`I will beat you with a motorbike chain and kick you to death with my Western cowboy boots." This curse of the Gypsies was one of the first Hungarian phrases Dubliner Selina Guinness was taught on her arrival in Budapest. She lived there for a year. "The Gypsies were treated like scum," she says. "They exist on the margins of society."
Gypsies. They have been mythologised, romanticised, demonised. And persecuted. More than 500,000 of them, most of them non-Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, targets because they were Gypsies. It is a fact which tends to be sidelined in the world's consciousness. There are no words in Romani, the hybrid language of the Gypsies, for reading and writing. Words for these activities are borrowed from other languages. Since so many of them were illiterate, Gypsies are absent from the canon of Holocaust literature of which Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Anne Frank are only a few of the more famous examples.
There is not one but two stereotypes of Gypsies, each of them an extreme. There's the sentimental image of a wild and proud people, free to wander where they will, wearing gold earrings and dancing with passion around bright campfires. There's a battalion of Gypsy Rose Lees endlessly forecasting futures and the spoilt lady of the manor running away with her "yellow Gypsy love" in the merrily frenetic ballad, The Raggle Taggle Gypsy.
And then there's the villain-like image of lazy, dirty, lying thieves who beg and cheat for their living. Like the fairies, in the folklore of childhood, the Gypsies are those who might come and steal bad children away.
What is the reality? Perhaps somewhere in the indefinable middle. Isabel Fonseca's book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies And Their Journey (Vintage) is a powerful and beautifully written blend of travel, anthropology and social history. First published in 1995, it is already acknowledged as a classic text. "They remained the quintessential outsiders of the European imagination: sinister, separate, literally dark, and synonymous with sorcery and crime," Fonseca writes.
During her research in Eastern Europe, a Gypsy himself told Fonseca, "Never before has a group been so persecuted and so unlovable."
"Nostalgia," Fonseca writes, "is the essence of Gypsy song, and seems always to have been. But nostalgia for what? The Gypsies have no home and, perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland."
The Gypsies came originally from India, over 1,000 years ago, through Persia. From there, some went north-west to Syria, Armenia and Iraq and others west and south-east to Greece, the Balkans and Europe. Hence their dark skin and rootlessness. There are so many different dialects sprouting from Romani that even other Gypsies from various parts of the world find it difficult to understand each other. Linguists have found that the grammar and vocabulary of Romani has roots in Hindi, Nepali and Gujarati.
On one of the Internet's Gypsy Information websites, there's an uncredited quote on an opening page: "Gypsy, one scattered race, like stars in the sight of God." Twelve million Gypsies are now starred across the world, eight million of them in Europe, predominantly Eastern Europe. They are the Continent's largest ethnic minority. Like the Untouchables of India's Hindu caste system, Gypsies have perpetually existed at the bottom of society's tumbled heap. As recently as the late 19th century, they were bought and sold as slaves. Infamously unwelcome, the arrival of 150 Czeck and Slovak Gypsies at Dover this autumn provoked a tide of jittery articles in the British press. There was the self-deprecatory headline "No Gypsies Please, We're British" in The Observer and the bluntness of "Invasion of the Giro Gypsies" in The Sun. In several countries, the hatred, fear, and contempt which they incite in many people is openly expressed. In Rome, I watched a man on a scooter plugging quietly down the road adjoining the Colosseum - until he caught sight of a group of Gypsy children, walking along the footpath. The transformation to tormentor was instant. Yelling with an aggression that required no command of Italian to interpret, he mounted the footpath and, at top speed, drove his scooter right at the children, like someone scattering a flock of pigeons.
BUT this is nothing in comparison to the pogroms which are still taking place across Eastern Europe. Michael Keating, of the Irish Refugee Council, has spent three years in Romania. "Persecution of the Gypsies is ongoing," he says. Pogroms started up again in the 1990s, directly related to the end of Communism and the introduction of capitalism to Eastern Europe. As well as being entertainers - bear-trainers, musicians, and dancers - Gypsies had always been involved in trading, mainly with horses and scrapmetal. In the early 1990s, some Eastern European Gypsies did well economically, particularly in the area of importing used cars. In countries new to free trade, it must have been almost impossible to comprehend why the pariahs of society were doing well. "Gypsies were perceived as getting too uppity," Keating says wryly. The ongoing result is that Gypsy houses in villages across Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are being torched. The Gypsies who do not lose their lives are forced to leave the villages. "To my knowledge, nobody has been brought to justice for those crimes," Keating says, who himself saw this happening. "There is complicity at a local level."
