The Gypsies perhaps uniquely among peoples have no dream of a homeland historically illiterate, they also have no book in which their collective memories are stored, and indeed no real sense of their own history beyond the memories of grandparents and great-grandparents. Tinsmiths, and coppersmiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths…as well as the esteemed musicians among them, were valued and even fought over.” Yet always they remained a people set apart, wayfarers by choice (when they had a choice), speaking a language that no one else could understand, never trusting the gadje-the outsiders-and mingling as little as possible. “Early in their Balkan existence…the Gypsies were wanted…not for their crimes, but for their talents. Some 12 million Gypsies (or Roma) now live in Europe, making them among the continent’s largest minority populations.

With the coming of the Seljuk Turks and the Ottoman Empire, many more moved north across Bosporus into Europe to wander among the peoples of the Balkans and even further north and west. Then onto the Anatolian steppes, the land now called Turkey but once part of the vast Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. First, out of India into the Caucasus and Armenia-the mountainous lands between the Black and Caspian Seas. For a thousand years the Gypsies wandered.

Bury me standing by isabel fonseca