alternatehistory.com
Romani State
In early July 1940, Gregor Samsa designated the Szekely Land as the Romani Autonomous Unitarian Republic. Over the course of that month and the next, the Romani of the CUS, Turkey, and the Balkan territories occupied by both were shephereded into the small area as the local Hungarian and Romanian population were deported. Moving the Romani in proved to be a comparatively simple task— the peasants of Southern Europe, embittered and hardened by years of brutal war, saw the resumption of anti-Roma actions as a kind of perverse return to normalcy, and eagerly participated in finding Roma communities and reporting them to the Unitarians— but the removals of the Hungarians helped set off the Pharrajimos in September, as Koves’s Titanium Guards and associated paramilitaries overwhelmed the RAUR’s makeshift army and persuaded the indigenous peoples that they could keep their homes if they murdered as many of the newcomers as possible. By October, a Romani resistance movement had coalesced under the leadership of the Wallachian colonel, Ion Voicu, who leveraged his old military training to build a new army of his people that hid in the forested mountains and struck mercilessly when the time was right. Through resistance, the Romani stayed alive while the Germans advanced eastward in Operation Schwarzburg. By November, the Germans had pacified Debrecen and captured Gregor Samsa and his loyalists. The neutralization of the Kovesians followed apace, as the Germans placed Hungary under military occupation. The Germans’ definition of Hungary notably excluded the Romani lands, which were recognized as the Romani State [1] in the early spring of 1941. Over the course of May and June, the Germans dug deeper into the Balkans, liberating most of Slavonia and Wallachia-Moldavia. This gave the Romani some breathing room.
By July 1941, one year had elapsed since the world as the Romani knew it was brutally smashed. Many traditional leaders were dead, and the survivors had nowhere to go. The new nation, which— after the mass killing of over a hundred thousand people during the Pharrajimos— counted a population of a little less than three million with a growing Romani majority, committed itself to the task which generations of Romani had accomplished for centuries: survival.
The arrival of the German Army, in many ways, allowed the resumption of Romani life. Many of the more urbanized Romani, who had part-timed as porters in the railway stations of Buda and Prague, found their skills in high demand as the German supply train wound its way through the former lands of Visegrad. Musicians, some of whom had tenaciously held onto their violins and harmonicas amid the chaos of the past year, made a quick buck performing for the German soldiers as they prepared to leave the former Szekely Land behind and head off to the Balkans. The real winners, however, ended up being the traditional craftsmen. Occupation had always been very important to the Romani clans of Wallachia and southern Hungary. For centuries, they had been held as slaves and serfs of the boyars. Their occupations became the only important thing about them. After their emancipation, these craftsmen made a livelihood out of roaming the villages of the land, offering their services to villagers who did not have them. The Kalderash were coppersmiths, who set up camp near villages for days and a time and repaired the locals’ cauldrons and cooking tools. The Kovachi were blacksmiths. The Lingurari were spoon-carvers, and the Sepuchides were basket-weavers. All found avid customers among the Germans. The Kalderash and Lingurari mended and replaced the cooking tools of the soldiers, and the Kovachi even did repairs of the landships’ outer armor. The Sepuchides, who suspected that their trade might be the first to fade away in a new, uncertain era, found that their traditional vocation was given a lease on life by the Germans’ need for containers to hold their supplies. In return for their efforts, the Roma were repaid with food, clothes, weapons, and German marks, which, in the absence of a Romani alternative, became the unofficial currency of the Romani State. Steadily, people returned to the normalcy of their traditional jobs, and started to put their shattered lives back together. The Germans, in their own way, even helped keep public order: the old Roma of Hungary, who has once traversed the local villages and sold clothes and tools, knew exactly where the Hungarians lived. The German army was all to eager to conscript them and send them to the front against the Unitarians as “volunteer armies.” The Hungarians of the Szekely Land, who generally felt that the Unitarians had abandoned them, proved amenable to fighting against them in the Balkans. After the war, they would be allowed to move to Germania or given the option to resettle in Kolozsvár, Temesvár, and Gyulafehérvár [2]. All this helped make important parts of Transylvania more Hungarian in composition.
A less desirable outcome of the German Army’s involvement in the Romani State was prostitution. In the desperation of war, families had been split up and vulnerable young women had grown up amid horrors. They could get by through begging, but there were few people to beg from— few among the Romani were economically secure enough to just give things away. Though Germania tried to disavow this part of their legacy, the willingness of even the declared “friends” of the Romani to take advantage of them in their time of need would be remembered as one of the worst parts of a terrible war.
