The Way of the Land: a podcast sheds light on the forgotten history of Roma slavery in Romania

In the past, the Ministry of Culture requested that Șerban not use the word slavery in her posters. Then, she directed a play about the 500 years of Roma slavery that took place in what is now known as Romania. It was called The Great Shame.

“I am glad that I wasn’t born during slavery, to be sold by my owner in auctions and be separated from my mother. I am glad that I wasn’t born during the Holocaust, to end up in those trains…” She was born just in time to chant, “Ole, ole, Ceaușescu is gone!” With this statement, Șerban opens the play.

Social amnesia

Șerban’s experience is one of the many presented in The Way of the Land, a podcast series made by the magazine Decât o Revistă (DoR). Through personal stories and historical documentation, the podcast exposed the key role of slavery in past and current anti-Roma sentiment and discrimination in Romania.

When it comes to slavery, Romanians tend to look to the United States and the former colonies of the western world. What they miss are the almost 500 years of Roma slavery that took place in what is now known as Romania. It was the longest period of slavery in the world and is still barely known. That is why the first episode was called “Social Amnesia”.

Officially, Roma make up 3.3 per cent of the total population of Romania. In reality, the percentage is approximately three times higher. Roma people hide their ethnic identity to avoid social marginalisation. This is one of the consequences of the politics of eugenics and the Holocaust that shook the last century.

“Slavery has mutilated us all,” said Ana Ciobanu, the author and main voice of the podcast, in the first episode. “If we don’t want our relationships shaped by an unknown history, we need to discover it so we can heal.” She warns listeners that the journey will be difficult. In six episodes, researchers, scholars, artists and influencers sketch what systematic racism looks like in Romania. With one exception, all are of Roma origin. All of them have been victims of racism. The experience is almost didactic. Ciobanu presents the subject as if the listener has no clue about past Roma slavery. She shows how the names of streets and places and personal stories are marked by this traumatic past. It is made for a Romanian audience, and some nuances ultimately get lost in translation.

Ciobanu explains why she uses the term Roma instead of Țigan. Roma is the name that community members have chosen for themselves. Țigan is a name chosen by others. It has no equivalent in English, but it is the same as cigány (Hungarian), Cygań (Polish), zingaro (Italian) and Zigeuner (German). It comes from the Greek term athinganos/athinganoi which means pagan, impure or untouchable.

Unseen trauma

Anti-Romani sentiment is prevalent in Romanian culture. Ciobanu exemplifies this with commonly used expressions. When children are not behaving properly, they are warned that “the gipsy will steal them.” When Romanians want to say, “to stumble at the threshold”, many use the expression “to drown like a gipsy at the shore.” They have forgotten the saying’s dark historical meaning. When a slave tried to run away and was captured, they were tied up and thrown in whirling water. In a sadistic jest, the master would often promise the slave freedom if they escaped.

The oldest known document that mentions Roma slavery in the Romanian provinces is from 1385. It states that Dan I, the ruler of Wallachia, gave forty Roma families to the Tismana monastery. For almost five centuries, the three main owners of slaves were the country’s ruling house, nobles and church. The master owned the slave’s body. He chose who the slave married, what language the slave spoke, and had the right to sell their children. Masters frequently donated slaves to monasteries, hoping for redemption. Roma women were often raped by their masters. Their children became slaves as well.

In 1865, slavery officially ended. The pressure came from a group of abolitionist students influenced by western ideas. There was also external political pressure. At that time, slavery was seen as a barbaric practice throughout Europe. It was the same year that in the US, the North won the Civil War. Almost thirty years earlier, the United Kingdom officially ended the practice of slavery. The Romanian provinces were allowed to unite only if they abolished slavery. However, Roma was only first recognised as a national minority in 1990, after the fall of the communist regime.

With so much proof, it is curious why many Romanians do not know about Roma slavery and its current effects. However, two years ago, the producers of the podcast also did not know the magnitude of this historic trauma. 

“I have ten years of experience writing about racism, social injustice and poverty,” says Ciobanu, the journalist who made the podcast. “I never connected them to our history.” While she was a student, Ciobanu found out about Roma slavery from the memoirs of foreigners who passed through the Romanian provinces. However, the acts of cruelty were never discussed in class. It was only when Ioanida Costache, an ethnomusicologist of Roma origins, recommended a group of researchers that Ciobanu discovered the magnitude of the issue. One of them was the sociologist Adrian-Nicolae Furtună.

“When it comes to minorities, the issue of memory becomes a political issue,” said Furtună. He is one of the main figures involved with the podcast. For many years, Furtună has researched documents that attest to slavery and has observed its effects in real life. “If you use the legal term, the crime that happened in the past becomes reprehensible.”

But the word used by history books, in school, literature and mainstream discourse is robie. This archaic word does not challenge our modern sensitivities in the same way. It translates as captivity or servitude. Some historians argue that this is the correct term, as the human trade only occurred inside the provinces. It can also be a way of distancing the Roma experience from African-American slavery. 

In his office, Furtună explains why he ultimately chose to use the archaic word. After spending so much time reading historical documents, this term has a stronger effect. It symbolises the characteristics of the Roma experience. He compares the current identity crisis of Roma to a form of schizophrenia. 

Representation problem

To make peace with the past, one first needs to know it. Although there is a great amount of academic research about Roma slavery, Furtună points out how little we know about it. The Romanian Orthodox Church is the main owner of the documents and its leaders show little interest in collaborating with scholars. 

