The Story of the Gypsies
The Story of the Gypsies

Author(s): Konrad Bercovici
Subject(s): History, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Ethnohistory, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology
Published by: CEEOL Digital Reproductions / Collections
Keywords: Gypsies; Roma; Egyptians; Sinti; Travellers;
Summary/Abstract: I am attempting to unravel the story of a people whose vocabulary lacks two words — ‘duty’ and ‘possession.’ For hundreds of years the Gypsies have lived beside us —in the Orient and in the Occident, in Egypt as well as in England, in Syria and in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Turkey, on the frozen plains of Russia, in the Pusta of Hungary, on the barren rocky mountains and in the fertile valleys of Wallachia, in Australia and in the Americas — and we neither know nor understand them. What we know about them compared with what they know about us is like but a drop of water in the vast ocean. They do not live as we do because they do not consider our manner of living good enough for them, because they are not like the vintners who never get ‘half as good as the things they sell.’ (the author’s introduction)

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