‘Greek Gypsies’, Greek dress and a blockade in the 1886 British press

Abstract

Ninety-nine Roma from the periphery of Europe arrived in Britain in July 1886. They were called the ‘Greek Gypsies’ in the contemporary press and hailed from all parts of Greece and European Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Asia Minor coast, at a time when Europe was under a ‘Balkan crisis’. The ‘Greek’ epithet affixed to the foreign travellers in the 1886 British press was effectively an umbrella term for the ‘Graeco-Turkish corner of Europe’. It also associated a transnational group with Greece, a single, defiant nation over which the Powers had already asserted their dominance with a naval blockade in the spring of 1886. This article explores the political climate of 1886 in regards to Greece, the narrative of the ‘Greek Gypsies’ in the British press and the depiction of modern Greeks in the same year to show that, like the ‘Gypsies’, the Greeks physically and culturally represented at the time an Other both familiar, exotic and a supposed threat to Europe’s stability that Victorian Britain could not accommodate.