Gypsies

Unlike all of my articles of the past several years, this one will have no photographs. I apologize. Since arriving in Germany in late September, I’ve visited nine other countries and have written about and photographed Germany, Singapore, England, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Ukraine. Though I’ve been to the Czech Republic three times, I couldn’t quite come up with the right angle to discuss it, so with just over a week left before returning to Philly, I thought about going down to Usti nad Labem or Most, two towns in Northern Bohemia, to examine its Gypsy situation.
In 1999, Usti nad Labem attracted attention when it built a 2 meter high, 65-meter long wall down the middle of a street to separate Gypsies from other Czechs. The New York Times quoted the town’s mayor, Ladislav Hruska, ‘This wall is about one group that obeys the laws of the Czech Republic and behaves according to good morals, and about a group that breaks these rules – doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t use proper hygiene and doesn’t do anything right. This is not a racial problem. It is a problem of dealing with decent and indecent people.’ After much international condemnation, the wall was torn down two months later.
In 2011, Baia Mare in Romania built a similar wall, for which its mayor was fined $1,530 by the central government. Catalin Chereches ignored its ruling to tear it down, however, and had art students paint murals on it. It’s now a work of art, he declared. At the next election, townspeople reelected him by a landslide. In 2013, 13 more Gypsy walls were built in Romania.

This post was published at Lew Rockwell on February 29, 2016.