Given that Gypsies have long inhabited an uneasy place in society, being socially, politically and economically invisible, Gypsy culture is a skittish thing to define. Like many other ethnic minorities, the Gypsy look was briefly appropriated by the fashion industry. In the 1970s, Yves Saint Laurent and Bill Gibb sent their models down the catwalk wearing the traditional brightly-coloured long tiered skirts that Gypsy women everywhere wear. Headscarves tied at the nape of the neck, gold-coin jewellery and voluminous embroidered white blouses also made an appearance.
MUSIC has always been associated with Gypsies, particularly the violin. Although both men and women sing, only the men play instruments. In the 18th and 19th centuries, some Gypsy bands travelled with soldiers from town to town through Eastern Europe, their distinctive music soliciting the attention of potential military recruits. Gypsy musicians also attracted the patronage of the aristocracy. They played in courtyards of the Austro-Hungarian court, where Haydn had the job of royal composer.
Since Gypsy music was so popular with the public, it attracted the interest of Haydn and other composers. Liszt, Bizet, Brahms, Dvorak, Verdi, Rachmaninov and Bartok were all influenced by the jagged rhythms and unpredictable cadences of traditional Gypsy tunes.
Since 1991, Ireland has been home to Loyko, the Gypsy band which has attracted a cult following and which received wildly enthuasiastic reviews at the Edinburgh Festival this year. The band is composed of three Russians; Sergei Erdenko, his cousin Oleg Ponomarev, and Vadim Koulitskii. Erdenko and Ponomarev are Gypsies. Both of them play the fiddle and come from a clan long renowned for its music-making. The band is named after one of their ancestors; the famous 18th-century violinist, Loyko Zabar. Koulitskii trained as a classical guitarist at the Moscow College of Music. They have released three CDs, the most recent of which is called The Fortuneteller.
Until 1955, Erdenko and Ponomarev's clan was constantly on the road. Then they settled in Khaberovsk, where the cousins were born. "From this time, things changed with our clan, because we had education, and this was very unusual for a Gypsy family," Erdenko says. There was always music in their houses; he started playing the fiddle at the age of five.
Erdenko has written a pamphlet which he hopes to have published called Down Gypsy Roads, which contains a short history of the Gypsies, as well as the story of Loyko. About songs, he writes: "Not having a written language, Gypsies expressed the dreams and aspirations of the entire Gyspy people in song. Like any other folk culture, Gypsy music is traditional and composed in accordance with the same rules, but it differs in that it is capable of being transformed by contact with the most unexpected sources, including contemporary music."
Internationally, probably the best-known contemporary Gypsy band is The Gypsy Kings: certainly, they are the most commercially successful. Comprising brothers and cousins, the band are French Gypsies, playing a type of pop-flamenco, with their biggest hit having been Bamboleo.
FLAMENCO dancing, which orginated in Andalusia, is complex, energetic and gorgeous. The essence of flamenco is improvisation, so every dancer has a unique style. Gypsies first began dancing professionally in Spanish cafes in the 19th century. Castanets, often associated with flamenco, are not traditional; the clicking sounds are achieved by the subtle use of finger snapping. Hand-clapping and well-judged shouting also form part of the rhythm. Gadjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger) is a new French film which recently played for one night at the IFC as part of the French Film Festival. It got such an enthuasistic response that the IFC will be bringing it back for a run in March. It is directed by Tony Gatlif, who is half Gypsy. The entire cast, with the exception of the two lead actors, Rona Hartner and Romain Durus, are Romanian Gypsies, some of them musicians - who simply play themselves. The film is about a young Frenchman (Durus) who comes to Bucharest searching for the Gypsy woman singer who his dead father had recorded on tape.
Hartner, who was born in Bucharest, had to learn Romani and flamenco for her part in the film. "When you speak Romani, you speak hard," she explains, clutching her gullet. "It makes you feel hard." She learned to dance by joining in with the Gypsy women who dance at weddings. Her flamenco in the film is stunning, a fabulous performance by any measure. "Everyone dances how they feel," she says. Much of the filming took place in winter. "It is very good for the cold weather, this dancing. You get hot like you can't imagine!"
The Crazy Stranger is a rare opportunity for a realistic glimpse of Gypsy life. Hartner says that the Gypsies who were themselves involved in the film think it is an accurate portrayal. It's a film shot through with darkness, and one in which the Gypsies show themselves to be as bigoted as their Romanian neighbours. The film ends with a pogrom; the encampment is burnt down. The screaming of the Gypsies as they run through the muddy forest has a chilling echo of reality to it. "They knew what they were screaming about," Hartner says. "They weren't acting."
