A Glossary of Greek Romany as Spoken in Agia Varvara (Athens) (review)

Reviews Gordon M. Messing, A Glossary of Greek Romany as Spoken in Agia Varvara (Athens). Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers. 1988. Pp. 175. $15.95. The Gypsies, descendants of a group of people that left India in roughly the ninth century a.d. and made their way westward through the Middle East and Turkey to Greece and thence northward, have been a presence in Greece in one form or another for possibly as long as 700 years. They refer to themselves natively as roma (plural of rom, the word for 'man; husband', with feminine form romni 'woman; wife') and their language is generally referred to by outsiders (gadie 'non-Gypsies') as Romani (also Romany, in the older spelling Messing adopts), and by the roma themselves as romani (tjip), literally "(the) roms' language". After the Gypsies passed through the Balkans, great numbers of them moved on to other parts of Europe and elsewhere, but a significant number remained in or returned to Greece. A recent European Community report by M. Siguan concerning minority populations in Spain, Portugal, and Greece (Les minorités linguütiques dans la communauté économique européenne: Espagne, Portugal, Grèce [Luxemburg 1990]) places the number of roma now living in Thrace alone at 22,000. Throughout this time, the roma have almost always been relegated to a low and somewhat marginal social standing within Greece and elsewhere (for a view of the Balkans, see Hugh Poulton's Minorities in the Balkans [Minority Rights Group Report 82,1989] and for a perceptive, sensitive, and occasionally chilling essay on the treatment of Gypsies in Western societies, see Ian Hancock 's The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution [Karoma Publishers, 1987]). As a result, the Greek Gypsies as a group have not attracted much attention among scholars interested in Greece, although there is in general a healthy interest in Gypsy studies focusing on other groups of Gypsies, as evidenced, for example, by the long publication history of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Sockty. The tradition of a closed and tighdy knit social group somewhat alienated from mainstream Greek culture makes field work among the Gypsies in general rather difficult. Nonetheless, Gordon Messing managed to gain entry amongst the sedentary Gypsies of Agia Varvara, a suburb of Athens, and over a period of some 15 years beginning in 1973 collected an enormous amount of information about the particular form of Romani spoken in this Gypsy community. (Another source is Birgit Igla's Grammatik der Kalderash, an unpublished 1989 dissertation done at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. Thanks to Professor Ian Hancock of the University of Texas for this inforJoumal of Modem Greek Studies, Volume 9, 1991. 249 250 Reviews mation and also for reading and commenting upon an early draft of this review.) Interestingly, as Messing points out (p. 11), it is likely that "the immediate ancestors of these Gypsies came to Greece from Turkey perhaps not much earlier than die last part of the nineteendi century," for Agia Varvara Romani "bears a markedly close relationship to the Turkish Romani so ably described by Paspati in his magnificent account of 1870." Messing's contribution to Gypsy linguistic and cultural studies is selfevident : in this book are to be found not only a brief grammatical sketch of this dialect of Greek Romani but also some sample texts, an extensive RomaniEnglish glossary covering more than 1200 lexical items, complete with examples of use taken from texts and interviews, and an English-Romani wordlist that can be used as an index to the Romani-English lemmata. Given the significant contribution of this work to Gypsy studies, one might well ask whether it has any relevance for Modern Greek studies. The answer is clearly yes, for at least two reasons. First, while the field of Modern Greek studies has generally concerned itself only with matters Greek, it is possible instead to view the field as including the study of all aspects of modern Greece, and not just the language of the Greeks, the literature of the Greeks, the architecture of the Greeks, the social organization of the Greeks, etc. Under such a view, the non-Greek minority speech communities living in Greece would...