No abstract

The author of the study presents a micro-historical study of a family of Vlach Roma (Lovára) of western Slovakian origin, who were one of the few Romani groups still on the move in the mid-1950s and who in the late 1950s were forced to settle in the towns of Louny and Žatec in north-western Bohemia. Against this background the author focuses on some aspects of the Czechoslovak assimilation policy of the 1950s regarding ‘itinerant Gypsies’, designed to limit their mobility, which is represented mainly by the implementation of the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Itinerant Persons (No. 74/1958 Coll.). Using a combination of oral history methods involving Vlach Romani narrators and of archival research, the author clarifies some aspects of the local process of the implementation of the above-mentioned law and of selected impacts of the registration of travelling and semi-travelling people in February 1959. The forced sedentarization which occurred in the two localities under study is presented in the context of the regime of state socialism and the policies of central as well as local authorities towards so-called ‘travelling Gypsies’ in the late 1950s.

This article focuses on the departure of the Lovára from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Slovakia upon Czechoslovakia’s disintegration in 1939. Based on a combination of archival research and oral history methods, it shows the Lovára’s departure in the context of the contemporaneous measures and efforts of the state administration to limit the mobility of “nomadic Gypsies” in the Czech lands, continuous throughout the pre-war period, and to stoke anti-Gypsy sentiments which were politically supported and growing in the society of the time. This description is enriched by the perspectives of participants - narrations of Roms who were perceived as “nomads” and witnessed these events. The study opens epistemic dilemmas of how to determine the category of Lovára in the available archival sources as well as how to speak about the Lovára in a historical context without essentializing this category. The author reconstructs the presence of the Lovára’s stay in the Czech lands during the First Republic from gendarme reports and other state administration documents and submits evidence of mobility of the Lovára in Czechia in the interwar decades. Their presence terminated upon Czechoslovakia’s disintegration in 1939 when the Lovára and other Roms of Slovak home affiliation had to relocate themselves from the protectorate to Slovakia. The author analyses the circumstances and the course of the departure of Lovára and other Romani families from the Czech lands to Slovakia on the eve of the Second World War and presents the narrators’ reflections on the sudden departure and subsequent peripeteia of individual families in Slovakia during the war.