Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca

Author:Isabel Fonseca
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307761040
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-06T21:00:00+00:00

A Kalderash girl from Sintesti, Romania, 1994. Her back-tied head scarf and gold coins show that she is married. (photo credits 4.5)

A hundred yards up a climbing dirt path we came upon a small single-room house, a new log cabin, all alone on a gentle hill. Completely isolated, it spoke almost too eloquently for its beleaguered inhabitants. It was pathetic. Then the Gypsies appeared, ducking out from its low door, one at a time. One large family—seventeen people—had returned to Casin and had built this house, fully intending to remain on the site of their old settlement, where only a couple of months earlier sixteen houses had been torched.

It wasn’t hard to see why the Czacky family wanted to stay where they were—where, they claimed, their family had lived for many generations. Though they themselves looked poor and ragged, the setting was spectacular. Dotted with ancient trees, the wide-open views of low, terraced hills gave over to golden swaths of sunflowers in the distance. Usefully, in the other direction, there was a lookout over the hostile town. Just below the house on the hill was a dense copse bordered by a bright stream. In the water was an outcrop of some kind. A large rock? No, a small island. Several Gypsy children played there, sitting in the middle and hugging their knees, or standing in the stream holding on to the patch of ground with both hands as the water washed over their legs. Looking down towards them I thought of an entry that I had come across in an archive in Bucharest, from the diary of M. A. Demidoff, a Russian tourist of the Romanian principalities in 1854. He described a sighting of some aurari, or gold-washers.

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