The Roma of Crete

1. Introduction There are no official Greek statistics for the number of Roma in Greece. According to the Greek Helsinki Monitor the figure is approximately 350,0001, of which 90% speak Romani (Bakker 2000:40). This statistic makes up 3% of the total population which spreads across the country throughout the mainland and on the islands. Whilst some have assimilated into Greek society, others are left on the outskirts of towns and make up the infamous gypsy camps. It is apparent that a divide exists between the Roma of Greece and the Greek Roma depending on the level of assimilation and therefore their language, culture and attitudes vary accordingly. This paper looks at the Roma of Crete in the Heraklion prefecture (see figure 1) by collecting and analysing qualitative data from one-to-one ethnographic interviews and quantitative data through the Romani Dialectological Questionnaire2. It focuses on two specific areas, Nea Alikarnassos and a smaller community near the main port of the capital (see figure 4). This paper provides a general profile by exploring the history behind these settlements, their lifestyles and living situations, the relationship between Roma and non-Roma balame, and their dialect that speakers refer to as Romanika. 2. Historical Background The first appearance of Roma in Crete dates back to 1322 through written records by Franciscan monk Simon Simeonis (Elsie 1989). This is also believed to be the first recorded presence of atsigani gypsies in European territory.

1 2

Greek Helsinki Monitor 1999 (NGO). Cia Rinne (2002) The Roma Minority of Greece. [www.romnews.com] See figures 2 and 3 on attached coursework CD.

We also saw outside this city a tribe of people, who worship according to the Greek Rite and assert themselves to be of the race of Cain. These people rarely or never stop in one place for more than thirty days but always, as if cursed by God, are nomad and outcast. After the thirtieth day they wander from field to field with small, oblong, black and low tents, like those of the Arabs, and from cave to cave, because the place inhabited by them becomes after the period of thirty days so full of vermin and other filth that it is impossible to live in the neighbourhood. 3

Lydaki (2006) supports this claim by proposing Greece as a main station along the Romas route from India to the west during the fourteenth century. Other records show their presence in Corfu in 1360 and that they intentionally confused their origins by making false connections to Egypt which consequently produced the label aigyptoi. Increasingly the Roma of Greece are being studied and investigated in terms of language, identity and culture.4 The Ministry of Education examined ten districts across the country to ascertain the Romas economical, cultural and social status; this took place from 1997 to 1998 and covered 68% of the population.5 One of the districts was Nea Alikarnassos in Heraklion and they observed the main problems as appalling living conditions, lack of access to water/electricity and no improvements carried out or measures implemented with the municipality preventing relocation of the Romani community.6

Esposito, M. (ed.) 1960. Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis ab Hybernia ad Terram Sanctam, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. 4 Lydaki (1993-1997) explored the lives of 7000 gypsies living in Ano Liosia and Agia Barbara which presents data on their lifestyles and languages. 5 This report is available at http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/socialcharter/Complaints/CC15CaseDoc8_en.pdf 6 In 2004 this made up part of the complaint sent from the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) to the General Director of Human Rights, Council of Europe.

The legal status of Roma in Greece ameliorated in the 1970s in the sense that it was granted. However, due to the high levels of illiteracy and complexity of the documents, hardly any of the Roma have been able to succeed in acquiring Greek citizenship. The interviewees considered themselves Greek citizens based on their upbringing and knowledge of Greek, not one commented on their official legal status. 3. Nea Alikarnassos and Heraklion Port Around seven hundred people inhabit the camp found in Nea Alikarnassos (see figure 5) and approximately fifty near the main port of Heraklion (see figure 6). The smaller community is based further into the capital and live in concrete buildings made up of single rooms, where typically up to eleven adults and children live. In contrast to the camp in Nea Alikarnassos the living conditions here appeared worse despite the building materials and closer proximity to the city. When the balame non-Roma refer to the Roma of Crete they often point to Nea Alikarnassos as their home, it is the largest settlement on the island and has existed for around twenty five years. The camp itself is adjacent to the local prison but has no refuse collection or legal water and electricity supplies; it is situated next to the national road and set back from other towns and villages. On arrival we were directed to a different entrance where the officials lived, this was the first appearance of a hierarchy, and here we were invited into a small kafeneion with a pool table, television, and bar. In contrast to the concrete kafeneion the other buildings were made up of wood, corrugated iron, plastic sheets and tarpaulin (see figures 7 - 13).

