I always respond by pointing out that the citizens of almost every country are naturally xenophobic and/or racist, just not necessarily against people of African descent. In the case of Europe, I usually point to the Roma as an area where Europeans tend to be a bit racist. I had no idea there were huge Roma ghettos in Bulgaria, but I knew of some Roma communities when I lived in Rome, Italy. And without fail, countless Italians warned me to steer clear of the Roma because "they are all liars and thieves"...
I think Roma are the least interesting example of this.
In 2020 I had the pleasure of reading the Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset's Magnum Opus _Kristin Lavransdatter_.
For those that don't know, _Kristin Lavransdatter_ is the Norwegian _Anna Karenina_ ... but longer. Recommended.
In the book, among other things, it describes that Norwegians in the fourteenth century thought that Finnish people were basically sub-humans. They were treated like animals and could be killed (!) without legal ramification.
Let that sink in for a bit ...
Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Handt Hanson considered Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Eli Halla to not even be a human being.
I think there may be some deep conclusions to make about the nature of division and difference in human societies. Could it be that there will never not be an out-group ?
From my perspective the United States is amazing because a lot of "white" people who stick together are actually from different parts of Europe who might not have always been fond of each other.
This is all conjecture but as a european I feel like I can easier spot where a european is from based on their appearance, while white americans don't see that in each other.
Similarly black americans are from wildly different parts of Africa who might have been at war during some time. But in the US they're all black americans.
I find this very fascinating, which shows how much more divided we are here and definitely prejudiced.
That's because you have seen italians speaking and acting italian, romanians speaking romanian etc. Americans see americans speaking american
It's more than a bit. It's institutionalised and pervasive racism.
One big difference from the US is that Eastern-Europeans don't even acknowledge there is any racism against gypsies so it's not even part of the public discourse. Much like how fish don't realise they're surrounded by water, so do Eastern Europeans not acknowledge that they live in a racist society. The tensions flaring up in the US are partly caused by the fact that the opressed category is trying to get equal footing in society. If gypsies were to start talking about how they should be treated equally, you can bet there would be a backlash from a big part of society.
For comparison, look at how the US treated race relations 100 years ago. (To be clear, I'm not saying Eastern-European countries are backwards or more primitive just because they can be compared to the US in the past; it's just a helpful way to understand the context.)
Source: I'm originally from an Eastern European country and only realised the racism in Eastern Europe once I lived abroad for multiple years and drew parallels with the highly mediatised US racial tensions.
In America, if people say "The things people say about Black people are a gross simplification HOWEVER", it's usually something really racist that's about to follow. Say, "Sure many Black people are fine, but if you find yourself surrounded by Black people in the Inner City, you are in danger." I mean, I dunno.
It really depends. I've been in that situation in open air markets, at fairs etc and no, definitely not in trouble. Walk into a ghetto? Maybe.
I thought gypsy was the exonym for the Roma(ni) people. Are there other "gypsy" peoples?
Many of the replies to your comment are from Europeans defending their prejudice likewise as "oh but you don't understand, in Europe it's different because you may be surrounded by a gang of people that are clearly gypsy and they rob you, so it's easy to see why!".
But that's the exact same thing with X race in Y country. Such as blacks in America. It's a broad brush stroke based on an experience or group of experiences that eventually paints the whole race that way.
You can find these things in basically every country, sadly.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0494831/
Documentary above also really nicely shows the microculture of these people
Ofcourse I don't know how big this group was, relative to all Roma people in the US. This was some reality marriage show, I think on TLC or something. (yes, my then-girlfriend watched this :) ).
Once Eastern Europeans of other ethnicities are no longer willing to do migrant work, Western farms and slaughterhouses shall run out of options and employ Roma migrant workers. This is already happening.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/eyes-wid...
In Denmark they're committing a mass crime against humanity in a cultural cleansing against their Muslim minority, a vicious fascist action, and nobody cares to stop it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immi... (https://archive.is/Um7tE)
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/3/17525960/denmark-children...
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/01/15/denmarks-ghett...