“Many people think that Roma do not have a history,” Furtună said. “They see them as exotic people with long and colourful skirts, fallen from the sky.” In reality, they were forced to live in this land. They were forced to assimilate into the dominant culture and renounce their traditions. Furtună has seen how these policies shape the Roma community’s sense of worth.

This was the case for Luiza Medeleanu, who is currently doing a PhD in how Roma are represented in the mainstream culture. Like many children, Medeleanu searched for role models in books. She wanted to find a Roma hero that she could imitate and love, just like how she loved Robin Hood and Uncle Tom. What she found were humble servants. They were mere shadows in the stories. “I never understood why they were like that until I understood what slavery was,” said Medeleanu. In the podcast, she mentions that she only heard about slavery as a student. For her, slavery became a revelation. She finally understood why Roma women were sexualised and why the Roma community was side-lined. Slavery was the answer to why she was discriminated against when she was a child.

In her village, she was known as the granddaughter of “Nicu, the Gipsy”. Medeleanu did her best to be a model child. She earned good grades and enrolled in national competitions. However, the other children did not want to play with her because she was Roma. “I couldn’t understand why,” Medeleanu said, “I kept asking myself what I was doing wrong.”

Racism scarred her identity. As a young girl, she was proud that she did not speak Romani. She thought that if she spoke it, she would have an accent that would make her sound ridiculous. “It is crazy”, Medeleanu says nowadays, “but I grew up with this stigma”.

Medeleanu organises educational programmes for the Roma Education Fund. Once, she was asked why Roma do not know their past and why families do not teach their children. “As if you learn about Decebalus from your father,” Medeleanu jokes, mentioning the ancient past of Romania. The answer is simple: they do not learn it in school. 

When Roma scholars open up about their trauma, they are mocked. Their discourse is considered self-pity. For Medeleanu, this sincerity marks the first step to regain a sense of dignity. It is how others can understand what it means to face discrimination. From this point on, people can talk of healing the past and current relationships. 

A historical reckoning? 

The Way of the Land quickly became the most popular podcast in Romania. Competing journalistic publications recommended it to their subscribers. Ciobanu was invited onto several other podcasts and interviewed on her work. Furtună and Medeleanu were also invited for interviews. Several teachers have written Ciobanu to say that they used information from the podcast in class.

Although Romanian politicians remained silent towards this issue, the Swedish Embassy in Bucharest shared the podcast on its Facebook page. “Historically we did not start with equal chances,” said Therese Hydén, the Ambassador of Sweden in Bucharest, in an e-mail. Hydén stressed how important it is to support and encourage this sort of journalistic work. “The podcast is an encouragement to embrace tolerance and to try to understand the circumstances that led to the power relationships of nowadays.”

The last episode of the podcast was released days after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As a result, this potential historical reckoning never became a bullet point in the public agenda. The traditional media focused on the new conflict, while conversations about the programme continued on social media. 

It is tempting to compare The Way of the Land with the 1619 Project, a programme that galvanised audiences in the US and put critical race theory in the spotlight. Cristian Lupșa, the editor-in-chief of DoR, laughed when asked if he wished for a similar effect. “It is difficult to produce a historical reckoning in Romania,” he said. “We have many events with which we need to make peace,” Lupșa added, “including the fact that, despite the usual narrative, Romania was not always the victim”.

There are many comments on social media that back up Lupșa’s concern. Talking points such as “we were also doing badly” or “slavery comes from the word Slav,” reflect an unwillingness to take a critical stance against the mainstream narrative. Instead, the acts of other European states are presented as undoubtedly worse. 

When asked why Roma slavery is not mentioned in the official gallery, the National Museum of History communications team gave a confusing answer. They argue that this exclusion has to do with the delayed restoration of the building, which has been going on for 20 years now. They also blame it on the lack of historical heritage. 

The Orthodox Church has answered the allegations made by the podcast. In an e-mail addressed to Ciobanu, two historians claim that the church has never enslaved people. The church has merely accepted a system imposed by political leaders. They stress that Roma people did not experience “slavery”. They also distanced themselves from what they called a Marxist-influenced thesis. The word they use for Roma is Țigan.

In 2019 Pope Francis publicly apologised for the Catholic Church’s discrimination and abuse carried out against the Roma community. The leaders of the Orthodox Church have never asked the Roma community for forgiveness. 

Confession

The play ends and the public cheers in standing ovation. Șerban bows and receives flowers. For almost two hours, the audience witnessed how racism shaped her life and identity. They discovered what it means to grow up in a ghetto. They saw how Șerban carried the stigma of her race even when she was playing in New York or London.

“It is important for people to see how difficult it is to live in a world where everybody has prejudices against you,” said Agnieszka Krawczyk, who is from Poland. She listened to the podcast and this is the second time she has seen the play. She came with her husband and two colleagues. “In Poland, Roma people are also discriminated against,” Krawczyk said.

Children rushed onto the stage to take a picture with the actress. For Claudia, who is ten, the most memorable scene was when Șerban danced while wearing a crow mask. She did not understand the racial symbolism, like most of her classmates, who asked the teacher what it meant. All she saw was the beauty of the dance.

“This is not the usual story,” said Mădălina Ivan, who worked with abandoned children. She considers Șerban an exception to the rule, saved only by her strong will. “She is an example for the rest,” Ivan said. “She understands their fight.”

Miriam Țepeș-Handaric is a Romanian journalist working as a freelancer for international publications. She is currently based in Bucharest.

history, memory, Podcast, Roma, Romania