Understanding and legitimizing Gypsy slavery in the traditional Romanian society – the life of St Gregory of Agrigento

Abstract:The origin of the Gypsies’ slavery, as we understand it today, could not be known to the traditional Romanian society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For their self-understanding and that of the world around them, those people related less to a distant past or to their real historical ancestors and more to the present, cultivating significant differences from their contemporaries. These differences were projected into a quasi-mythological past and justified by invoking authoritative characters such as God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, various saints. As to the Gypsies’ representations, they were built around oppositions such as: slave vs. free man, honourable vs. infamous occupations, white vs. black, nomadic vs. sedentary, Orthodox vs. pagan. Differences from “the other” were exaggerated and manipulated. As the Gypsies were, par excellence, slaves, the texts generally used to explain their servitude or enslavement could be invoked to explain the origin of the Gypsies. After several local adaptations, the hagiography of Gregory of Agrigento came to serve as an explanation for the slavery of the Gypsies, whose allegedly sinful ancestors received their due punishment in the form of eternal slavery. The first part of this article attempts to sketch the mental horizon of the traditional society of the early nineteenth century, while the second part presents different variants of the hagiography which are analysed in order to observe since when and to what extent its varying elements could contribute to societal understandings and legitimizations of Gypsy slavery.