As rule of thumb the bigger the distance from the Blue Banana the less enlightenment you encounter. Especially in the eastern and southern direction.
It's only as an adult that I realized this was probably a racial or cultural slur.
Europeans spent centuries coming up with creative ways to kill each other in the name of god, country or race, and was able to move on to better things only after having been on the precipice of annihilation.
The American condition shouldn’t be whitewashed and is a story that is still evolving. But people are people, and the stories of America or Europe or some subdivision are more about people than country.
Brexit was one big middle finger to the Polish diaspora.
Stolipinovo is one of several European Roma communities that I have visited over the years (several times now), and it's the largest that I'm aware of. The photos in the post are representative and true of how the area actually is, and I'm happy to answer any questions (forewarning, I'm not an expert).
If I were to emphasize any one take-away - it's the friendliness I experienced from the locals. Sounds cliched, but look at reality - I was taking photos in a place where I don't particularly belong (it's kind of my hobby since "retiring" from tech), and you may assume that a poverty-stricken, much maligned group of people would be wary of "outsiders".
Indeed, the exact opposite was the case.
edit: with regards to racism, a story I was told in the same city is perhaps the best example of just how far Bulgaria (in this example) has to climb. I asked a local Bulgarian friend why I didn't see Roma working at the local restaurants. He said that would be really bad for the business - to have a Gypsy waiter, or cashier, or in any "public facing" role. I voiced my assumption that perhaps they were working back-of-house, in the kitchen. He said they weren't - if the public found out a Gypsy was working in the kitchen, most people would never dine at that restaurant.
But once I met a poor family referring to themselves this way, so a bit perplexed and curious I rather asked them directly if they consider themselves being Roma or Gypsy... only to get an ambiguous answer.
Edit: I met that family in the eastern Slovakia.
The main reason for this state of affairs is roma's traditional reliance on internal law and complete disregard for outsiders and their laws. Coupled with this is a tendency to just not apply morality to whatever you do to outsiders. This makes it very very hard to change their ways from outside - even 40 years of communism barely made a dent. Best strategy I know of is to make sure each individual has full protection of the host nation's laws and support mechanisms, and that they know it. This makes it possible for them to disregard internal laws with less fear of being ostracized. It's a slow strategy, but I know of none quicker.
And to end on a brighter note, in the next elections I'll be voting for an independent, who is the newest rising star of local politics. He's a gypsy.
A common travel cliche is "99% of people are friendly to you". That's a good thing, but I want to know what the 1% and 0.1% are likely do to you.
I would expect them to show up in dirty clothes, and not having bathed in months, and neglect to follow basic hygiene like washing their hands. They would likely perpetrate actions like tasting food and putting the same utensil back into the pot, completely lacking the inhibition of refraining from doing whatever comes naturally.
In the community that I grew (Evosmos, West Thessaloniki) there were many of them. I’ve met a few that were integrated in the community, managed to finish school etc.
But their culture is just nothing about that. Women in dirty clothes carrying a trolley all day and going through garbage cans collecting dumps. Kids 5,6,7 years old with no shoes and no clothes on are walking around main streets At noon sneaking into stores and stealing whatever they can. Their teenagers are bullying everyone they can when they go out for no reason. They are deep into the drugs and the guns game. Police are always on them but there isn’t much they can do but to isolate them in further areas outside the city.
I’ve seen all those things and they aren’t pretty.
In some places, like Andalusia, the Romani people flourished and developed a distinctive and globally appreciated culture. Even Greece has 100k Romani, and most of them are not living on the streets.
My sense is that it's very popular to point to external causes, causes that aren't blame-producing. "It's because they're poor"...well, maybe it's true that "If not for being poor..." but that's not the world we live in. By many accounts their culture (that is, the set of learned things they inherit) is set up to produce more poverty, crime, and social isolation. There are many groups of very poor people who do not have this problem, and who thrive in different circumstances. Accepting that there are things about their culture that would be better if changed or removed both reflects empirical reality and sets you down the road to finding a workable solution.
