by siberianbear on 11/15/20, 6:06 PM with 226 comments
by EB-Barrington on 11/15/20, 7:41 PM
Stolipinovo is one of several European Roma communities that I have visited over the years (several times now), and it's the largest that I'm aware of. The photos in the post are representative and true of how the area actually is, and I'm happy to answer any questions (forewarning, I'm not an expert).
If I were to emphasize any one take-away - it's the friendliness I experienced from the locals. Sounds cliched, but look at reality - I was taking photos in a place where I don't particularly belong (it's kind of my hobby since "retiring" from tech), and you may assume that a poverty-stricken, much maligned group of people would be wary of "outsiders".
Indeed, the exact opposite was the case.
edit: with regards to racism, a story I was told in the same city is perhaps the best example of just how far Bulgaria (in this example) has to climb. I asked a local Bulgarian friend why I didn't see Roma working at the local restaurants. He said that would be really bad for the business - to have a Gypsy waiter, or cashier, or in any "public facing" role. I voiced my assumption that perhaps they were working back-of-house, in the kitchen. He said they weren't - if the public found out a Gypsy was working in the kitchen, most people would never dine at that restaurant.
by umvi on 11/15/20, 7:18 PM
I always respond by pointing out that the citizens of almost every country are naturally xenophobic and/or racist, just not necessarily against people of African descent. In the case of Europe, I usually point to the Roma as an area where Europeans tend to be a bit racist. I had no idea there were huge Roma ghettos in Bulgaria, but I knew of some Roma communities when I lived in Rome, Italy. And without fail, countless Italians warned me to steer clear of the Roma because "they are all liars and thieves"...
by mrtksn on 11/15/20, 7:33 PM
I have relatives that live in a region with a lot of gypsies and I am endlessly fascinated by the success of their phone scams. As I visit them annually, I witnessed gypsies getting rich and building huge houses, collecting scam money from the local western-union branch almost on regular basis. Since they speak Turkish too, women call random Turkish numbers and ask men for money(claiming that they are coming to Turkey for them but an issue come up at the border) and their husbands collect the money from the western union. Sometimes it's very theatrical, the husband pretends to be the "evil Bulgarian police officer". I've seen it with my own eyes.
Just next to Bulgaria is Turkey and in this country the Gypsy image is drastically different. In Turkey gypsies are musicians, dancers and overall free soul people. Much less negative connotations overall. The exception is "Conolar" or "the Jonos", a clan in a major Turkish city. They are known for their temper and originalit. Here is a local fight, quite amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaNj4RQC4Ec
If I lived only in Bulgaria I might as well be a racist but I have seen enough to believe that the Bulgarians need to look in the mirror if they are looking someone to blame about the situation with gypsies. It doesn't have to be the way it is in Bulgaria.
by knolan on 11/15/20, 8:19 PM
It’s difficult to look past ones prejudices and I’m very aware of my own in this situation. It’s easy to hate on the entire community because of the appalling behaviour of a few and their insular nature as a community.
Of course it’s far more complex than the surface reveals and there are huge issues around education, inclusion, and integration.
by pmoriarty on 11/15/20, 7:30 PM
It's an ancient cemetery which has basically turned in to a giant slum, with poverty-stricken people living among the ancient tombs.
There are a number of interesting videos on youtube about it, such as [2], [3], and [4], but it's the first of these that I found most fascinating, because not only did it show and talk about the City of the Dead, it also shows Zabbaleen.[5]
Zabbaleen is much like Stolipinovo, with people living among mountains of garbage.
The people who live there grow up there and are traditionally tasked with dealing with the garbage, which is shipped in to the neighborhood for them to live amongst.
It's clearly a miserable, nightmarish life.
As the narrator in the video says at about 9 minutes in, "I don't care how essential what they do is for Cairo. Cairo needs to get its shit together.. it's not ok."
I highly recommend watching this video[2]. The part on Zabaleen starts around 4'48".
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Dead_%28Cairo%29
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8KiBycJi9I
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeystshWL2I
by bogomipz on 11/16/20, 12:19 AM
>"And, personally, honestly, I’m actually deceiving you right here on this page. It can’t be helped. No set of photos, nor a thousand or so words, gathered over the course of a single day in Stolipinovo, could possibly begin to tell the whole story."
