The Gypsies we remember from folktales
If any of you have any romantic ideas about Gypsies, you need to let those go. There are no more Gypsies of our childhood stories, gathered around horse-drawn wooden ‘roulottes’ (caravans) and cooking outside over open fires. Men are no longer strumming guitars while women in long, flowing skirts shake tambourines and dance around the campsite. Modern Gypsies are now traveling in updated airstreams pulled by trucks, just as you might see any American pulling an RV. You are more likely to see them having picnics and camping in parking lots rather than on the open roads. Many Gypsies are no longer traveling but are settled in sedentary communities. I am sure that some of the Gypsies we saw traveled only to come to the Pilgrimage. I am told that most Gypsies in Spain are settled in communities. I have only seen one wooden ‘roulotte’ so far in Saintes-Maries, parked in the back of a Guardian’s cottage as a curious garden sculpture!
Modern Gypsies remind me of the flashy Puerto Rican gangs out of the stage show West Side Story. The young men are dressed in designer tee-shirts and sunglasses, and ornamental belts and jewelry. Sometimes they wear hats that seem to be identified with Gypsies — black felt fedoras. Many Gypsies wear tattoos, although I am also told that this is more common for Spanish Gypsies. I saw some very small, but very good looking young men walking down a street together in suits and high-heeled mens’shoes!
A Modern Gypsy home pulled by a van
Older men have tremendous bellies, and no qualms about letting them all hang out. Whether this is a sign of stature, wealth, or indifference to how they present themselves, I don’t know. We saw well-dressed men with bellies, and bare bellies — ALL bellies adorned with chains and heavy jewelry hanging over them. Whether these bellies are due to certainly enough food, they could also be from bad diet or too much alcohol. These men with the big bellies are no longer the ‘young Turks’ but perhaps the heads of families. I am not passing judgment here, just observing.
Most Gypsy women appear to be on the heavy-set side too. Some older women look like peasants from Eastern Europe, with dowdy clothes and their hair pulled severely behind their heads or tucked under a headscarf. (which some of us would recognize as a babushka) Younger women could be attractive or not, depending on their dress and how much they cared about taking care of themselves. Gypsy women tend to marry very young, so it is not unusual to see a young woman in her early twenties with three children trailing behind her.
I was particularly interested is seeing that not all Gypsies are dark — indeed, I saw plenty of light-haired, light-eyed and light-skinned Gypsies. It makes me wonder how much mixing between populations has taken place through the centuries. My theory is that my DNA of U3b, common among the Polish, Lithuanian, and Spanish Gypsies, was picked up along the migration route of the Gypsies as they traveled through the Caucasus. I think Gypsy men must have chosen wives from the populations around the Black Sea, and those maternal/mitochrondrial DNAs have traveled along with the Gypsies into certain populations at a higher percentage because of what is called a ‘founding effect’–the tendancy for Gypsies to marry between themselves. Two of my high-resolution genetic cousins are Gypsy–that is two out of nine close matches that I have in the FamilyTreeDNA database.