On one hand, European culture is indeed hypocritical to throw stones at the US over racism. Quite staggeringly so, actually. If I may, it's also an excellent demonstration that skin colour really isn't that important, and the US obsession over it is a bit weird.
If you are poor then maybe you will behave like that, but if you behave like that then you will certainly be poor.
Riiiight. It must be their culture?
You think that if you give them clean clothes they'll throw them away?
You think they prefer a meal picked out of a garbage can to one from a restaurant or grocery store?
Or that they'd rather have their kids go without shoes or clothes?
"I've seen all those things and they aren't pretty."
You might have seen them, but you did not understand them.
And then you go on to describe the effects of poverty, not culture. Sounds to me like they need economic opportunity, not further isolation.
However, crime in Ukraine is lower than in US, and it’s significantly lower than in US cities. While its infrastructure’s state reflects the income levels, it’s not atrocious, and it’s certainly better than what US would end up with if it was only spending figures comparable to Ukraine. Certainly, you don’t have rotting garbage piling up everywhere on the sides of the street, like in the OP photos.
It’s not poverty that results in what happens in Gypsy ghettos. It’s the culture.
This is what poverty looks like, especially in underdeveloped areas.
Have you not seen Venice Beach lately? Or perhaps you might want to say that the current state of Venice Beach is just... it's culture?
Go watch a video on West Point, Liberia
To be fair, modern Greek culture is nothing but a shadow of its ancient past.
Also "many children don’t attend school." is rather a problem, isn't it. And though I do not know much about Bulgaria, I doubt it's because of the money. I'd assume Bulgaria has free schools and probably social support for financially struggling kids.
There are so many different nations in Europe, some with their nation states, many without. However, Roma or Travellers seem to have the same poor opinion almost everywhere - which is not really shared with any other people. Maybe it is not that fair to picture Bulgarians as the only source of the bad situation in this neighbourhood. Isn't there a way for the community to organise anything, even some basic cleanup?
I didn't particularly care for the quote (from comments):
> I generally try to avoid Western Europe these days – along with most of the Western world, people their are (in general) just trying to convince themselves that the little bubble they exist in is all that matters.
A bit rich coming from an American, but anyway I do not understand what it that supposed to mean. I'd believe it's rather Western Europeans that try to care for the world as the whole, rather than do the least immediately necessary.
I am also a member of a minority in Bulgaria (Turkish), but our people are nothing like the Roma - we don't live in ghettos. And although there is a lot of "historically based" hatred towards us here, I can say from experience that the (ethnic) Bulgarians are not that racist (or at least not unreasonably so). Westerners are too soft and entitled to their progressive beliefs which are going to screw them big time.
Note that the people that live in Stolipinovo are Bulgarian. I guess you meant to say "I do not think they would be friendly to any non-Roma Bulgarian". That's an assumption that (from experience) is incorrect.
Also, I'm not American, but I get that a lot.
It won't. Perhaps you should do some research and not try to object to or ban more language, as the term is not always used negatively. While some Romani are opposed to it, others use the term in a positive light to promote their culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_Lore_Society
Many on social media today claim to be gypsies in a positive light (however, they're more claiming to adopt certain culture aspects they appreciate).
Ticked me off a bit, since that was exactly the prejudice eastern europeans faced and face in western europe.
At least here in Spain that is because most of the Eastern Europeans we get are Roma. So people automatically assume Bulgarians or Romanians are all Roma and act like them.
I have relatives that live in a region with a lot of gypsies and I am endlessly fascinated by the success of their phone scams. As I visit them annually, I witnessed gypsies getting rich and building huge houses, collecting scam money from the local western-union branch almost on regular basis. Since they speak Turkish too, women call random Turkish numbers and ask men for money(claiming that they are coming to Turkey for them but an issue come up at the border) and their husbands collect the money from the western union. Sometimes it's very theatrical, the husband pretends to be the "evil Bulgarian police officer". I've seen it with my own eyes.
