CHAPTER XXXIII. THE TZIGANES: THEIR LIFE AND OCCUPATIONS.

In every other country where the gypsies made their appearance they were oppressed and persecuted—treated as slaves or hunted down like wild beasts. So in Prussia in 1725 an edict was issued ordering that each gypsy found within the confines of the country should be forthwith executed; and in Wallachia, until quite lately, they were regarded as slaves or beasts of burden, and bought and sold like any other marketable animal. Thus a Bucharest newspaper of 1845 advertises for sale two hundred gypsy families, to be disposed of in batches of five families—a handsome deduction being offered to wholesale purchasers. In Moldavia, up to 1825, a master who killed one of his own gypsies was never punished by law, but only if he killed one which was the property of another man—the crime in that case not being considered to be murder, but merely injury to another man’s property.

In Hungary alone these wanderers found themselves neither oppressed nor repulsed, and if the gypsy can be said to feel at home anywhere on the face of the globe it is surely here; and although Hungarians are apt to resent the designation, Tissot was not far wrong when he named their country “Le pays des Tziganes,” for the Tziganes are in Hungary a picturesque feature—a decorative adjunct inseparable alike from the solitude of its plains as from the dissipation of its cities. Like a gleam of dusky gems they serve to set off every picture of Hungarian life, and to play to it a running accompaniment in plaintive minor chords. No one can travel many days in Hungary without becoming familiar with the strains of the gypsy bands. And{243} who has journeyed by night without noting the ruddy light of their myriad camp-fires, which, like so many gigantic glowworms, dot the country in all directions?

At the present time there are in Hungary above one hundred and fifty thousand Tziganes, of which about eighty thousand fall to the share of Transylvania, which therefore in still more special degree may be termed the land of gypsies.

The Transylvanian gypsies used to stand under the nominal authority of a nobleman bearing the title of a Gypsy Count, chosen by the reigning prince; as also in Hungary proper the Palatine had the right of naming four gypsy Woywods. To this Gypsy Count the chieftains of the separate hordes or bands were bound to submit, besides paying to him a yearly tribute of one florin per head of each member of the band; and every seventh year they assembled round him to receive his orders. The minor chieftains were elected by the votes of the separate communities; and to this day every wandering troop has its own self-elected leader, although these have no longer any recognized position in the eyes of the law.

The election usually takes place in the open field, often on the occasion of some public fair; and the successful candidate is thrice raised in the air on the shoulders of the people, presented with gifts, and invested with a silver-headed staff as badge of his dignity. Also, his wife or partner receives similar honors, and the festivities conclude with much heavy drinking.

Strictly speaking, only such Tziganes are supposed to be eligible as are descended from a Woywod family; but in point of fact the gypsies mostly choose whoever happens to be best dressed on the occasion. Being of handsome build, and not over-young, are likewise points in a candidate’s favor; but such superfluous qualities as goodness or wisdom are not taken into account.

This leader—who is sometimes called the Captain, sometimes the Vagda, or else the Gako, or uncle—governs his band, confirms marriages and divorces, dictates punishments, and settles disputes; and as the gypsies are a very quarrelsome race the chief of a large band has got his hands pretty full. He has likewise the power to excommunicate a member of the band, as well as to reinstate him in honor and confidence by letting him drink out of his own tankard.

Certain taxes are paid to the Gako; also, he is entitled to percentages on all booty and theft. In return it is his duty to protect and{244} defend his people to the best of his ability, whenever their irregularities have brought them within reach of the law.

Whether, besides the chieftains of the separate hordes, there yet exists in Hungary a chief judge or monarch of the Tziganes, cannot be positively asserted; but many people aver such to be the case, and designate either Mikolcz or Schemnitz as the seat of his residence. In his hands are said to be deposited large sums of money for secret purposes, and he alone has the right to condemn to death, and with his own hands to put his sentence into execution.

No Tzigane durst ever accept the position of a gendarme or policeman, for fear of being obliged to punish his own folk; and only very rarely is it allowed for one of them to become a game-keeper or wood-ranger.

