Romani People

Where the Romani people came from was argued over for centuries, and it was settled by linguistics. In the late eighteenth century scholars noticed that Romani vocabulary corresponded to Indo-Aryan, and the correspondence has since been worked out in detail: Romani is an Indo-Aryan language, its inherited stock points to northern India, and the layers of borrowing it picked up on the way, Persian, Armenian and above all Greek, trace a route westward. That is a rare case of a people's origin being recovered from grammar after the historical record had failed.

Romani communities are attested in the Byzantine world and then across Europe from around the fourteenth century, and today they include the Roma of central and eastern Europe, the Sinti of German-speaking lands, the Kale of Iberia and of Finland and the Romanichal of Britain, with considerable variation in language, occupation and religion.

The English word Gypsy rests on a mistaken medieval belief that they came from Egypt. It is rejected by many and reclaimed by some, and there is no single term that everyone accepts. The twentieth century added a second reason to record this accurately. Between a quarter and half a million Romani people were murdered in the Nazi genocide, the Porajmos, and recognition of it came late and grudgingly in most of the countries where it happened.

Romani communities have generally practised the religion of the majority around them: Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans and eastern Europe, Catholicism in central and western Europe and in Spain, Islam in Turkey and parts of the Balkans. That pattern is often described from outside as shallow or merely nominal, which is a judgement rather than an observation, and the atlas does not make it. Distinctive practice exists inside those frameworks: the annual pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue each May, where Sara-la-Kali, Saint Sara, is venerated in the crypt, is the best known gathering in western Europe and draws Romani people from across the continent.

The largest development of the last century is Pentecostal. The Gypsy Evangelical Church, which began in France in the 1950s and grew into a movement with Romani pastors preaching in Romani, has spread across Europe and into the Americas and now claims a very large following. It is unusual in being a mass religious movement led from inside a community that has almost never had institutions of its own, and it has changed the religious map of Romani Europe within living memory. Older practice persists alongside all of it, particularly around purity and pollution, marime among many Roma, which regulates cleanliness, contact and conduct, and which functions as a body of religious law without a clergy to administer it.