After enduring much loss, the Romani obtained short-term survival. Long-term changes soon began to change the very architecture of the land, and especially of Nedezhdimos [3], the capital of the Romani State. The Roma living among the Slavs in Northern Hungary had long supported themselves through the production of valki. Each valka was a dried brick, not a fired one. They were made by mixing soil, straw, and water, and then stomping on the mix with bare feet or a cow’s hooves. The mix would then be pressed into wooden moulds and allowed to dry and shrink for a few days. Eventually, they shrunk enough to be safely removed from the mold and were dried in the sun, where they shrunk and hardened even more. The resulting bricks were durable, easy to make, and cheaper than fired bricks. Thick mud could be used as mortar to bind them together. Valki appeared to be the solution for the housing crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Romani— old houses could be repaired and new houses could be built with valki. However, there was not enough of it to go around, and so many of the historically sedentary Roma (actually a majority of the pre-1940 Roma population) defaulted to building huts from thin frames of interlocking logs and branches, chinked with the same mixture used in the production of valki. The floors of these huts were stomped earth. Stoves or hearths doubled for heating and cooking. Sloping roofs were made from scavenged metal sheets, and a single window fashioned from a piece of glass let the light in. A single bed, or an old chest of prized possessions, were typically the only furniture in the house. As the available pre-1940 housing in Nedezhdimos ran out, new neighborhoods of houses and huts quickly sprung up in the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, the Roma of Greece had a long tradition of building small gardens near their houses. They leveraged these skills to build large community gardens that fed their neighborhoods with their surplus, and received the gratitude and gifts of their neighbors. The orphans of the city, who had never been able to learn a trade before being cut off from their families, were adopted by the Greek Roma families who were economically secure enough to raise them and train them as agricultural workers. In every respect, Nedezhdimos was being remade, slowly developing along the lines of a traditional Roma settlement, or mahala. However, some traditions were already being phased out. Those who worked with the soil were once regarded by the itinerant tradesmen as uncultivated or even unclean. In the new world of Nedezhdimos, however, the Lovara (horse-traders) and Kalderash found themselves living alongside and dependent on the labors of strangers from distant lands, and stopped seeing themselves as the culturally pure inheritors of Roma tradition. Waves of change radiated out from Nedezhdimos into the remainder of the Romani State. Greek Roma fishermen, who had once plied the lakes of Macedonia, built new fishing communities along the Olt River. Professional foragers, who had much experience in finding the hidden wealth of Europe’s forests, set off in search of nuts and berries and found both in appreciable quantities. Homes of valki and logs sprung up in Sim-Djuradj [4], which became the Romani State’s second city, and the horses of itinerant tradesmen trod new paths between each new-built foro, or center of business.
Politically, matters in the new country were a little less vibrant. Though Ion Voicu was ostensibly the Democrat of a republican government, and he oversaw the establishment of a Supreme Kris [5] to oversee the judicial matters of the land, the army was still the strongest and oldest institution of the Romani State. Voicu didn’t see this state of affairs as a bad thing— he reasoned, perhaps correctly, that his generally illiterate, parochial, and clannish people were not ready for civilian rule— and instead set about entrenching the army’s power. Lone travelers or the shattered remnants of extended families were sought out, and the men among them were recruited into the Romani Army. The relatives of soldiers were settled in the vacated homes of the old Hungarian residents, and given a monthly ration of food and clothing. The beneficence of the army became a lifeline for the many Roma who could not support themselves by taking up the traditional trades or the new vocations. The use of the military as a political machine that dispensed welfare and patronage to newly-minted supporters of Voicu, and satirical jokes at the expense of the “military man,” the “welfare queen,” and the little hordes of “princelings” they spawned, would both become fixtures of Romani life for years to come.
Romani foreign policy was distinguished by a close alignment with Germania. German might had saved the Romani from Unitarian depredations, German funding had given the Romani Army the resources it needed to transition from a ragtag guerrilla force to a governing institution, and continued interaction with the German people promised to give the Romani State an economic future. Ion Voicu’s cabinet of advisors, which aided him in the tasks of governing, included many Roma from Germania. Though these foreigners called themselves Sinti, and had only arrived in the lands of the Romani State in the spring and early summer, they nonetheless felt a kinship with the other Roma and a wish to contribute to their future. In Germania, Sinti culture had been allowed to develop to a greater degree than in Visegrad. Sinti children went to schools, and some became distinguished linguists who, along with German colleagues, successfully traced the origin of the Romani language and people to faraway India. Though Voicu was interested in the prospect of a new Ministry of Education, in which the Sinti immigrants might be used to establish new Romani-medium schools (perhaps using Voicu’s own Kalderash dialect as a standard language) across the country, he knew that, in the short term, the Sinti were more valuable as diplomats. Using them as messengers and interpreters, Voicu kept up a steady dialogue with his German allies. A set of talks in late July ended positively, with promises to meet again in September to discuss closer economic cooperation that went beyond simple subsidies and foreign aid. The musical instrument and textile industries, traditional crafts of the Romani, were revived the government in the hopes of capitalizing on the German public’s new interest in Romani culture. The forests of the mountains, which had one guarded Voicu’s men in their time of need, were cut down to serve the needs of a new age. Germania’s companies, however, proved to be more interested in reports of natural gas. Visegrad’s energy companies had found natural gas in the Szekely Land before the Unitarian Revolution, and both Roma and Gadžo [6] could see the profits to be gained by picking up where the Visegradians left off...
[1] For some reason, I’d like for this to remain the colloquial name of the country. After all, the “Czech Republic” was a nice enough name while it lasted.
[2] OTL: Cluj, Timisoara, and Alba Iulia.
[3] OTL: Targu Mures. Targu Mures was the capital of the Romanian “Magyar Autonomous Region” (an early communist-era autonomous administration in the Szekely Land) and it’s still the biggest settlement in the area. “Nedezhdimos” is the Kalderash Romani word for “hope.”
[4] OTL: Sfântu Gheorghe.
[5] A Kris is a traditional Romani court of law, which upheld justice between Roma. The judges are usually elders of the community.
[6] The Roma term for a non-Roma European. The term has so many good and bad connotations stacked on top of each other that it basically ends up value-neutral. It’s an accepted term in Roma studies.
The Romani State (July 1941)
In early July 1940, Gregor Samsa designated the Szekely Land as the Romani Autonomous Unitarian Republic. Over the course of that month and the next, the Romani of the CUS, Turkey, and the Balkan territories occupied by both were shephereded into the small area as the local Hungarian and Romanian population were deported. Moving the Romani in proved to be a comparatively simple task— the peasants of Southern Europe, embittered and hardened by years of brutal war, saw the resumption of anti-Roma actions as a kind of perverse return to normalcy, and eagerly participated in finding Roma communities and reporting them to the Unitarians— but the removals of the Hungarians helped set off the Pharrajimos in September, as Koves’s Titanium Guards and associated paramilitaries overwhelmed the RAUR’s makeshift army and persuaded the indigenous peoples that they could keep their homes if they murdered as many of the newcomers as possible. By October, a Romani resistance movement had coalesced under the leadership of the Wallachian colonel, Ion Voicu, who leveraged his old military training to build a new army of his people that hid in the forested mountains and struck mercilessly when the time was right. Through resistance, the Romani stayed alive while the Germans advanced eastward in Operation Schwarzburg. By November, the Germans had pacified Debrecen and captured Gregor Samsa and his loyalists. The neutralization of the Kovesians followed apace, as the Germans placed Hungary under military occupation. The Germans’ definition of Hungary notably excluded the Romani lands, which were recognized as the Romani State [1] in the early spring of 1941. Over the course of May and June, the Germans dug deeper into the Balkans, liberating most of Slavonia and Wallachia-Moldavia. This gave the Romani some breathing room.
By July 1941, one year had elapsed since the world as the Romani knew it was brutally smashed. Many traditional leaders were dead, and the survivors had nowhere to go. The new nation, which— after the mass killing of over a hundred thousand people during the Pharrajimos— counted a population of a little less than three million with a growing Romani majority, committed itself to the task which generations of Romani had accomplished for centuries: survival.
Romani women work as porters for the German Army.
The arrival of the German Army, in many ways, allowed the resumption of Romani life. Many of the more urbanized Romani, who had part-timed as porters in the railway stations of Buda and Prague, found their skills in high demand as the German supply train wound its way through the former lands of Visegrad. Musicians, some of whom had tenaciously held onto their violins and harmonicas amid the chaos of the past year, made a quick buck performing for the German soldiers as they prepared to leave the former Szekely Land behind and head off to the Balkans. The real winners, however, ended up being the traditional craftsmen. Occupation had always been very important to the Romani clans of Wallachia and southern Hungary. For centuries, they had been held as slaves and serfs of the boyars. Their occupations became the only important thing about them. After their emancipation, these craftsmen made a livelihood out of roaming the villages of the land, offering their services to villagers who did not have them. The Kalderash were coppersmiths, who set up camp near villages for days and a time and repaired the locals’ cauldrons and cooking tools. The Kovachi were blacksmiths. The Lingurari were spoon-carvers, and the Sepuchides were basket-weavers. All found avid customers among the Germans. The Kalderash and Lingurari mended and replaced the cooking tools of the soldiers, and the Kovachi even did repairs of the landships’ outer armor. The Sepuchides, who suspected that their trade might be the first to fade away in a new, uncertain era, found that their traditional vocation was given a lease on life by the Germans’ need for containers to hold their supplies. In return for their efforts, the Roma were repaid with food, clothes, weapons, and German marks, which, in the absence of a Romani alternative, became the unofficial currency of the Romani State. Steadily, people returned to the normalcy of their traditional jobs, and started to put their shattered lives back together. The Germans, in their own way, even helped keep public order: the old Roma of Hungary, who has once traversed the local villages and sold clothes and tools, knew exactly where the Hungarians lived. The German army was all to eager to conscript them and send them to the front against the Unitarians as “volunteer armies.” The Hungarians of the Szekely Land, who generally felt that the Unitarians had abandoned them, proved amenable to fighting against them in the Balkans. After the war, they would be allowed to move to Germania or given the option to resettle in Kolozsvár, Temesvár, and Gyulafehérvár [2]. All this helped make important parts of Transylvania more Hungarian in composition.
A less desirable outcome of the German Army’s involvement in the Romani State was prostitution. In the desperation of war, families had been split up and vulnerable young women had grown up amid horrors. They could get by through begging, but there were few people to beg from— few among the Romani were economically secure enough to just give things away. Though Germania tried to disavow this part of their legacy, the willingness of even the declared “friends” of the Romani to take advantage of them in their time of need would be remembered as one of the worst parts of a terrible war.
A Romani blacksmith and his family, pursuing old occupations in a new land.
After enduring much loss, the Romani obtained short-term survival. Long-term changes soon began to change the very architecture of the land, and especially of Nedezhdimos [3], the capital of the Romani State. The Roma living among the Slavs in Northern Hungary had long supported themselves through the production of valki. Each valka was a dried brick, not a fired one. They were made by mixing soil, straw, and water, and then stomping on the mix with bare feet or a cow’s hooves. The mix would then be pressed into wooden moulds and allowed to dry and shrink for a few days. Eventually, they shrunk enough to be safely removed from the mold and were dried in the sun, where they shrunk and hardened even more. The resulting bricks were durable, easy to make, and cheaper than fired bricks. Thick mud could be used as mortar to bind them together. Valki appeared to be the solution for the housing crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Romani— old houses could be repaired and new houses could be built with valki. However, there was not enough of it to go around, and so many of the historically sedentary Roma (actually a majority of the pre-1940 Roma population) defaulted to building huts from thin frames of interlocking logs and branches, chinked with the same mixture used in the production of valki. The floors of these huts were stomped earth. Stoves or hearths doubled for heating and cooking. Sloping roofs were made from scavenged metal sheets, and a single window fashioned from a piece of glass let the light in. A single bed, or an old chest of prized possessions, were typically the only furniture in the house. As the available pre-1940 housing in Nedezhdimos ran out, new neighborhoods of houses and huts quickly sprung up in the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, the Roma of Greece had a long tradition of building small gardens near their houses. They leveraged these skills to build large community gardens that fed their neighborhoods with their surplus, and received the gratitude and gifts of their neighbors. The orphans of the city, who had never been able to learn a trade before being cut off from their families, were adopted by the Greek Roma families who were economically secure enough to raise them and train them as agricultural workers. In every respect, Nedezhdimos was being remade, slowly developing along the lines of a traditional Roma settlement, or mahala. However, some traditions were already being phased out. Those who worked with the soil were once regarded by the itinerant tradesmen as uncultivated or even unclean. In the new world of Nedezhdimos, however, the Lovara (horse-traders) and Kalderash found themselves living alongside and dependent on the labors of strangers from distant lands, and stopped seeing themselves as the culturally pure inheritors of Roma tradition. Waves of change radiated out from Nedezhdimos into the remainder of the Romani State. Greek Roma fishermen, who had once plied the lakes of Macedonia, built new fishing communities along the Olt River. Professional foragers, who had much experience in finding the hidden wealth of Europe’s forests, set off in search of nuts and berries and found both in appreciable quantities. Homes of valki and logs sprung up in Sim-Djuradj [4], which became the Romani State’s second city, and the horses of itinerant tradesmen trod new paths between each new-built foro, or center of business.