Just next to Bulgaria is Turkey and in this country the Gypsy image is drastically different. In Turkey gypsies are musicians, dancers and overall free soul people. Much less negative connotations overall. The exception is "Conolar" or "the Jonos", a clan in a major Turkish city. They are known for their temper and originalit. Here is a local fight, quite amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaNj4RQC4Ec
If I lived only in Bulgaria I might as well be a racist but I have seen enough to believe that the Bulgarians need to look in the mirror if they are looking someone to blame about the situation with gypsies. It doesn't have to be the way it is in Bulgaria.
These ones live in shanty towns, do not send their young children to school even in places where school is mandatory under 15 thus perpetuate the cycle of illiteracy. Is this what educated people here are defending? really? This kids aren't even given a chance to succeed.
They have a tight sense of community and most of them never assimilate wherever they go and barely make effort to speak the local language. This isn't a cliché or a stereotype, that's the reality of these gangs. There is next to 500 Roma slums around Paris, and we're talking about people that have for EU citizenship. One cannot blame that situation on "racism", this is 100% due to criminal behaviour and gangs trafficking vulnerable people.
Yes, all Roma aren't like this, a lot of them work tough jobs in agriculture or construction. But criminal Roma networks are a reality nobody can deny.
There are a plethora of criminal gangs that belong to other ethnicities and nationalities in Europe. Painting the whole ethnicity/nationality with the same brush is the textbook definition of racism even though we like to hide it behind "not all Roma are like this".
> These ones live in shanty towns, do not send their young children to school even in places where school is mandatory under 15 thus perpetuate the cycle of illiteracy. Is this what educated people here are defending? really? This kids aren't even given a chance to succeed.
Yes. Gypsies are very insular and keep their culture, but I feel like that is too convenient of an explanation that people are using. In my opinion governments should make a better attempt at integrating them into the education system. Literacy is key into helping them overcome the gadjo vs roma mentality and I don't think that people and communities do enough to overcome this problem.
True, but that doesn't mean there is no racism. If anything, this would support the fact that racism exists, since conflict tends to make people think in terms of in-group/out-group.
A follow-up question is whether the racism is justified. An even more important question is whether the conlfict stems from a failure to integrate different cultures and whether taking deliberate steps to encourage integration would resolve these conflicts.
Btw, the same argument also comes up wrt racial tensions in the US: "Blacks are x% of the population, yet are involved in y% of crime" with y >> x.
The gangs, the trash, the dirt, the kids out of school - all real things as photographed and descrbed by the author of the article.
The more likely explanation is that the Bulgarians screwed up with the policy and the Turks got something right.
That said, at some point(not sure when or how) that all changed. Now in the day-to-day life, gypsies cause no harm whatsoever. They are a minority and as such I have very little interaction with them but in the few instances I've had, they've always been very warm and kind and the once I've worked with have been incredibly hard working and devoted.
But even though I see a huge improvement, we need to look back a bit to see the root cause: I had the chance to meet some of my grand-grand parents and they all had roma friends when they were young in the early 20-th century. However there have been huge political campaigns against them(both socially and economically) between 1944 and 1989(even though those were flowered up as "integration" programs). I think what we see now is one of the many scars the regime left behind.
You probably don't feel that it is your duty to go and clean up garbage everywhere in your city. At some distance, it's simply not your problem anymore. This is the same, but the distance ends at the threshold of your house.
Any norm makes sense, internally, if you know that this is the norm others will use to judge you. Most people don't go beyond what is required of them.
They're as bad as they look even when maintained.
It's an ancient cemetery which has basically turned in to a giant slum, with poverty-stricken people living among the ancient tombs.
There are a number of interesting videos on youtube about it, such as [2], [3], and [4], but it's the first of these that I found most fascinating, because not only did it show and talk about the City of the Dead, it also shows Zabbaleen.[5]
Zabbaleen is much like Stolipinovo, with people living among mountains of garbage.
The people who live there grow up there and are traditionally tasked with dealing with the garbage, which is shipped in to the neighborhood for them to live amongst.
It's clearly a miserable, nightmarish life.
As the narrator in the video says at about 9 minutes in, "I don't care how essential what they do is for Cairo. Cairo needs to get its shit together.. it's not ok."
