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Through its name – ‘Mahala şi Ţigănie’ (‘Slums and Gypsydom’) – the Roma Fair signalled that it brought together low and high culture, by bringing the slums and Gypsydom to the centre, and thus implying a reversal in the ordering of centre and periphery within the city of Bucharest. ‘Mahala şi Ţigănie’ indexed the social etymology of two words, both of which are derogatory in Romanian today. ‘Mahala’, a Turkish word, initially meant a Turkish district or quarter, and later became a synonym for ‘slum’ with an Orientalist undertone. ‘Ţigăn/ie’ is used negatively in the Romanian language to imply a place or a group characterized by disorder and chaos, irrespective of the ethnicity of its inhabitants.

The organizers of the fair were inviting the audience to rethink the meanings of these words within the precincts of a museum that had erased the histories they represented (Ţigani, like all other ethnic minorities, had been absent from the museum; and both ‘Ţigani’ and ‘mahala’ were associated with negative foreign cultural influences, from the Roma and the Middle East respectively). However, depending on the participants’ perspectives, the hegemony of ethnonationalism in the museum and the commodification of Roma cultural elements under neoliberalism framed this project in ways that threatened to undermine its radical potential.

‘Ţigan’ meant ‘slave’ in Moldavia and Wallachia until 1856, and the terms were used interchangeably until slavery was abolished in the second half of the nineteenth century. The territories of Moldavia and Wallachia, part of today’s Romania, were the only European region – at least from the fifteenth century onwards – where Ţigani were slaves.⁶ These histories continue to be silenced or perfunctorily addressed, and for these reasons the derogatory meaning of the word is unleashed when non-Roma choose to call Roma ‘Ţigani’, a term that has preserved its connotations of lower social status into the present day. Today the social etymology of the term is rarely discussed, yet it continues to be used by non-Roma, and even prescribed as an alternative to the ethnonym ‘Roma’, as mentioned above. In what follows I will trace the social etymology of the term and uncover the ‘histories that have found quiet refuge’ in it (Stoler 2009, 35).

Although the initial migration of Roma from India and the Middle East approximately 1,000 years ago is a more or less generally accepted hypothesis, their arrival in the Romanian territories from the Balkans and the origins of slavery represent points of contention in Romanian historiography, and by extension in Romanian politics. Different theories exist in Romania as to whether Roma were slaves before or became enslaved after their arrival in the Romanian territories. Non-Roma Romanian historian Viorel Achim (1998) argues that Roma were slaves in medieval Bulgaria and Serbia, before they entered Romanian territories. Non-Roma historian Nicolae Grigoraş, on the other hand, maintains that Roma who migrated to Wallachia and Moldavia became enslaved after their arrival. Some free Roma even sold themselves after crossing the border into Wallachia in order to pay their debts, or else became enslaved by marrying slaves (Grigoraş 2000, 79). Roma scholar Nicolae Gheorghe refutes the thesis that Roma had slave status prior to their arrival in the Romanian territories. He argues that this hypothesis attempts to shift the blame for the Roma’s marginalization and to characterize it as an innate condition (Gheorghe 1983, 15).

Beyond these controversies about the origins of Roma slavery, it is undisputed that Roma were the individual property of the crown, the nobility (boyars) or the monasteries, and they appeared on property inventories alongside cattle and goods in Moldavia and Wallachia (Mircea 2000, 61). Whether their owner was the crown, a noble or a monastery, slaves were always at the mercy of their owners, and potentially subject to any kind of mistreatment except killing. Documents legalizing the donation or purchase of a slave were as official as any other property act of the time. For the dominant class under Romanian feudalism, slavery was a stable and solid institution strengthened by Church support. The princes and nobles who were slave owners endowed monasteries with large numbers of slaves and thus gained these religious institutions’ endorsement of slavery. Monastery slaves were the most numerous and the most oppressed (Grigoraş 2000, 85).

The first documents to attest to the existence of Roma slavery date from the fourteenth century for Wallachia and the fifteenth century for Moldavia. Grigoraş argues that Roma slavery originated with the enslavement of captives during the wars against Tatars; although initially slaves were named ‘Tatars’ – a term gradually replaced with ‘Ţigani’ – Grigoraş contends that the slaves had always been Roma. A relatively small number of Roma came to the Romanian territories from east of the Denester River, where fights with the Tatars took place. Most Roma arrived in Wallachia and Moldavia in the fourteenth century by crossing the Danube to the north, because of wars in the territories of present-day Bulgaria and Serbia. When they entered Romanian lands they became slaves and property of the crown because of legislation regarding Ţigani (Grigoraş 2000, 77).

Roma were considered foreigners, and their situation differed from that of local serfs, who were destitute and often tied to the land. During slavery, laws upheld strict distinctions between slaves and free people through the regulation of mixed marriages. Free people who married slaves became slaves, and the offspring of mixed marriages were born slaves (Grigoraş 2000). The categories ‘slave’ and ‘serf’ distinguished between slaves, serfs and free persons, and the policing of the boundaries between these categories ensured the maintenance of the institutions of slavery and serfdom.

