CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
OTTOMAN GIPSIES.
HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.
SOME PHYSIOLOGICAL ERRORS.
MR ASLATT’S WARD.
BRITISH GUIANA.
ROBERT BRAMLEIGH’S WILL.
THE OLD HOME.
No. 746.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 1878.
OTTOMAN GIPSIES.
Independent and savage, unrecognised by thepeople in whose midst he lives, and whose societyand civilisation he has ever learnt to shun, theOttoman gipsy—of whom there are some twohundred thousand souls—has neither politicalnor literary history of his own, and is at oncethe most brutal and degraded of all the wanderingraces. Religious because it suits his convenienceto be so, submissive to law because hefears punishment, he leads a wild and wretchedlife, scarcely earning by his industry the wherewithalto satisfy even the most frugal demandsof nature. Yet secure in his tent he defies theworld, and hates with an undying enmity allstrangers to his race. Can it then be wonderedat that neither Christian nor Mussulman bearsany great love for his unsociable neighbour, norcares to enter into commercial relationship withhim? Even those gipsies who have abandonedtents for fixed dwellings have but little amelioratedtheir condition, and are no less heartily despised onthat account. Their superficial religion, their inclinationto theft, their skill in deception, and theirbrutal debaucheries, cause them to be distrustedwherever they may chance to settle, and excludethem for ever from participation in the benefits ofa more civilised state of society.
To deal firstly with the veritable wanderinggipsy, who knows no settled home, whose tentsdot the sunny landscapes of European Turkey,Roumania, and Asia Minor, who is here one dayand there the next, the question arises, whithergoeth he and whence cometh he? We shall see.
About the middle of April, sooner or lateraccording to the season, he quits his winter’sresidence, or gyshla as he terms it, and begins toroam the surrounding country. Some of hiskind descend from the north of the Balkansand pass into Asia Minor; others mount wheretheir brethren descended, only to return about thecommencement of October; whilst some—andthese, in our humble opinion, by far the mostsensible—confine themselves, in their migrations,to one single province, where they know the wantsof all and are known by all.
When cold and frost cut short their wanderings,and warn them to beat a retreat, they unfailinglyreturn to their old quarters, where in the vicinityof some open spr