I highly recommend watching this video[2]. The part on Zabaleen starts around 4'48".
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Dead_%28Cairo%29
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8KiBycJi9I
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeystshWL2I
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1589047,24.785939,3a,75y,202...
You can compare to other areas of the city:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1589047,24.785939,3a,75y,202...
I think racial tension came down a lot the last 10 years, and the reason is that quite a few Roma work in Western Europe. For the ones in Stolipinovo I believe the prime destination is Dortmund. FWF I think the EU helped diffuse the tension by allowing increased mobility of both Roma and poor Bulgarians. I think the Roma neighbourhoods were much worse around the turn of the century and the politics were much more aggressive towards the Roma - I remember the Attack party being really popular back then.
I think it has been slow, but nowadays it is not as acceptable as once was to publish bluntly racist texts like this example from a prominent BG journalist in 2012:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=bg&tl=en&u=https:/...
In 2018, the same guy got a lifetime achievement award from the union of BG journalists.
Did the author get two teenage girls or women to help with translation?
At the time, I believe both girls may have been teenagers. One has become my friend - she is now in her early twenties.
It’s difficult to look past ones prejudices and I’m very aware of my own in this situation. It’s easy to hate on the entire community because of the appalling behaviour of a few and their insular nature as a community.
Of course it’s far more complex than the surface reveals and there are huge issues around education, inclusion, and integration.
>"And, personally, honestly, I’m actually deceiving you right here on this page. It can’t be helped. No set of photos, nor a thousand or so words, gathered over the course of a single day in Stolipinovo, could possibly begin to tell the whole story."
What a great summary. What great photos. This whole post was a wonderful bit of travel journalism. Thanks for sharing.
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAgPnsaxdsk
The situation of Roma is always a good counter example to the statement "no racism in Europe". Perhaps there was never official segregation, but there is almost always implicit segregation. They can ride the bus, but more intimate relationships between the Roma and non-Roma population are rare. True friendships, marriages etc. So it's not Mississippi of the 50's, but there's also been little progress in the last decades. Which is a pity because IMHO there is no quick fix, only slowly changing what is considered to be normal.
One of the issues I is the social welfare state and the underlying social contracts it is based upon that are taken advantage of by Roma. There is an incentive for Roma communities to stay the same because of that as minimum social welfare check, child support and similar handouts help provide for a life based on large communities.
In order to make any progress, a country should start by recognizing that in order to help Roma people and brake the cycle, special laws will be needed. In order to be smart about it, it should be done like Denmark did it with it's ghetto laws where they target an area (not ethnicity) and implement special restrictions, tougher laws, tougher punishment but at the same time focus more on providing primary and secondary education, working with families and so on.
That never happens when I stroll through a wealthy neighbourhood."
At least a bit of encouragement.
There are millions of spaniards who really support government programs to integrate our large gypsee population (no one here, including the gitanos themselves, call them Roma; their dialect is known as romaní, though).
There are also millions of Spaniards who have written them off as a hopeless basket case.
Both groups have a point.
As many people here have pointed out, many gypsees have integrated in mainstream society, and in many cases one would struggle to identify them as such. These have no trouble working in restaurants, or getting any other job for that matter.
But gypsees have a very proud culture, and those who behave like payos (which is how they call non-gypsees) get mocked, and all but banished by their own kin. This is compounded by the sad fact that it is undeniable that those that do cross over would do better if they hide their origins from the mainstream. And this culture is radically different, not only from mainsteam spanish culture, but western culture in general.
The main issue with traditional gypsee culture, and the biggest hurdle for integration, is school education. The spanish state has spent millions over many decades on this, with mixed success.
