Julieta Rotaru is a contract teacher of Romani Chib and Sanskrit at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), Paris, and holds a course on Vlax Romani dialect, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. She is also the managing editor of “Romani Studies. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society”, published by Liverpool University Press, and the general secretary of this scholarly society which was established in 1888. I am happy to share one of my current books, one on the history of the Rudari people, which I hope to be of great interest to your readers, especially because of the many debatable issues underlining research on these people, including their socio-ethnic profile, i.e. are they Roma of Indian origins, or Romanians because they speak an ancient form of the Romanian language, or in fact, of a different ethnicity, coined recently as “Boyash”.
You are one of the authors of the first volume of the monograph on the beginnings of Roma lexicography in Romania. What does the volume consist of?
The main part of the volume is a critical edition of a bilingual Romanian-Romani dictionary written in the second half of the 19th century by a prominent Moldavian intellectual, Vasile Pogor. It is a dictionary written out of curiosity, based on the author’s collection of data and other published sources that we have identified. The dictionary followed the first list of Romani words published on the territory of present-day Romania only three decades earlier. The Romani lexicography had started late here, nearly 400 years since Johannes von Grafing’s lists of Slavic, Hungarian, and Romani words in Western Europe, and 300 years after the first known text in Balkan Romani, in the travelogue of Evliya Çelebi. For the major Romanian territories, including Transylvania, Pogor’s dictionary was written 200 years after the first trilingual Romani-Latin-Hungarian dictionary by Mihály Vistai Farkas, a work which is currently in preparation by the same authors, Victor Shapoval (Moscow City University), Aurore Tirard (INALCO, Paris), and myself. In the published volume, we present a state-of-the-art Romani lexicography for Romanian territories, along with insights into the perspectives of our project.
How did you approach the entries of the Moldovan author, Vasile Pogor, which, as it stands, he copied from other sources and thus made them questionable?
The dictionary compiled by the Moldavian author, like similar works of its time, at first glance seems of little originality. The source of the text is a glossary published by the historian and philologist J. A. Vaillant (1861), a French intellectual from the circles of Pogor’s family, who was naturalized Romanian and who held abolitionist views towards the Romani people. Pogor’s manuscript was later edited with entries written in blue ink, possibly by Pogor himself. All these entries were identified in the lists of Iberian Romani words published by the anthropologist Victor de Rochas in 1876. This is a peculiarity of the Romani texts production and the networking of the time and we have offered some insights in our introduction to the critical edition of the dictionary.
Additionally, the importance of the dictionary lies also in the organization of the lexical material copied and/or compiled from the two sources, to which the author added data collected in his fieldwork.
The dictionary contains original lexical data. For instance, so far, I haven’t come across a Romani word corresponding to the term “slave”. Most of the actual Romani dialects have words derived from Romanian loan words, such as o robo and the neologism o sklavipe (introduced in the abolitionist milieu of the 19th century). Pogor’s dictionary has the phrase o drom le çiorengoro /o drom le ʧioreŋoro/ which is a loan translation from Romanian ‘drumul robilor’ meaning ‘the path of slaves,’ in which çiorengoro / ʧioreŋoro/, meaning ‘of the poor ones’ or ‘of the thieves’ (depending on the spelling adopted), lexicalizing the Romanian word rob corresponding to ‘slave’.
Your work is focused on the Roma Miners who traditionally inhabit the Balkan region and most of Central Europe. What aspect of their history did you deal with in the book The Wallachian Gold-Washers?
To start with a paradox embedded in the terms “the Roma Miners”: this is a book on the Rudari from Romania, the first historical monograph, from their first attestation in medieval documents until the late 19th century when they changed their occupation from gold-washers to mainly woodworking. We also attempted a history of the gold-washing in Romanian territories since prehistory to show the continuity of the occupation. The Rudari from Romania never were miners, because the two Romanian provinces, Wallachia and Moldavia do not have gold lodes, and the only source is the alluvial gold and gold nuggets from rivers hailing from the Carpathian Mountains. Although the name Rudar is a Slavic term for miner, they presently work mostly with wood, thus it is possible to study them as a case of the fluidity of professional identity. They do not speak Romani Chib but rather an antiquated form of the Romanian language. Because of their lifestyle, they have been consistently treated as part of the Romani or Gypsy ethnic community, but they in most cases reject that identity, stating many reasons. Coming to your question, which aspect of their history I have dealt with, it is their history based on archival sources, published or edited, which we published for the first time in the Appendix of the volume. These documents are kept in the National Historical Archive in Bucharest and the historian and palaeographer Florin Rotaru from Bucharest was responsible for data collection and transliteration. The book capitalizes on the demographic findings from the Maprom database which has been completed by Ryan Dias within the project financed by the Swedish foundation Östersjöstiftelsen (2017-2022) and implemented by the Södertörn University, Stockholm. Based on archival sources and corroborated research, we have reconstructed the first maps of different Rudari-like communities from the 19th century and Nikoloz Kobakhidze has drawn 5 maps (the first is a collective map with all the four Rudari-like communities). The book has 39 appendices. In appendices 36-39, we have listed the localities inhabited by Rudari, Țigani gold-washers, Lingurari, and Zlatari, and in addition, the Gypsy salt-cutters (Țiganii ciocănași) of Cozia, because they were reported living together or in the proximity of the Rudari communities. In this way, our study has now opened new avenues for researchers who may pursue linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological investigations in these mapped localities.
In the book, you state that they worked as gold prospectors and gold washers for the Wallachian crown and were governed as slaves by a monastery located on the Olt River.