Only the necessity of obtaining a piece of bread to still his hunger, or of providing himself with a rag to cover his nakedness, occasionally obliges the Tzigane to turn his hand to labor of some kind. Most sorts of work are distasteful to him—more especially all work of a calm, monotonous character. For that reason the idyllic calm of a shepherd’s existence, which the Roumanian so dearly loves, could never satisfy the Tzigane; and equally unpalatable he finds the sweating toils of the agriculturist. He requires some occupation which gives scope to the imagination and amuses the fancy while his hands are employed—conditions he finds united in the trade of a blacksmith, which he oftenest plies on the banks of a stream or river outside the village, where he has been driven by necessity. The snorting bellows seem to him like a companionable monster; the equal cadence of the hammer against the anvil falls in with melodies floating in his brain; the myriads of flying sparks, in which he loves to discern all sorts of fantastic figures, fill him with delight; horses and oxen coming to be shod, and the varied incidents to which these operations give rise, are never-tiring sources of interest and amusement.

Instinctively expert at some sorts of work, the Tzigane will be found to be as curiously awkward and incapable with others. Thus he is always handy at throwing up earthworks, which he seems to do as naturally as a mole or rabbit digs its burrow; but as carpenter or locksmith he is comparatively useless, and though an apt reaper with the sickle he is incapable of using the scythe.

GYPSY TINKER.

All brickmaking in Hungary and Transylvania is in the hands of the Tziganes, and formerly they were charged with the gold-washing in the Transylvanian rivers, and were in return exempted from military service. They are also flayers, broom-binders, rat-catchers, basket-makers, tinkers, and occasionally tooth-pullers—dentist is too ambitious a denomination.

BASKET-MAKER.

Up to the end of the sixteenth century in Transylvania the part of hangman was always enacted by a gypsy, usually taken on the spot. On one occasion the individual to be hanged happening to be himself a gypsy, there was some difficulty in finding an executioner, and the only one produced was a feeble old man, quite unequal to the job. A table placed under a tree was to serve as scaffold, and with trembling fingers the old man proceeded to attach the rope round the neck of his victim. All his efforts were, however, vain to fix this rope to the branch above, and the doomed man, at last losing patience at the protracted delay, gave a vigorous box on the ear to his would-be hangman, which knocked him off the table. Instantly all the spectators, terrified, took to their heels; whereon the culprit, securely fastening the rope to the branch above, proceeded unaided to hang himself in the most correct fashion.

When obliged to work under supervision, the Tzigane groans and moans piteously, as though he were enduring the most acute tortures;  and a single Tzigane locked up in jail will howl so despairingly as to deprive a whole village of sleep.

The Tzigane makes a bad soldier but a good spy; his cowardice has passed into a proverb, which says that “with a wet rag you can put to flight a whole village of gypsies.”

The Tziganes are by no means dainty with regard to food, and have a decided leaning towards carrion, indiscriminately eating of the flesh of all fallen animals, or, as they term it, whatever has been killed by “God,” and consider themselves much aggrieved when forced at the point of the bayonet to abandon the rotting carcass of a sheep or cow, over which they had been holding a harmless revelry.

A hedgehog divested of its spikes is considered a prime delicacy; likewise a fox baked under the ashes, after having been laid in running water for two days to reduce the flavor. Horse-flesh alone they do not touch.

The only animals whose training the gypsy cares to undertake are the horse and bear. For the first he entertains a sort of respectful veneration, while the second he regards as an amusing bajazzo. He teaches a young bear to dance by placing it on a sheet of heated iron, playing the while on his fiddle a strongly accentuated piece of dance music. The bear, lifting up its legs alternately to escape the heat, unconsciously observes the time marked by the music. Later on, the heated iron is suppressed when the animal has learned its lesson, and whenever the Tzigane begins to play on the fiddle the young bear lifts its legs in regular time to the music.

Of the tricks practised upon horses, in order to sell them at fairs, many stories are told of the gypsies. Sometimes, it is said, they will make an incision in the animal’s skin, and blow in air with the bellows in order to make it appear fat; or else they introduce a living eel into its body under the tail, which serves to give an appearance of liveliness to the hind-quarters. For the same reason live toads are forced down a donkey’s throat, which, moving about in the stomach, produce a sort of fever which keeps it lively for several days.

