Congress of Gypsies in London in 1971. Is it the beginning of a self-awakening of Europe's invisible minority? In the museum's trim backyard, a parked fleet of old gypsy wagons makes only one thing clear: the Romas' wandering past is over and their place in the new Eastern Europe is still to be determined.

To visit the Ethnographic Museum, take a bus or train to Tarnow, about 70 kilometers east of Krakow. Admission to the museum, at Krakowska St. 10, is 3 PLN ($1.10).

For more information, call the museum at (48-14) 22-06-25.