4. Attitudes 4.1 Attitudes within the Tsigani community From my own interviews it was clear that the Roma of Crete referred to themselves as Tsigani (pl) and it was derogatory or offensive to use the term Yifti (pl). The general response regarding the difference between the two was the Yifti are thieves, they do not work, we are Tsigani and we work to live here. In Crete there seems to be a large divide between the Roma who have assimilated into Greek society and those living in the settlements described above. Marios, 24, has moved into Agios Nikolaos and works at a local petrol station, he speaks Romani but rejects the label tsigani. When one of his friends arrived at the workplace and began to speak in Romani he replied do not use that language here. This contradicts Lydakis (1997) report that Romani is used in presence of non-gypsies to strengthen the bonds of their race. There was a strong desire to appear Greek and belong to the local community and Marios refused to discuss any aspect of Roma life. This reflected a growing shift in attitudes among the younger generations interviewed, the traditions are beginning to outlive the beliefs and they wish to integrate themselves into Greek society. This is particularly true of the younger men; they described their modified cars, Greek girlfriends and the Greek language as desirable. Tong (1983) added two extra categories to the types of Roma, which are apparent in Crete. Originally the distinction described only nomadic and sedentary Roma, however, Tong suggested that there are also those that live amongst the Greeks and those that totally reject Greek society and pretend to be anything but Romani (cited in Schulman 2003:14). Despite this shift there are many Roma families living in Crete who still abide by tradition and custom and the interviewees often spoke of family gatherings and the importance of

being one group. Contradictory to this were their opinions on Albanian gypsies living in Greece; they labelled them violent thieves who are always trying to outsell us. This was the second indication of a hierarchy amongst the community and where the difference between yifti and tsigani was most apparent. Articles such as The Kings of Rubbish7 and other media coverage have tried to help the situation however it appears this divide is ever-increasing, which mirrors the Albanian-Greek segregation in the non-Roma world. 4.2 Attitudes towards the Tsigani Crete is especially conservative in its views towards outsiders and a large number of Cretans even look down upon Athenians as lesser Greeks. They have banded together in a defined territory and a separate history and the outsiders within Crete have banded together into communities such as the Albanians, Bulgarians, and Roma. Institutionalised racism shifts from one group to another based on a new wave of immigrants or the media and local scandals. The Tsigani of Nea Alikarnassos have received both positive and negative press in and beyond Crete.8 Recently, a number of activist initiatives have resulted in workshops and meetings for the Roma of Nea Alikarnassos. This acknowledgement has provided such opportunities as Through My Eyes where individuals were given basic training in photography and asked to portray their day-to-day lives. Breast cancer awareness seminars have taken place as recently as January 2010 and music collaborations are commonplace with local Greek groups. Treatment of the Cretan Roma by officials has been notoriously negative, since their arrival they have faced many attempts of forced eviction. In November 1999, Heraklion County Court cancelled the eviction plans issued by the Mayor of Alikarnassos in 1997 and ruled
7

This article is available at http://journalistaward.stopdiscrimination.info/fileadmin/ja08/Winning_articles/041_JA_SJA_EN.pdf 8 GHM report to ERRC No 59: 29.05.1999 Report on the coverage of the Roma in Greek Press.