What a great summary. What great photos. This whole post was a wonderful bit of travel journalism. Thanks for sharing.
by jmcdl on 11/15/20, 7:52 PM
by shmerl on 11/15/20, 7:27 PM
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAgPnsaxdsk
by markvdb on 11/15/20, 11:15 PM
by carlsborg on 11/15/20, 7:22 PM
by locallost on 11/15/20, 8:23 PM
The situation of Roma is always a good counter example to the statement "no racism in Europe". Perhaps there was never official segregation, but there is almost always implicit segregation. They can ride the bus, but more intimate relationships between the Roma and non-Roma population are rare. True friendships, marriages etc. So it's not Mississippi of the 50's, but there's also been little progress in the last decades. Which is a pity because IMHO there is no quick fix, only slowly changing what is considered to be normal.
by kostarelo on 11/15/20, 10:11 PM
In the community that I grew (Evosmos, West Thessaloniki) there were many of them. I’ve met a few that were integrated in the community, managed to finish school etc.
But their culture is just nothing about that. Women in dirty clothes carrying a trolley all day and going through garbage cans collecting dumps. Kids 5,6,7 years old with no shoes and no clothes on are walking around main streets At noon sneaking into stores and stealing whatever they can. Their teenagers are bullying everyone they can when they go out for no reason. They are deep into the drugs and the guns game. Police are always on them but there isn’t much they can do but to isolate them in further areas outside the city.
I’ve seen all those things and they aren’t pretty.
by Kosirich on 11/16/20, 7:48 AM
One of the issues I is the social welfare state and the underlying social contracts it is based upon that are taken advantage of by Roma. There is an incentive for Roma communities to stay the same because of that as minimum social welfare check, child support and similar handouts help provide for a life based on large communities.
In order to make any progress, a country should start by recognizing that in order to help Roma people and brake the cycle, special laws will be needed. In order to be smart about it, it should be done like Denmark did it with it's ghetto laws where they target an area (not ethnicity) and implement special restrictions, tougher laws, tougher punishment but at the same time focus more on providing primary and secondary education, working with families and so on.
by dimitar on 11/15/20, 8:03 PM
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1589047,24.785939,3a,75y,202...
You can compare to other areas of the city:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1589047,24.785939,3a,75y,202...
I think racial tension came down a lot the last 10 years, and the reason is that quite a few Roma work in Western Europe. For the ones in Stolipinovo I believe the prime destination is Dortmund. FWF I think the EU helped diffuse the tension by allowing increased mobility of both Roma and poor Bulgarians. I think the Roma neighbourhoods were much worse around the turn of the century and the politics were much more aggressive towards the Roma - I remember the Attack party being really popular back then.
I think it has been slow, but nowadays it is not as acceptable as once was to publish bluntly racist texts like this example from a prominent BG journalist in 2012:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=bg&tl=en&u=https:/...
In 2018, the same guy got a lifetime achievement award from the union of BG journalists.
by jsanford on 11/16/20, 6:09 AM
by pachico on 11/15/20, 7:42 PM
by baxtr on 11/15/20, 7:34 PM
That never happens when I stroll through a wealthy neighbourhood."
At least a bit of encouragement.
by charlysl on 11/16/20, 1:52 AM
There are millions of spaniards who really support government programs to integrate our large gypsee population (no one here, including the gitanos themselves, call them Roma; their dialect is known as romaní, though).
There are also millions of Spaniards who have written them off as a hopeless basket case.
Both groups have a point.
As many people here have pointed out, many gypsees have integrated in mainstream society, and in many cases one would struggle to identify them as such. These have no trouble working in restaurants, or getting any other job for that matter.
But gypsees have a very proud culture, and those who behave like payos (which is how they call non-gypsees) get mocked, and all but banished by their own kin. This is compounded by the sad fact that it is undeniable that those that do cross over would do better if they hide their origins from the mainstream. And this culture is radically different, not only from mainsteam spanish culture, but western culture in general.
The main issue with traditional gypsee culture, and the biggest hurdle for integration, is school education. The spanish state has spent millions over many decades on this, with mixed success.
What follows is just an anecdote, albeit not an isolated one, that I belive highlights the challenges. My mum has a very close friend who is a school teacher. Several years ago this friend, an idealist, volunteered to teach at an area with a very large gypsee population. The first and largest problem was to get the gypsee families to send their kids to school to begin with. The best they managed was to get them to cram a bunch of kids in a taxi, which the teachers, who in Spain are not well paid, would pay out of their own pockets. The kids, 5 year olds, swore like drunken sailors. Good luck teaching manners. Their dads would leave porn running on the tv, to which the kids would be exposed from an early age, and candidly told the teachers. They would also tell how daddy beat mummy regularly, because this gypsee culture is very macho. One boy said his dad was very good. He would pretend to beat his mum, who would scream, so that neighbours would know everything was alright in the family. My mums friend couldn't stand all this after a year and begged for a transfer. When they were relocated by the government from the shanty to new appartments, they yanked out all the fittings and furniture, and sold it all for scrap.