The gypsies are attached to their children, but in a senseless animal fashion, alternately devouring them with caresses and violently ill-treating them. I have seen a father throw large, heavy stones at his ten-year-old daughter for some trifling misdemeanor—stones as large as good-sized turnips, any one of which would have been sufficient to kill her if it had happened to hit; and only her agility in dodging{249} these missiles—which she did, grinning and chuckling as though it were the best joke in the world—saved her from serious injury.

They are a singularly quarrelsome people, and the gypsy camp is the scene of many a pitched battle, in which men, women, children, and dogs indiscriminately take part with turbulent enjoyment. When in a passion all weapons are good that come to the gypsy’s hand, and, faute de mieux, unfortunate infants are sometimes bandied backward and forward as improvisé cannon-balls. A German traveller mentions having been eye-witness to a quarrel between a Tzigane man and woman, the latter having a baby on the breast. Passing from words to blows, and seeing neither stick nor stone within handy reach, the man seized the baby by the feet, and with it belabored the woman so violently that when the by-standers were able to interpose the wretched infant had already given up the ghost.

BEAR DRIVER.

The old-fashioned belief that gypsies are in the habit of stealing children has long since been proved to be utterly without foundation. Why, indeed, should gypsies, already endowed with a numerous progeny, seek to burden themselves with foreign elements which can bring them no sort of profit? That they frequently have beguiled children out of reach in order to strip them of their clothes and ornaments has probably given rise to this mistake; and when, as occasionally, we come across a light-complexioned child in a gypsy camp, it is more natural to suppose its mother to have been the passing fancy of some fair-haired stranger than itself to have been abstracted from wealthy parents.
 

Tzigane babies are at once inured to the utmost extremes of heat and cold. If they are born in winter they are rubbed with snow; if in summer, anointed with grease and laid in the burning sun. Though trained to resist all weathers, the Tzigane has a marked antipathy for wind, which seems for the time to weaken his physical and mental powers, and deprive him of all life and energy. Cold he patiently endures; but only in summer can he really be said to live and enjoy his life. There is a legend which tells how the gypsies, pining under the heavy frosts and snows with which the earth was visited, appealed to God to have pity on them, and to grant them always twice as many summers as winters. The Almighty, in answer to this request, spoke as follows: “Two summers shall you have to every winter; but as it would disturb the order of nature if both summers came one on the back of the other, I shall always give you two summers with a winter between to divide them.” The gypsies humbly thanked the Almighty for the granted favor, and never again complained of the cold, for, as they say, they have now always two summers to every winter.

Another legend relates how the Tziganes once used to have cornfields of their own, and how, when the green corn had grown high for the first time, the wind caused it to wave and shake like ripples on the water, which seeing, a gypsy boy came running in alarm to his parents, crying, “Father, father! quick, make haste! the corn is running away!” On hearing this the gypsies all hastened forth with knives and sickles to cut down the fugitive corn, which of course never ripened, and discouraged by their first agricultural essay the gypsies never attempted to sow or reap again.

Both Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. did much to induce the Transylvanian gypsies to renounce their vagrant habits and settle down as respectable citizens, but their efforts did not meet with the success they deserved. The system of Maria Theresa was no less than to recast the whole gypsy nature in a new mould, and by fusion with other races to cause them by degrees to lose their own identity; the very name of gypsy was to be forgotten, and the Empress had ordained that henceforward they were to be known by the appellation of Neubauer (new peasants). With a view to this all marriages between gypsies were forbidden, and the Empress undertook to dot every young gypsy girl who married a person of another race. The Tziganes, however, too often accepted these favors, and took the earliest{251} opportunity of deserting the partners thus forced upon them; while the houses built expressly for their use were frequently used for the pigs or cattle, the gypsies themselves preferring to sleep outside in the open air.

