This book is the first publication from the Roma History and Culture Book Series.

The Series’s overarching goal is to incorporate Roma history and culture into the mainstream of European and global academia. To achieve this goal, the Roma History and Culture Book Series will publish books from a wide range of disciplines that offer innovative, critical, and, above all, reliable insights into the history and culture of the Roma (formerly known as ‘Gypsies’), relying on critical rereading and rethinking of historical sources and existing research. This approach marks a critical turn in the academic studies of Roma history and culture. This scientific field had been blighted by myths, stereotypes and misinterpretations all too often in the past, which created serious obstacles for the development of modern academic knowledge as a field in its own right.

The Series challenges the prevailing academic narratives, which present the Roma as a disengaged, marginalised community, a passive object of governmental policies, by analysing and contextualising the agency of Roma as actors in their own right, with their own views and visions for the development of their communities. In this way, the books published in the Roma History and Culture Book Series contribute to making the Roma voices heard and to understanding the Roma views. This approach is conducive to the incorporation of the Roma past and present into the mainstream of European and global academia rather than the confinement of Roma history and culture into a narrow ethnic box as a kind of academic ghetto.

The Roma from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe are the academic focus of the Roma History and Culture Book Series. In addition, the Series aspires to cover the history and cultures of other communities that have historically been known under the general label ‘Gypsies’, such as the Sinti, Manush, Kale, Romanichals, Irish and Scottish Travelers, etc.

***

For us, the fact that the Roma History and Culture Book Series begins with Shakir Pashov’s book History of the Gypsies in Bulgaria and in Europe: Roma is of particular, even symbolic, importance. Not only is this the first comprehensive book written by a Roma author and dedicated to the origin and history of the Roma, but it also has another, much more comprehensive and, above all, more significant meaning.

In recent years, a false stereotype has developed in academic work on the subject. It holds that for the history of the Roma, it is not necessary to know and use written historical sources because they are written by non-Roma and do not allow the voice of the Roma to be heard in history. The proponents of this theory insist on prioritising the oral history of the Roma. This mantra can be heard everywhere, and it is a direct consequence of another equally widespread false premise, namely that the Roma civil emancipation movement is a product of our time, and the Roma elite is a creation of the age of modern neoliberalism.

In previous publications, we have clearly demonstrated, based on a vast body of diverse historical sources written by Roma, that the movement for Roma civil emancipation is an integral part of the era of modern nationalism, and its origins can be traced back to the mid-19th century (Marushiakova & Popov, 2021; 2022). In the same way, the birth and development of Roma literature (in the broad sense of the word) is the product of this movement (Roman et al., 2021).

Against this background, and taking into account the existence of 22 Roma newspapers and journals as well as several dozen books by Roma authors published before the Second World War, it is absurd to insist on prioritising oral history in the study of the Roma (and yet, such views are dominating).

A leading position in the movement for Roma civil emancipation is held by the Roma civil elite, who generated and spread among their community the main ideas that shaped the movement. However, this Roma elite is not the outcome of social engineering, carried out through generous donations and dissemination of neoliberal ideas in the community by the respective donors (as they often like to point out) who eagerly play the role of the “big white brothers”. On the contrary, the Roma elite emerged and developed over the course of generations in the Roma community itself. The present book by Shakir Pashov is one of the best illustrations in this regard.

During the preparation of this book, Dr Tomasz Koper, a member of the Romani Advisory Board of the Roma History and Culture Book Series, left us prematurely after a severe illness. We dedicate this first publication of the new Series to his memory.

Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov, Sofiya Zahova

/Series Editors/