Independent and savage, unrecognised by the people in whose midst he lives, and whose society and civilisation he has ever learnt to shun, the Ottoman gipsy—of whom there are some two hundred thousand souls—has neither political nor literary history of his own, and is at once the most brutal and degraded of all the wandering races. Religious because it suits his convenience to be so, submissive to law because he fears punishment, he leads a wild and wretched life, scarcely earning by his industry the wherewithal to satisfy even the most frugal demands of nature. Yet secure in his tent he defies the world, and hates with an undying enmity all strangers to his race. Can it then be wondered at that neither Christian nor Mussulman bears any great love for his unsociable neighbour, nor cares to enter into commercial relationship with him? Even those gipsies who have abandoned tents for fixed dwellings have but little ameliorated their condition, and are no less heartily despised on that account. Their superficial religion, their inclination to theft, their skill in deception, and their brutal debaucheries, cause them to be distrusted wherever they may chance to settle, and exclude them for ever from participation in the benefits of a more civilised state of society.

To deal firstly with the veritable wandering gipsy, who knows no settled home, whose tents dot the sunny landscapes of European Turkey, Roumania, and Asia Minor, who is here one day and there the next, the question arises, whither goeth he and whence cometh he? We shall see.

About the middle of April, sooner or later according to the season, he quits his winter’s residence, or gyshla as he terms it, and begins to roam the surrounding country. Some of his kind descend from the north of the Balkans and pass into Asia Minor; others mount where their brethren descended, only to return about the commencement of October; whilst some—and these, in our humble opinion, by far the most sensible—confine themselves, in their migrations, to one single province, where they know the wants of all and are known by all.

When cold and frost cut short their wanderings, and warn them to beat a retreat, they unfailingly return to their old quarters, where in the vicinity of some open spring they dream away the wintry hours, little molested by their Turkish neighbours. Sometimes they enliven the monotony of this season by a clandestine hunt, but it is more from a desire to rob with impunity than from any wish to nourish themselves on the game they thus slay.

With black shaggy hair, bronzed weather-beaten face, and dark brilliant eyes, the stalwart Mussulman gipsy is by far the best type of his race. He detests and distrusts all but the dwellers in tents. Although familiarised with village life, and often half frozen under his frail covering, he prefers to die beneath his well-patched canvas, to living restricted by the narrow walls and low ceiling of a chamber. Nothing ever seems to rouse the stolid indifference of one of this race. He lives and dies as a beast. The habits of his civilised neighbours, the garments of their women, the cleanliness of their homes and children, and their usually happy appearance, all have no effect whatever upon him. At night-time he retires to his tent to rest, and everything he has seen is forgotten or looked upon as an idle dream; and he works mechanically on from day to day, without the slightest desire to enter into the joyous stream of life with which he finds himself surrounded.

Some few of his kind are so poor as to be unable to purchase even a tent, and these are compelled to dwell as they best may in hollow tree-trunks or chasms in the rocks; whilst others, chiefly those of Bosnia, have wooden bark-covered cabins, which they remove from place to place, on unwieldy wagons, drawn by from ten to a dozen oxen at a time. Some work in iron, some are basket and sieve makers. They are often oppressed, and seldom if ever find defenders. Books and newspapers are quite unknown to them, and the commonest of domestic utensils find no place in their tiny tents. About their origin they know little, though the prophet Job, they say, taught their ancestors the trade they now follow; and they have some slight suspicion that they formerly came from Persia to the country they at present occupy.

The Turks call them TchinganÉs; whilst the term they know one another by is Rom, the title which binds the whole of the widely scattered nomad tribes together. Their language itself is styled Romany.

There is not the slightest allusion to a deity in any of their most ancient songs and legends, and they have no religious observances peculiar to themselves alone. They have but one festival, during which for three whole days they abandon themselves to feasting and merriment. The fatted lamb is slain by those who can afford it, the tent decorated with flowers, and passers-by freely invited to join their repast; all litigations and legal processes are temporarily adjourned, and their annual tax is then paid to the Turkish government. One branch of their race, the Zapari, are the most ferocious of their kind. They are to be found at the village fÊtes and large fairs, whither they go to earn a few coins by the display of their dancing bears or performing monkeys. Some few of them are blacksmiths in winter. The Zapari are all Mussulmans; and from their ranks the Sublime Porte finds its supply of hangmen. They form quite a distinct class of themselves, being held in abhorrence even by their savage brethren. Outcasts of outcasts, they stop short of no crime, and are fitting companions for the much-talked-of Bashi-Bazouks or wild marauders of the late disastrous war.

But now to turn to the renegade or housed gipsy. Still retaining the inherent desire for liberty so common to his race, he avails himself of his dwelling as a shelter only by night, traversing the streets by day, tricked out in dirty gaudy clothing, or seated with wife and family just without the threshold of his hut, there frittering the precious hours away. His children, if sent to school at all, are only despatched there to be out of the way, and his home is as devoid of furniture and well-nigh as comfortless as the ragged tent of his more Esau-like brother. Little by little he forgets his old language, but not his vicious habits, and very often ends by intermarrying with some poor Greek family whose members are as lazy and apathetic as himself.

Their language—descended from the old Sanscrit—has besides giving the only real clue to their origin, also shed some rays over the dark period between the first emigration of the gipsies from India and their appearance in Europe. Originally the distinct mode of speech of a single and special border tribe of Northern India, it has, during the many wanderings of the race, appropriated words from nearly every country through which they passed; while on the other hand it lost many of its own words, and still more of its own inherent power and elegance; and much also of its resemblance to the mother tongue. These adopted foreign words, their relative number, and their more or less corrupted state, point plainly to the gipsies having passed from India first into Persia, to their having remained there a considerable time, and to their having wended their way to some Greek country, perhaps Asia Minor, and to their descent thence into their present European homes.

It is worthy of further remark, as proof of their Indian origin, that the speech of the English gipsies has been found on comparison most marvellously akin to that of the natives of Bombay, though some of their words have, strangely enough, entirely changed the meaning they at first possessed.

The speech of the TchinganÉ is rude, sharp, strongly accentuated, and somewhat difficult to comprehend. Properly spoken it is harmonious enough, though rendered hoarse and almost distasteful by the wild tribes who employ it. ‘We speak,’ say they themselves, ‘as the birds sing, but we sing as the lions roar!’ With them papa signifies an apple, cat scissors, rat night, Devel God, whilst dad seems to be the only word exactly synonymous with any in our own language.

Heroic in suffering, the true Ottoman gipsy never sheds a tear. On his legs to the last, he only betakes himself to his couch when death is too surely nigh, and departs without a murmur from the life that has been so full of unhappiness and misery to him. Buried apart from the rest of humanity, and unwept even by his own, his low moral nature is apt to be forgotten in his sad end, though the unsuccessful efforts of more than one philanthropical European Society testify to the fact, that whatever else you may do with the Ottoman gipsy, you will never succeed in even partially civilising him.