What follows is just an anecdote, albeit not an isolated one, that I belive highlights the challenges. My mum has a very close friend who is a school teacher. Several years ago this friend, an idealist, volunteered to teach at an area with a very large gypsee population. The first and largest problem was to get the gypsee families to send their kids to school to begin with. The best they managed was to get them to cram a bunch of kids in a taxi, which the teachers, who in Spain are not well paid, would pay out of their own pockets. The kids, 5 year olds, swore like drunken sailors. Good luck teaching manners. Their dads would leave porn running on the tv, to which the kids would be exposed from an early age, and candidly told the teachers. They would also tell how daddy beat mummy regularly, because this gypsee culture is very macho. One boy said his dad was very good. He would pretend to beat his mum, who would scream, so that neighbours would know everything was alright in the family. My mums friend couldn't stand all this after a year and begged for a transfer. When they were relocated by the government from the shanty to new appartments, they yanked out all the fittings and furniture, and sold it all for scrap.
Me, I was instinctively terrified of them as a kid growing up in Spain. You saw gypsees, you ran. We have all been mugged and bullied by them. As you grow up, you become aware of the social problems, and also end up talking to some, and yes, many are very nice and friendly. But you also hear from them how their own environment makes it very hard to, say, take their education seriously.
My point is, it is too easy to slap the racist adjective without making an effort to understand. There is racism for sure, but there is also enormous cultural resistance from the gypsees, which makes many to abandon hope, on both sides.
My main gripe when it comes to comparing this to the racial problem in US is that no one brought the gypsees to Europe, they came of their own accord, and nowhere were they enslaved, AFAIK, at least not at scale, maybe only by the nazis.
They still keep coming to Spain, mostly from Romania. And, guess what? The spanish gypsees hate the romanian gypsees. In Spain, the gypsee women often beg. One day, sitting at a terrace, my mum gave one a coin, as she often does. The woman warned my mum, bitterly complaining about the romanian gypsee women. "We just beg, they will steal your handbag".
In a TV news segment they showed a portable toilet that somebody had given them, and it was unusable because of how filthy it was. When asked why the people living there said it was because nobody came there to clean it for them.
Here's another camp outside of Stockholm. Again, why so much trash?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532716/The-rubbish...
My grandparents built a house near the Black Sea when I was a child and in spring and summer they've always hired a gypsy family from the nearby town to help us in the garden. They were hard workers and my grandparents treated them fairly and paid them fairly. Besides getting paid for their work we also gifted them some unused TV's, radios, bicycles and some other stuff throughout the years. The family head and his wife were on the older side and both had finished high school (under communism). Their 5 or 6 children however have not... They had finished only the mandatory 8 years at school and dropped out afterwards. They were really upset about the fact, but they couldn't control their children it seems. Other people from their gypsy community didn't really support them it looks like and it seemed easier to work in sanitation or other jobs where education was not important. Their daughter got married off to someone and soon grandchildren came into the picture as well. Their sons also moved away. I haven't seen them in many years now. Hope they're well. I've always respected them as people, but most of them are not like that family. They don't want to be integrated.
I've been in a couple of street fights throughout the years (never the instigator). One of them was with a gypsy who wanted to steal my watch. I was in high school at the time and by this point training in MA for 4-5 years. I was going home from school and it was dark because most high schools in Bulgaria divide the semesters in two timetables morning and afternoon (7:30-13:30, 13:00 - 19:15 the times also depend how many subjects you have that day). It was the first semester for me during autumn/winter and it was the afternoon timetable 13:00 to 19:15. So it was after 19 and it was already dark outside. I was walking on the sidewalk and there weren't a lot of cars passing by. I saw a person walking against me in the distance but didn't think any of it until he got closer and I saw he was a gypsy. The moment I saw his complexion I was on high alert. This is an instinct that most Bulgarians will understand in this situation. Alone, it's dark and there's a gypsy in front of you. We walk closer and closer to each other and I see that he looked at my watch. He stops me and asks me for some change and I say I don't have anything. The actual combat situation played out very fast. He very quickly grabbed my left hand. I instinctively punched with my right hand straight to his face and caught him on the chin, he wobbled back and let go of my left hand then I kicked somewhere around his waist groin area and he crumbled down. After that I started running and ran all the way home. He didn't try to follow me. By that point he probably thought it was more trouble than worth or was afraid of being caught. I don't know. Another friend years later was in a similar situation, they wanted his watch. My friend lost the watch and got a broken tooth in the ordeal :/
