The dark-skinned nomadic folk, called Romani, became known as “Tzigans” - from the Greek word Athinganoi, which became derived, often pejoratively, into “Gitans” in French, “Gitanos” in Spanish and “Gypsy” in English.Ī document dated 1385 attests that Prince Dan, monarch of the Romanian province of Wallachia, “made a gift of 40 Atzigan households to the monastery of Tismana”. The Roma are believed to have left an ancestral home in northern India around 1,500 years ago and arrived in mediaeval Europe about six centuries later. “The slavery of the Roma is a lost page of history,” said Alina Serban, a young Roma actress and playwright who has written about the Roma identity. “The five centuries of slavery mark a tragic period in the history of Romania… a period in which the Roma were deprived of the status of human beings,” Delia Grigore, a specialist in ethnology and herself a Roma activist told AFP. EURACTIV France reports.Īnd it is a story that remains largely untold today, even though hundreds of thousands of descendants of those who were enslaved - the Roma - struggle with the stigma it left. Hostility to the minority in France is among the highest in Europe. France continues evicting Roma, cuts re-housing and integration effortsįrance continued to evict thousands of Roma in 2015, and cut its re-housing efforts, as demand for housing soared due to the refugee crisis.
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