Me, I was instinctively terrified of them as a kid growing up in Spain. You saw gypsees, you ran. We have all been mugged and bullied by them. As you grow up, you become aware of the social problems, and also end up talking to some, and yes, many are very nice and friendly. But you also hear from them how their own environment makes it very hard to, say, take their education seriously.
My point is, it is too easy to slap the racist adjective without making an effort to understand. There is racism for sure, but there is also enormous cultural resistance from the gypsees, which makes many to abandon hope, on both sides.
My main gripe when it comes to comparing this to the racial problem in US is that no one brought the gypsees to Europe, they came of their own accord, and nowhere were they enslaved, AFAIK, at least not at scale, maybe only by the nazis.
They still keep coming to Spain, mostly from Romania. And, guess what? The spanish gypsees hate the romanian gypsees. In Spain, the gypsee women often beg. One day, sitting at a terrace, my mum gave one a coin, as she often does. The woman warned my mum, bitterly complaining about the romanian gypsee women. "We just beg, they will steal your handbag".
by bruceb on 11/15/20, 9:33 PM
Did the author get two teenage girls or women to help with translation?
by bogomipz on 11/16/20, 12:29 AM
by imartin2k on 11/16/20, 12:14 PM
by altmind on 11/16/20, 2:20 AM
by nesarkvechnep on 11/15/20, 11:36 PM
by sorenjan on 11/16/20, 3:24 AM
In a TV news segment they showed a portable toilet that somebody had given them, and it was unusable because of how filthy it was. When asked why the people living there said it was because nobody came there to clean it for them.
Here's another camp outside of Stockholm. Again, why so much trash?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532716/The-rubbish...
by _hao on 11/16/20, 9:14 AM
My grandparents built a house near the Black Sea when I was a child and in spring and summer they've always hired a gypsy family from the nearby town to help us in the garden. They were hard workers and my grandparents treated them fairly and paid them fairly. Besides getting paid for their work we also gifted them some unused TV's, radios, bicycles and some other stuff throughout the years. The family head and his wife were on the older side and both had finished high school (under communism). Their 5 or 6 children however have not... They had finished only the mandatory 8 years at school and dropped out afterwards. They were really upset about the fact, but they couldn't control their children it seems. Other people from their gypsy community didn't really support them it looks like and it seemed easier to work in sanitation or other jobs where education was not important. Their daughter got married off to someone and soon grandchildren came into the picture as well. Their sons also moved away. I haven't seen them in many years now. Hope they're well. I've always respected them as people, but most of them are not like that family. They don't want to be integrated.
I've been in a couple of street fights throughout the years (never the instigator). One of them was with a gypsy who wanted to steal my watch. I was in high school at the time and by this point training in MA for 4-5 years. I was going home from school and it was dark because most high schools in Bulgaria divide the semesters in two timetables morning and afternoon (7:30-13:30, 13:00 - 19:15 the times also depend how many subjects you have that day). It was the first semester for me during autumn/winter and it was the afternoon timetable 13:00 to 19:15. So it was after 19 and it was already dark outside. I was walking on the sidewalk and there weren't a lot of cars passing by. I saw a person walking against me in the distance but didn't think any of it until he got closer and I saw he was a gypsy. The moment I saw his complexion I was on high alert. This is an instinct that most Bulgarians will understand in this situation. Alone, it's dark and there's a gypsy in front of you. We walk closer and closer to each other and I see that he looked at my watch. He stops me and asks me for some change and I say I don't have anything. The actual combat situation played out very fast. He very quickly grabbed my left hand. I instinctively punched with my right hand straight to his face and caught him on the chin, he wobbled back and let go of my left hand then I kicked somewhere around his waist groin area and he crumbled down. After that I started running and ran all the way home. He didn't try to follow me. By that point he probably thought it was more trouble than worth or was afraid of being caught. I don't know. Another friend years later was in a similar situation, they wanted his watch. My friend lost the watch and got a broken tooth in the ordeal :/
by nottorp on 11/15/20, 8:12 PM
They're as bad as they look even when maintained.
by eznzt on 11/15/20, 8:01 PM