them abusive. 102 families were served municipal orders to evacuate the land; however, it was ruled public property not private and that there was prior official consent fifteen years beforehand. From this time the Roma built up homes from a range of scrap materials on the promise that better accommodation would be provided, this fuelled the arguments behind the eviction notices as no alternative housing would be available. However, one unprecedented movement resulted from this situation; the Roma appealed their case in court.9 This marked the beginning of Roma realising their rights in Crete and since then, the General Secretary of Heraklion has reorganised the relocation program, offering accommodation in and around the city. This has prevented forced evictions but does not explain why seven hundred people still live in Nea Alikarnassos. From the interviews I discovered that a number of them were given property through the Cretan authorities but chose to rent them as a source of income. They preferred to stay as one group in the current living conditions than disperse around Heraklion into accommodation allocated by officials. Another response to this decision is the treatment by the local police force; the Roma described verbal abuse and excessive violence when away from the group alongside raids on their homes and incidents of the police burning down their houses. From the balame interviews the Roma were generally portrayed as criminals, beggars, and drug-dealers. 10 5. Culture 5.1 Religion All the interview participants named Greek Orthodox as their religion and this mirrors the situation across the country. Many of the minority groups take on a second Greek identity
Heraklion County Court, Crete, Decision number 975/1999 of 12.11.1999, cancelling the 17.12.1999 eviction protocol issued by the mayor of Nea Alikarnassos against local Roma. 10 Notably, there was a higher level of acceptance from the villagers, who encounter the Roma very rarely and the more conservative responses came from the towns where there is a higher level of interaction and stereotyping.
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through the Church assigning them Christian names such Giorgos, Kostas, Sotiris, Anna, and Maria. 5.2 Education Approximately 40 children were reported to attend municipality schools in Heraklion, around 30 were boys like Giorgos, 15 (see figure 14). However, during the recordings it became apparent that he could not read or write and when asked replied we only speak Romani and Greek. Many reports in Greece show high levels of illiteracy in the Roma communities, this was also true of Crete.11 Common beliefs among the balame revolve around misunderstandings, complaining that the Roma do not want to attend lessons and cause problems in schools.12 However, in Crete there is evidence to the contrary, there is a willingness to attend and a respect from the Roma. Other considerations are the Greek educational system laws, citizenship makes schooling compulsory, and this creates a difficult situation where Roma children are forced into education, therefore Greek language and society but the social cohesion can provide more job opportunities. 5.3 Employment The Roma in Crete are more visible during the summer months in locations such as Chania, Agios Nikolaos and Heraklion, where the women and children sell balloons, flowers and dance or play instruments for the tourists. Also, they are often seen begging when there are big public gatherings such as Easter celebrations, cleaning in the hotels, and at markets selling clothes and household items. The majority of the men possess vans or pickup trucks

ERRC reports show 80-90% illiteracy rates in Greece. ERRC (1999) Publications, Fact Sheet. [www.errc.org/publications/factsheets/greece] 12 Jonasson, Wes. Education Still Pipedream for Gypsies in Greece. [www.unesco.org/education/efa/know_sharing/grassroots_stories/greece]

