Dr Veselin Popov, Minority Studies Society Studii Romani
2007 award - pilot project
£9,990 for 12 months
At present in Bulgaria, diverse materials from the 1940s and 1950s relating to the Gypsy/Roma culture are kept in small private collections. These include various written texts such as amateur genealogies, personal memoirs, artistic literature on the “Gypsy theme”, posters of musical performances, hand-outs of community events of the Gypsy organizations and political flyers, photographs and old records of Gypsy music. Since the 1960s with the assimilation of the Gypsy/Roma culture into mainstream society, these materials have become “outdated” and could become dangerous for their owners. A lot of this material has already been destroyed or lost, but nevertheless nowadays quite a few are preserved in private collections, mainly the descendants of the old activists of the Gypsy movement of the 1940s and 1950s.
There is a serious risk of the absolute disappearance of all these materials. The descendants of the old Gypsy activists do not always realise their importance and may either neglect or physically destroy them. If measures are not taken soon, these materials witnessing the transition of Gypsy/Roma to modern society will be lost.
The main aim of the proposed pilot project is to discover the existing collections of this material, connected with the community and cultural activity of the Gypsies in Bulgaria in the end of the 1940s and the beginning of 1950s and earlier, which will be digitised and also relocated where possible to the Studii Romani Archive at the Ethnographical Institute and Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
In addition, during the 1920s Roma newsletters and booklets were printed, some of them connected to evangelical missions, other to community life. Most of the copies of these newspapers and booklets have disappeared but some issues are preserved in private collections. During the communist era, copies of some of these newspapers were kept in the archives of public libraries. After 1989 some material from the archives was opened to the public, other materials were destroyed, some of them with a high historical or cultural value, and among them were some of the Roma newsletters and booklets. This project will discover the surviving copies of the newsletters and booklets and relocate them, or their copies, to the safe environment of the Studii Romani Archive.
