Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 746, April 13, 1878

No. 746.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 1878.
Independent and savage, unrecognised by the people in whose midst he lives, and whose society and civilisation he has ever learnt to shun, the Ottoman gipsy—of whom there are some two hundred thousand souls—has neither political nor literary history of his own, and is at once the most brutal and degraded of all the wandering races. Religious because it suits his convenience to be so, submissive to law because he fears punishment, he leads a wild and wretched life, scarcely earning by his industry the wherewithal to satisfy even the most frugal demands of nature. Yet secure in his tent he defies the world, and hates with an undying enmity all strangers to his race. Can it then be wondered at that neither Christian nor Mussulman bears any great love for his unsociable neighbour, nor cares to enter into commercial relationship with him? Even those gipsies who have abandoned tents for fixed dwellings have but little ameliorated their condition, and are no less heartily despised on that account. Their superficial religion, their inclination to theft, their skill in deception, and their brutal debaucheries, cause them to be distrusted wherever they may chance to settle, and exclude them for ever from participation in the benefits of a more civilised state of society.
To deal firstly with the veritable wandering gipsy, who knows no settled home, whose tents dot the sunny landscapes of European Turkey, Roumania, and Asia Minor, who is here one day and there the next, the question arises, whither goeth he and whence cometh he? We shall see.
About the middle of April, sooner or later according to the season, he quits his winter’s residence, or gyshla as he terms it, and begins to roam the surrounding country. Some of his kind descend from the north of the Balkans and pass into Asia Minor; others mount where their brethren descended, only to return about the commencement of October; whilst some—and these, in our humble opinion, by far the most sensible—confine themselves, in their migrations, to one single province, where they know the wants of all and are known by all.