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and sell rugs, fruit and vegetables, clothes and shoes; they travel to all areas on the island and throughout the year. Other employment includes seasonal work such as olive picking. For the Roma who stay at home the tasks assigned to them were similar to Lydakis findings in 1997. From my interviews in Crete the age of consent for females was 13-16 and for the males it was 14-18. Every girl and woman interviewed spoke of the significance of childbearing, cleanliness and keeping the home pure, whilst the majority of the men measured success in their wives, number of children (average 4-5) and appearance of their vehicles. It was clear that the family institution played a massive role and the community was governed by patriarchal beliefs, which agrees with other Roma populations elsewhere in Europe. 5.4 Traditions and Customs All participants claimed they celebrate the Greek holidays, such as Easter and name days. For christenings and weddings they buy presents, drink, eat, and dance and no one commented on the foretelling of death. On the whole, marriages are arranged by the parents and family groups were based on extended kinship, however it was made clear that consanguinity is prohibited, which interestingly some Cretans still allow. 6. Language Below are listed some of the main linguistic findings which are briefly discussed in contrast to other dialects of Greece.13 Other comparisons are made with Messings 1988 Romani dictionary to explore similarities and differences. A high level of Greek influence was quickly apparent from the interviews as Matras (2002:22) explains that outside the country the lexical component includes approximately 250 loanwords, a large number of basic semantic concepts, numerals, grammatical loans such as adverbs and particles, and also many
A complete Dialectological Questionnaire can be found on the attached coursework CD. The Romani Dialectological Questionnaire and the Ethnographic Questions are provided by the Romani Morpho-Syntactic Database Project at the University of Manchester.
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inflectional and derivational affixes (cited in Schulman 2003:12). This extent of this influence seemed much greater in Romanika. 6.1 Lexicon All the interview participants stated that only the numbers 1 to 6 were in Romani, from then on they were Greek (recording 1): jek one, duj two, trin three, tar four, pand five, oh six. Personal pronouns include me I, tu you (sg), von he, von she, amen we, tumen you (pl), and von they. It was also found that the demonstrative kava he was often used instead of the personal pronoun von he. There are two genders in Cretan Romani - masculine and feminine. It agrees with Messings (1988:17) description that they are often indicated by the characteristic endings of noun and adjective in the singular, -o for masculine and -i for feminine, or by agreement in the article or adjective. Many of the words borrowed from Greek were appointed their Greek gender and where there was uncertainty the neuter to was added. A number of notable lexicon points are as follows: Giraleh Crete was used which differs to Messings (1988:67) Girito. To form the names of Roma groups the participants used the place of origin or their Greek surnames, for example Portokalla. All interviewees called their language Romanika Romani and preferred the term Tsigani to the derogatory Yifti, both meaning gypsies. The single Albanian participant claimed he avoided Albanian borrowings when speaking Romanika as it identified him as an outsider.

Even with the knowledge that the interviewers were Albanian and English, the participants still referred to them as balame Greek non-Roma.

6.2 Morphology - Nouns and Verbs The following results can be compared to the RMS Database dialect sampler (recording 2):
Nouns in English day egg bread other Heraklion, Crete dives varo maro javer Sofades disara vandro mandro javer Parakalamos dives vando mando vaver Kalamata dives varo maro javer

The noun form maro bread is common of the Balkan dialects (see also figure 15). I was at home sinom-as to kher

am.1SG-REM at home I came home av-il-om to kher

come.PAST.1SG at home From these results the closest dialect is clearly Kalamata, however as the following sentences indicate this is not always true. This is a small boy akava isi xurd-o this avo

is small.M boy

I was playing with my brother eme khel-av-as-a I me pra-lesa

play.1SG.REM my.OBL brother.INSTR

Do you want to play with those four Gypsy girls? mange te khel-es-a me ta tar chija?

want.2SG COMP play.2SG with(GREEK) ART.PL(GREEK) four girls No one uses this anymore derjek na xrisimopi akava

nobody NEG xrisimopi.3SG(GREEK) this The room of my two sisters is small o domatios sta bes-en-a mi duj pen-ya isi but xurdo

ART.M room

in(GREEK) live.3PL.IND my.PL two sister.PL is very small

From 10 participants 8 used these formations. The above sentences show similarities to the Kalamata, Sofades, and Parakalamos dialects, however only the first two sentences were identical to one dialect.14 There is clearly possible further analysis of the differences which cannot be added here. An interesting point reoccurred with the plural ending -ya, and as Messing (1988:18) explains if the noun ends in -i , the plural adds an -a and the preceding changes to a semi-vowel y. Another example includes lulugya flowers. Otherwise the plurals were generally formed as follows:

14

See RMS database for dialect samples [http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/files/31_samplermap.shtml]

