Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 305, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1917 — GYPSIES OF BALKAN LANDS [ARTICLE]

GYPSIES OF BALKAN LANDS

Eastern Europe Original Home of th® Clan —Know All Roads and Bypaths. In the mountainous Balkan; lands the gypsies are as nearly at home as anywhere on the planet. There are native dialects in these parts not unlike their own and there are regions where the people resemble them closely in personal appearance. The Romany name is surely near akin to the Roumanian. Yet even here the gypsies are as alien to the people as a whole as are their brethren tramping the roads in western America, writes Nlksah. If the ethnologists are right the Balkan region is probably the original European home of the clan and they have ' been wandering back and forth across it for many centuries. Certainly they know all the roads and bypaths and in search for a guide you will sometimes find a gypsy who will tell you that he can take you over a certain mountain pass or through a certain valley, although he has never been that way himself, because he has heard his father or his grandfather tell of the road. Lore of the road is to the gypsy what lore of the market is to the broker or lore of the soil to the farmer, something precious, by which he lives, to be stored away for reference. These gypsies of eastern Europe range back and forth across the tumbled Balkan country, all the way from Constantinople westward to Hungary and Austria, even as far as Bohemia and the Russian frontier. Of all the world’s gypsies they are the most pov-erty-stricken in appearance, their caravans are the most miserable, their dogs the leanest and their children the dirtiest. Yet in some ways they are the ablest of the clan. They are certainly the most musical; their talent in this line is unmistakable and rare.