Historian Viorel Achim (1998) lists five different Roma groups during slavery, groups that have maintained the same or similar denominations in the present. Goldsmiths, later known as Rudara, were the property of the prince, and over time had to give up working with gold, which was scarce, in favour of woodcarving. Lingurara, or spoon makers, also fabricated wooden objects, and were the property of either the prince or nobles. Ursara, or bear handlers, were nomads who belonged to the crown. Layesh, also known as Kalderash or Kelderara, were coppersmiths and the property of either nobles or monasteries (Achim 1998, 75). Most Kelderara were nomads, and were allowed to wander as long as they paid their dues to their overlord. In summer they travelled across the country selling various metal household items to villagers. In winter they withdrew near forests and lived in huts. Because Kelderara interacted frequently with the majority population, they were often perceived as the authentic Ţigani. Vatrash, the most numerous group, were agricultural workers and the property of either nobles or monasteries. Many of them lost the nomadic aspects of Roma life and became sedentary, tied to the land. From among them came the musicians renowned for fiddle-playing (Achim 1998, 78). Significant status differences among these groups existed during slavery: the Layesh, including Kelderara, had more freedom as craftspeople and were better off than the Vatrash; among the latter, fiddle-playing was the most prestigious occupation; Roma chiefs, who negotiated between their groups and the Romanian masters, had a higher status than the average slave.

In the early 1830s, the first attempts to free the Roma slaves came from intellectuals who had studied in the West and who, under the influence of Western ideas, deemed slavery anachronistic for a small new nation aspiring to European status. In Moldavia and Wallachia, Romanian abolitionists Vasile Alecsandri and Mihail Kogălniceanu criticized slavery as an outdated practice. In his 1837 nonfiction text about Roma, written in French and intended for a Western audience, Kogălniceanu described the tenuous distinction between peasants and Ţigani, specifically the Vatrash. Because the Vatrash were sedentary and had lost their language and customs, Kogălniceanu referred to their assimilation into the peasant population:

The Vatrash are today more civilized than the peasants and deserve that their masters should finally confer on them a freedom of which they are worthy. Boyars have the right to free them and many, those enlightened with the brilliance of civilized Europe, use this privilege in not few circumstances, re-establishing the rights that nature has bestowed on all humans. (Kogălniceanu 1837 [2000], 248)

Kogălniceanu decried Europeans’ lack of concern with the slave problem and hoped to raise an interest which:

unfortunately, will certainly only be temporary, because that is how Europeans are! They form philanthropic societies to abolish slavery in America, while in the heart of their continent, in Europe, there are 400,000 Ţigani slaves and 200,000 more lost in the darkness of ignorance and barbarism! And no one cares to civilize this people. (Kogălniceanu 1837 [2000], 234)

The cause of emancipation intersected with that of nineteenth-century Romanian nationalism: intellectual nobles such as Alecsandri and Kogălniceanu militated for freedom for the Roma from their Romanian masters at the same time as they supported a Romanian nation independent of the empires – Russian and Ottoman – that had ruled it for centuries. The nationalist game began in the mid nineteenth century with competing claims over the territories of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bucovina. Following the 1848 revolutions in Austria, Hungary and much of Western Europe, Wallachian and Moldavian revolutions occurred that same year. As social historian Daniel Chirot (1978, 111) shows, the goals of the ‘national bourgeois’ revolutions were to end foreign domination – specifically by the Ottomans and Russians – and to create a modern nation-state. This was one of the first attempts to consecrate the Romanian nation. The revolutionaries’ emphasis was mostly nationalist and political, rather than social or economic. The peasantry they chose to represent the nation and demonstrate its traditions lived in extremely precarious conditions, while Roma were still enslaved. Joint Russian–Ottoman military action crushed the revolution, and Russia remained Wallachia and Moldavia’s protector, while the Ottoman Empire continued to be the nominal overlord.

The abolition of slavery in the two principalities was a twenty-year process that ended in 1856. Initially the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia issued laws to free the slaves they owned, only later freeing those who were private property. Owners could receive an amount of cash in redemption for their freed slaves. The abolition of slavery had political but few economic consequences for Ţigani, according to Achim: even when they were given small plots of land, they found the taxes and responsibilities that came with them overwhelming, and allegedly preferred to revert to their situation as slaves. The assimilation of the Roma population increased after the abolition of slavery and became even stronger in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially for the Vatrash (Achim 1998, 56).

The synonymy between ‘Ţigan’ and ‘slave’ in the Romanian language left deep traces in the racialization of inferior social status in Romania, a process that continues today. In 2007 the Romanian government instituted a Committee for the Study of Slavery, modelled on similar committees for the study of the Holocaust and of Communism. However, the Romanian Senate’s discussions of Roma slavery and the disputes within the Committee for the Study of Slavery revealed strong opposition to any critical assessment of the history of Roma slavery. Despite the historical evidence, some non-Roma senators strongly rejected the argument that Roma were not born enslaved outside the territories of today’s Romania. This resistance to a critical appraisal of Roma slavery reflected a refusal to address the history of the Romanian territories through lenses other than the nationalist one, which celebrates heroes and decries the subjugation by successive empires of the small Romanian nation avant la lettre. The argument that the crown and other institutions in Moldavia and Wallachia had actively enslaved Roma, and that the institution of slavery was specific to those territories, contradicted the narrative of victimization of the Romanian nation.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, during the 2010 Senate debate about the declaration of Emancipation Day, politicians used the construction of Roma as foreign as a justification for proposing the ethnonym ‘Ţigani’ instead of ‘Roma’. The insistence of non-Roma senators on defining Roma, and their attempts to legislate distinctions between Roma and non-Roma, maintained the racialized logic of Ţigani as Other. As I show in Chapter 5, non-Roma take the liberty of naming Roma ‘Ţigani’ on national television, even when the latter reject this ethnonym. The symbolic violence of this renaming is obscured and trivialized by claims that Roma use the term themselves. Non-Roma’s use of this term to name Roma symbolically excludes Roma from the prerogatives of citizenship, and represents an imposition of racial privilege.