Masculine Singular -o

Feminine Singular -i

Masculine Plural -e

Feminine Plural -a

Other results showed a high usage of Greek plural endings and neutralised examples such as dives days (cf. Matras 2002:85). Present tense conjugation of the verb kerav I do/make: many of the participants used the long forms in conjugating the verb, ker-av-a I make, ker-es-a you make (sg), ker-el-a he/she/it makes, ker-as-a we make, ker-en-a you make (pl), ker-en-a they make. Past tense formation of the verb kerav I make: ker-av-as I made, ker-es-as you made (sg), ker-el-as he/she/it made, ker-as-as we made, ker-en-as you made (pl), ker-en-as they made. The word order sometimes mirrored the Greek formation and mostly followed an SVO arrangement. Generally, the results showed a bigger influence of Greek on Romani than in other European dialects and agree with Tongs (1983:375-6) conclusion that Roma more assimilated to Greek society use many more foreign loanwords and mixture of Greek and Romani, those who are nomadic and less assimilated tend to be the more linguistically homogeneous group. For future research it is necessary that a higher number of participants complete the full Dialectological Questionnaire.15 There were recordings for the future tense, adverbs, prepositions and so on but I do not feel there was sufficient evidence to make generalisations

10 participants completed the linguistic questionnaire, age range 16 - 58, all born in Crete or elsewhere in Greece. 40 were interviewed for ethnographic responses, age range 13 - 62 and had all lived in Crete for at least 5 years.

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at this stage. However, from the above results and other findings I can suggest the classification for the Cretan dialect is Balkan. 7. Summary By looking at the overall profile of Roma in Crete it has shown great similarities to other communities in Greece and across Europe. Their economical and sociological status is poor and often they are treated with prejudice and racism, however, attitudes are changing within and outside the Roma community. They are integrating into Greek society through trends, education, employment, and language, especially the younger generations who seek transition into the mainstream. Being the majority language, Greek appears a necessity, but Romanika is still used in the home with higher levels of Greek borrowings. At this stage, based on comparisons to other Greek dialects, the suggested classification of Romani in Crete is Balkan. The media and state systems policies are increasingly positive towards the Roma of Crete than fifteen years ago with regular activist initiatives and NGO support. Social integration forms the main basis of any future official action plans, whereas unfortunately the language is not considered, and by adopting the Greek language and traditions the Roma of Crete are beginning to feel they belong. The island is particularly conservative towards its minorities and Roma face the most discrimination, however, they do appear a self-exclusive group in their location and lifestyles which sets them apart from an already divided society.

Word Count: 3,294 I would like to thank Arjanit Elezi for his time and translations, and all the Roma Questionnaire participants who were unfailingly helpful and welcoming.

References

Bakker, Peter, Milena Hbschmannov, Valdemar Kalinin, Donald Kenrick, Hristo Kyuchukov Yaron Matras, and Giulio Soravia. 2000. What is the Romani language? Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Elsie, Robert. 1989. Two Irish in Albania. Available: http://www.scribd.com/doc/87009/Two-Irish-Travellers-in-Albania-in-1322 [Accessed 04/02/2010] Engebrigtsen, A.I. 2007. Exploring Gypsiness. Power, exchange and interdependence in a Transylvanian village. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lydaki, Anna. 1997. Balame kai Roma [Balame and Roma]. Athens: Kastaniotis. Lydaki, Anna. 1998. Oi Tsingani stin poli: Megalonontas stin Agia Varvara [The Tsingani in the city. Growing up in Agia Varvara]. Athens: Kastaniotis. Lydaki, Anna. 2006. Gypsies of Greece: Tradition and Modernism. Available: www.cretegazette.com/2006-04/gypsies-greece.php [Accessed 30/01/2010] Matras Y. et al. 2001. Romani Dialectological Questionnaire. University of Manchester. Matras, Y. 2002. Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Messing, G.M. 1988. A glossary of Greek Romani. As spoken in Agia Vavara (Athens). Columbus: Slavica. Rinne, Cia. 2002. The Situation of the Roma in Greece. Available: www.domresearchcenter.com/journal/16/greece6.html [Accessed 30/01/2010] Schulman, V. 2003. Societal aspect of multilingualism in Greece with emphasis on Karditsa: the case of the Greek Roma. Thesis. University of Manchester. Tong, Diane. 1983. Language use and attitudes among the Gypsies of Thessaloniki. Anthropological Linguistics 25: 375-385.