The aim of this paper is to describe the single party-state’s Gypsy settlement elimination programme in socialist Hungary. In the course of the research, I relied mainly on decrees and reports issued by the local council apparatus as “secret dossiers” and on sociological studies from the period. The ideological background of the communist state’s Gypsy settlement elimination programme, the so-called “CS-housing” programme (CS = reduced comfort level), was as follows: the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party did not recognize the Hungarian Gypsies as a nationality and announced a policy of forced assimilation for them. The assimilation of the Gypsy population was mainly envisaged through the dismantling of their settlements and the dispersal of Gypsies among non-Gypsies. During the nearly two and a half decades of the CS-housing programme, more than 35,000 housing units were allocated, and most of the Gypsy settlements were dismantled. However, new forms of segregation emerged: ghettoized villages and segregated CS-housing settlements. In the last years of the socialist regime, it became clear that the single party-state’s policy of forced assimilation of Gypsies had failed, and that the segregation of Gypsies could not be eliminated, partly due to the failures of the CS-housing programme. Furthermore, some village and town councils prevented the dispersal of the Gypsy settlers among the non-Gypsy population and created “more modern Gypsy settlements” for them. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

This article is based on in-depth research into the administration of the Roma referred to as “Crown Gypsies” in the first decades of the nineteenth century within the Tsarist Empire. The research focuses on both personal and institutional intricacies linked to the Bessarabian Office of the Crown Gypsies, specifically created to supervise the control and installation of Gypsies on the crown lands in Bessarabia, a region annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. The analysis offers a new angle of reflection, by focusing first on the administration responsible for this installation by creating two Roma settlements, then on the populations it supervises. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .

Since the end of the Cold War, the term Roma has become the denominator of a distinct political object, the focus of the EU’s only ethnic policy and of a unique form of transnational governance. The politicization of Roma identity has created a need to quantify this object which, in turn, requires defining who is “Roma” for policy purposes. This essay looks at three different ways by which national “Roma population estimates” have been produced – expert guesstimates, census data and sociographic mapping. The huge variations between comparable estimates, the rejection of figures based on self-identity, the lack of any definitive characteristic(s) and the ambiguity of Roma identity demonstrate that the politics of Roma is not that of or about a specific people, but is rather the politics of the identity itself – Roma – how and why it is applied in a public, political context. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

The article reassesses Turner’s (1926) classification of Romani within the Indo-Aryan group, drawing on insights from recent research and several years of the author’s work on the Romani Etymological Dictionary (ЭСЦЯ, jointly with Kirill Kozhanov). Turner’s approach has proven robust, but some of his specific conclusions need revision. While some of the isoglosses identified by him remain valid indicators of Romani’s historical position within Indo-Aryan, others appear less reliable upon closer examination of the etymological evidence. The article also presents some recent findings and hypotheses on Romani prosody, including evidence for preservation of ancient vowel length potentially detectable through comparison with Dardictonal-moraic systems. Additionally, it touches upon the puzzling distinction between OIA kh vs. kṣ preserved in Romani, mentions the preservation in Romani of vestiges of the neuter, and brings up non-trivial Romani stress patterns in connection with the reconstructed “rhythmic law.” This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

The early eighteenth-century Ottoman state correspondences reference a peripatetic group in Rumelia identified as the “Turcoman Gypsies” ( Türkmān Ḳibṭīleri ). This group originated from Southern Anatolia and actively engaged with Turkic tribal organizations, notably the Zulkadriyye spin-offs ( ifrāz-ı Ẕūlkadriyye ). In response to discontent with Ottoman policies that sought to settle mobile populations in the late seventeenth century, they modified their traditional migratory routes. This led to their dispersion across Anatolia and Rumelia. Both state authorities and local communities labelled these groups as Gypsies ( Ḳibṭī or Çingene ), which assigned them an intersectional identity typically associated with peripatetic communities within the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the “Turcoman Gypsies” embraced multiple identities, including Abdal and Turcoman, as well as specific band names such as Çobān , Tarḫāneci , and Baṣdırmacı , reflecting their enduring connections to Turkic tribal organizations. The archival and ethnographic materials examined in the article uncover the historical links between the “Turcoman Gypsies” and other peripatetic groups in the Near East and Crimea, illustrating how they emerged from the segmentation of an ancestral community in Southern Anatolia. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nd/4.0/ .

This article analyses the depiction of spaces and characters in Hüseyin Tabak’s film Gipsy Queen considering the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity as decisive for situating inclusion and exclusion. Gipsy Queen follows the story of Ali, a single Romani mother living in Hamburg, who faces daily challenges of otherness, discrimination, racism, prejudice, and poverty. The film portrays Ali’s struggles in the boxing ring alongside her real-life challenges. Boxing rings uniquely represent negotiation and innovation for the Romani community. They also symbolize a meeting point between more privileged groups and marginalized others. Gipsy Queen should thus be viewed as one of the rare attempts to portray the life of a Roma with accuracy and empathy, in contrast to the tendency of representation based on anti-Roma stereotypes. While Romani people are often stereotypically depicted as thieves, beggars, and cheats, this film shows Ali working hard to give her children a life similar to that of socio-economically secure people despite being exploited under harsh conditions. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .