A Place of Their Own

Unlike other diaspora populations, which may cling to the idea of a place where they might one day be “at home,” the Gypsies have been a nomad people with no homeland to dream of, no original territory to reclaim. By a kind of internal emigration, Rom in Harangos created a place of their own in which they could feel at home, a social space composed according to their own ethic of relatedness. Only a few Magyars entered the Gypsy settlement, and even the police tended to come accompanied by armed soldiers. The arrangement of Thulo’s house was typical of most Gypsies in the Third Class, if distinctly a grander variation than the average. Apart from the more than 200 Gypsies who lived in the Third Class in huts and houses built around twenty-one courtyards, there were another 800 or so Gypsies in the town, 2.5 percent of its 40,000 inhabitants.