GIPSIES FORSAKE FORTUNE-TELLING FOR FACTORIES

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23116, 1 December 1949, Page 4

GIPSIES FORSAKE FORTUNE-TELLING FOR FACTORIES

(By Ronald Grccton, a Reuter Correspondent). SKOPLJE (Macedonia). More than GOOO gipsies here formerly regarded as vagabonds and outcasts and fit only for the most menial tasks, are being resettled and turned into a stable hard-working community. Most of them, however, are happy about their future. In their quarter, in this ancient, almost Oriental city which is now being built up into an up-to-date capital of Ihc Macedonian Republic, one of them said that under the Nazi and Bulgarian occupation, they were treated as an inferior race. Many of. them, he said, were deported; some were killed and their houses looted. Today, they enjoy equal rights with other citizens of Yugoslavia. The majority have already given up their traditional stock-in-trade, fortune-telling, begging, odd jobs and itinerant musicians- Now, they arc employed in local factories and offices. Most families are still living in tworoomed mud huts which they built themselves and painted sky blue, pale pink or yellow, but a few of the poorer ones, especially those who suffered most under the occupation have already been moved into the newlybuilt bungalows which arc now “invading” their quarter and will eventually cover the whole of it. The bungalows themselves, however, are considered to be only temporary. They will eventually give place to modern workers’ fiats. Each bungalow has two rooms, kitchen and an outhouse. A visit to several of the mud huts found anything up to 10 people living in two small rooms. Interiors were in Oriental style without furniture and carpeted but spotlessly clean. In one of tiie huts, I found a 42-year-old gipsy. Dimitir Karl, sitting cross-legged with his wife, her' mother and three dusky children, taking their evening meal out of a common pot. He has just opened a pack of American rations left over from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration's relief supplies, extracted a piece of chewing gum and put it into his mouth. Asked what lie thought of it. he said it was “poor stuff because it only lasts for two or three minutes, but 1 eat it because it is good for the heart.” Otherwise, he preferred sakae, a more robust chewing gum introduced into Macedonia by the Turks 200 years ago. This, he maintained, not only lasted five hours but could be blown up into a balloon and even kicked about. The gipsies have their own school, which has about 800 pupi'j who do their lessons in Macedonian although they have their own Roman language. “They are still working on a Romany grammar and until this is done and gipsy teachers trained the children will mainly talk their own language at home," Mr. Alexis, Director of the Macedonian Information Department explained. Gipsies living in the new bungalows are still doing without furniture, not by choice but because there is none to buy. One bungalow is inhabited by a gipsy who was formerly one of Marshal Tito’s Partisans and is now a sergeant in the Yugoslav Army. His 19-year-old wife took great pride in displaying a motley collection of cups, glasses'and beer mugs, her only household treasures. The rent of their bungalow was 150 dinars a month—or just over £1 sterling. In another section of Skoplje, live 20.000 Turks, descendants of those who conquered and ruled the Balkans for 600 years. This community is more conservative and patriarchal than the gipsies, and the Communists seem to be making less headway with them. The majority of the women still wear unsightly black veils covering the whole of their face, though Iho veil in Turkey proper has been a thing of the past for years. The women seem to be more conservative than the men in this respect. One 35-year-old Turk said, when asked if he approved of veils for women: “I am always telling my wife to take it off, but she will not do it.” Like the gipsies, the Turks live in mud huts of their own construction but left in their natural colour. Unlike the gipsies, visitors were not very welcome to their houses. The Turkish minority, like other minorities in Yugoslavia, now have their own schools and teachers; both were forbidden before the war. Mosques are still open but according to one grey bearded red-turbaned old Turk, “attended mostly by older people.” Prostrate and shoeless on a richly carpeted stone floor he was the only one in the mosque we visited. A “back-to-Turkey" movement was started among the Turkish minority shortly after the war, but was frowned upon by the Macedonian Republican Government because they alleged that it was promoted for “reactionary reasons.” Its sponsors were allegedly trying to stir np discontent among (lie minority against Marshal Tito’s regime, but it was slated that (he Macedonian Communists had nothing against the movement "in principle.” Skoplje partymen are not proud of the Oriental character of their capital. They regard it as a relic of an unhappy past. “Why do foreigners always want to look at the old gipsy and Turkish quarters when they come here?” one of them asked. “Our great Five Year Plan building projects, our power station and workers’ fiats arc much more interesting.” Symbol of their endeavour is the «reat "Liberation Square” from the four corners of which grim-looking white piaster statues of Marx, Lenin. Engels and Stalin stare at passersby. A large red star, illuminated at night hangs above the square on a wire, while a «ianl hammer and sickle surmounts the tallest, building-