The Olt River is one of the auriferous rivers which is thus often referred to in the travelogues of the foreign visitors to Danubian Principalities who had amply described the painstaking work of the gold-panning. A medieval voivoda organized a network of collectors of this ‘free’ gold necessary for the State Treasury. For that reason, he transformed 300 presumably free households into slaves who were placed under the administration of one monastery which he built on the Olt River. Cozia, the so-called “Jerusalem of Romania” was one of the earliest monasteries founded in Wallachia and throughout history was known for managing a large number of slaves who are forefathers of nowadays Romani people, among them many who were identified as Rudari.
Investigation of the Cozia Monastery archive registers reveals much concerning the history of the Rudari. Many documents show that for a long time, the monastery was considered responsible for “all” Rudari in Wallachia. We have shown through the demographic investigation which displays their geographic spread and the variety of their occupations, that this claim is not tenable. The Rudari had a centuries-long tense relation with the monastery and we concluded with a hypothesis which we subject to further research, that this might reflect a stage when the legal conception of the Wallachian institution of slavery was changing, from a loose sort of “ownership” over the product of the slave’s labor to a tighter control over the slave’s person and in which being a Ţigan was equal to being a slave, and vice-versa. We have concluded that the Cozia Monastery played a vital role in the emergence of the Rudari gold-washers as a collective. The monastery held that the families donated in the 14th century were its property and slaves. The Rudari particularly in Early Modern Era, insisted that they were not slaves of the monastery and even refused to pay the taxes to the monks. We have shown that this conflict probably “made” the Rudari emerge as a community with a special feeling of belonging that converted into an ethnicity separate from the other Roma groups.
The book aims at exhaustivity. We have for instance analyzed the semantic evolution of the socio-professional names under which the gold-washers came to be known diachronically in all Romanian provinces: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, removing thus the terminological unclarity which surrounds the conflation of Rudari with Boyashi for instance. We have analyzed socio-demographically each group listed in the first preserved census of the population as gold-panners: Rudari, Țigani as gold-washers, Lingurari, Zlătari, etc. For instance, we have discovered that the Zlătari were goldsmiths and jewelers, thus proper metallurgists, whereas the Rudari only collected gold and knew basic techniques of cupellation, etc. Possibly Zlatari were no longer or not at all connected with the Rudari, their household was differently organized and they lived mostly on their master’s properties. They were likely doing commissioned works for the church such as icons or even for casting typefaces for printing. It has recently been shown by a book historian that the Zlatari from southern Serbia used to caste the typefaces in the first Montenegrin printing house.
Thus, our book opens up to many aspects of the history and culture of the Rudari and other socio-professional groups coined as “Țigani” corresponding to Gypsies. Because of the complexity of their history, disparate sources have been gathered, confronted, and interpreted. This is also reflected in the organization of the bibliography: Manuscripts, Collections of documents, dictionaries, encyclopedias, datasets, etc; Works on Rudari, Boyash, etc; Linguistic works; Works on History of Mining and Metallurgy; Works on ancient history; and Other cited works.
We have subjected to critical examination the entire literature concerning the Rudari in the Danubian Principalities. The linguistic research is critically examined, starting with the first study of the Rudari/Boyash language, which emerged as a by-product of Gustav Weigand’s mapping of the Daco-Romanian dialects in 1883, and extending to the initial description of a dialect spoken by the Rudari in Romania in the 1990s and a comparative dialectal description of the language spoken by in different regions in South-eastern Europe. The conclusion is that in these studies convincing proof about the presence of elements of Romani in Rudari’s language is lacking. The linguists have often resorted to extra-linguistic arguments to prove it. At the level of vocabulary, there are greater influences of the Romani language on the Romanian and other surrounding languages, than on the language spoken by the Rudari.
What are the results of your MapRom project, the first demographic survey of the historic Roma population in Romania?
MapRom, as I briefly mentioned before, is a database stored at the website www.maprom.se, and the dataset is published at the Swedish National Data Center, and available on the EU portal of official information. This study draws on the unpublished 1838 first demographic count of the population in the Romanian historical province Walachia. We succeeded in gathering data about the entire Romani population: 12,282 Roma households (48,508 individuals), from 2,586 localities.
We are now able to offer comprehensive and fact-checked information on the organization of the Roma communities and households a few decades before their emancipation from slavery.
We can summarize some major findings of the MapRom:
- The 1838 census aimed at the permanently settled Orthodox population and thus excluded nomadic and Muslim Roma.
- We found an insignificant number of free Roma, the rest of them were slaves. For more than fifty percent of them, we have reconstructed, from other (unpublished) sources the names of the owners (private noblemen, monasteries, or churches). This kind of data makes MapRom unique.
- Slavery had a domestic character, as can be seen from the ownership: 6103 households belonged to the private owners, mainly aristocratic families; 4469 households belonged to the cleric (churches, but mainly monasteries, Orthodox or Catholic), whereas 1595 households belonged to the State/Crown.
- The Romani households and families were small, with few children. Seldom relatives lived together. The average household size was 3.8 persons, nearly the same as the majority Wallachian population (3.9).
- The breakdown of professions and skills shows that the Roma held many different jobs, most of them complementing those practiced by the majority population, and some restricted only to them: blacksmiths, gold-washers, spoon-makers, sieve-makers, bear-tamers, etc (4,456, representing 37% of the total Romani population), yet, the socio-economic stratification indicates a very large number of Roma in agricultural occupations (3,368 households, 28%). Importantly, there have been identified over 100 Romani households in high-rank occupations (three of them being tax collectors at the county level, the county being the first grand administrative division).