The flag of the Romani State. The tree represents the branches of the Romani people, which spread across Europe. Mass production of the flag was a form of life support for the ailing textile industry, which had lost many practitioners to the Pharrajimos.
Politically, matters in the new country were a little less vibrant. Though Ion Voicu was ostensibly the Democrat of a republican government, and he oversaw the establishment of a Supreme Kris [5] to oversee the judicial matters of the land, the army was still the strongest and oldest institution of the Romani State. Voicu didn’t see this state of affairs as a bad thing— he reasoned, perhaps correctly, that his generally illiterate, parochial, and clannish people were not ready for civilian rule— and instead set about entrenching the army’s power. Lone travelers or the shattered remnants of extended families were sought out, and the men among them were recruited into the Romani Army. The relatives of soldiers were settled in the vacated homes of the old Hungarian residents, and given a monthly ration of food and clothing. The beneficence of the army became a lifeline for the many Roma who could not support themselves by taking up the traditional trades or the new vocations. The use of the military as a political machine that dispensed welfare and patronage to newly-minted supporters of Voicu, and satirical jokes at the expense of the “military man,” the “welfare queen,” and the little hordes of “princelings” they spawned, would both become fixtures of Romani life for years to come.
Romani foreign policy was distinguished by a close alignment with Germania. German might had saved the Romani from Unitarian depredations, German funding had given the Romani Army the resources it needed to transition from a ragtag guerrilla force to a governing institution, and continued interaction with the German people promised to give the Romani State an economic future. Ion Voicu’s cabinet of advisors, which aided him in the tasks of governing, included many Roma from Germania. Though these foreigners called themselves Sinti, and had only arrived in the lands of the Romani State in the spring and early summer, they nonetheless felt a kinship with the other Roma and a wish to contribute to their future. In Germania, Sinti culture had been allowed to develop to a greater degree than in Visegrad. Sinti children went to schools, and some became distinguished linguists who, along with German colleagues, successfully traced the origin of the Romani language and people to faraway India. Though Voicu was interested in the prospect of a new Ministry of Education, in which the Sinti immigrants might be used to establish new Romani-medium schools (perhaps using Voicu’s own Kalderash dialect as a standard language) across the country, he knew that, in the short term, the Sinti were more valuable as diplomats. Using them as messengers and interpreters, Voicu kept up a steady dialogue with his German allies. A set of talks in late July ended positively, with promises to meet again in September to discuss closer economic cooperation that went beyond simple subsidies and foreign aid. The musical instrument and textile industries, traditional crafts of the Romani, were revived the government in the hopes of capitalizing on the German public’s new interest in Romani culture. The forests of the mountains, which had one guarded Voicu’s men in their time of need, were cut down to serve the needs of a new age. Germania’s companies, however, proved to be more interested in reports of natural gas. Visegrad’s energy companies had found natural gas in the Szekely Land before the Unitarian Revolution, and both Roma and Gadžo [6] could see the profits to be gained by picking up where the Visegradians left off...
[1] For some reason, I’d like for this to remain the colloquial name of the country. After all, the “Czech Republic” was a nice enough name while it lasted.
[2] OTL: Cluj, Timisoara, and Alba Iulia.
[3] OTL: Targu Mures. Targu Mures was the capital of the Romanian “Magyar Autonomous Region” (an early communist-era autonomous administration in the Szekely Land) and it’s still the biggest settlement in the area. “Nedezhdimos” is the Kalderash Romani word for “hope.”
[4] OTL: Sfântu Gheorghe.
[5] A Kris is a traditional Romani court of law, which upheld justice between Roma. The judges are usually elders of the community.
[6] The Roma term for a non-Roma European. The term has so many good and bad connotations stacked on top of each other that it basically ends up value-neutral. It’s an accepted term in Roma studies.
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