A gypsy girl, who had married a young Slovack peasant some years ago, used to run away and sleep in the woods whenever her husband was absent from home; while in another village, where the Saxon pastor had with difficulty induced a wandering Tzigane family to take up their residence in a vacant peasant house, he found them oddly enough established in their old ragged tent, which had been set up inside the empty dwelling-room. A story is also told of a gypsy man who, having attained a high military rank in the Austrian army, disappeared one day, and was later recognized with a strolling band.

There is, I am told, a certain method in the seemingly aimless roamings of each nomadic gypsy tribe, which always pursues its wanderings in a given circle, keeping to the self-same paths and the identical places of bivouac in plain or forest; so that it can mostly be calculated with tolerable accuracy in precisely how many years such and such a band will come round again to any particular neighborhood.

Nowadays the proportion of resident gypsies in towns and villages is, of course, considerably larger than it used to be, and nearly each Saxon or Hungarian town and village has a faubourg of miserable earth-hovels tacked on to it at one end. It is not uncommon, in these gypsy hovels, to find touches of luxury strangely out of keeping with the rest of the surroundings: pieces of rare old china, embroidered pillow-cases, sometimes even a silver goblet or platter of distinct value—to which things they often cling with a sort of blind superstition, always contriving to reclaim from the pawnbroker whatever of these articles they have been compelled to deposit there in a season of necessity. In the same way it is alleged that many of the wandering gypsy hordes in Hungary and Transylvania have in their possession valuable gold and silver vessels (some of these engraved in ancient Indian characters), which they carry about wherever they go, and bury in the earth wherever they pitch their temporary camp.

In order to count the treasures of one of the resident gypsies, it suffices to watch him when there is a fire in the village; ten to one it will be his fiddle which he first takes care to save, and next his bed and pillows—a soft swelling bed and numerous downy pillows being among the principal luxuries to which he is addicted.
 
Characteristic of the Tzigane’s utter incomprehension of all social organization and privileges is an anecdote related by a Transylvanian proprietor. “In 1848,” he told me, “when serfdom was abolished in Austria, and the gypsies residing in my village became aware that henceforward they were free, they were at first highly delighted at the news, and spent three days and nights in joyful carousing. On the fourth day, however, when the novelty of being free had worn off, they were at a loss what use to make of their novel dignity, and numbers of them came trooping to me begging to be taken back. They did not care to be free after all, they said, and would rather be serfs again.”

Of their past history the only memory the Tziganes have preserved is that of the disastrous day of Nagy Ida, when a thousand of their people were slain. This was in 1557, when Perenyi, in want of soldiers, had intrusted to a thousand gypsies the fortress of Nagy Ida, which they defended so valiantly that the imperial troops beat a retreat. But, intoxicated with their triumph, the Tziganes called after the retreating enemy, that but for the lack of gunpowder they would have served them still worse. On hearing this the army turned round again, and easily forcing an entrance into the castle cut down the gypsies to the last man.

All Hungarian gypsies keep the anniversary of this day as a day of mourning, and have a particular melody in which they bewail the loss of their heroes. This tune, or nota, they never play before a stranger, and the mere mention of it is sufficient to sadden them.

Only the higher class of Tzigane musicians (of which hereafter) are fond of calling themselves Hungarians, and of wearing the Hungarian national costume. This reminds me of a story I heard of a gypsy player who, brought to justice for a murder he had committed, obstinately persisted in denying his crime.

“Come, be a good fellow,” said the judge at last, fixing on the weak side of the culprit; “show what a good Hungarian you are by speaking the truth. A true Hungarian never tells a lie.”

The poor gypsy was so much flattered at being called a Hungarian that he instantly confessed the murder, and was, of course, hanged as the reward of his veracity.

Though without any regular social organization, the Hungarian gypsies may yet be loosely divided into five classes, which range as follows:
 
1. The musicians.

2. The gold-washers, who also make bricks and spoons.

3. The smiths.

4. The daily laborers, such as whitewashers, masons, etc.

5. The nomadic tent gypsies.

If, however, we reverse the order of things, and turn the social ladder upside down, these latter may well be ranked as the first, and so they deem themselves to be, for do they not enjoy privileges unknown to most respectable citizens?—free as the birds of the air, paying no taxes, acknowledging no laws, and making the whole world their own!