Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
public opinion to reject this ‘exception’, rich Roma and their palaces, into the criminal basket
of outlaws.
Roma and informal housing
As far as Roma housing is concerned, the image of their nomadic habitat, a wagon or tent,
reflects the same stereotype of informality. But even the habitat of sedentary Roma, the
majority in Eastern Europe, is considered as ‘informal housing’ made of poor materials and
located in peripheral
mahala
(quarters/sectors). However, since 1989, wealthy Roma in
different regions of Romania have designed and constructed a new type of habitat, the so-
called ‘Gypsy palaces’.
These huge flashy, exotic buildings contradict the current stereotypes and renew
tensions between the non-Roma and the Roma, particularly when they appear in the city
centre. My aim is to analyse now how such wealthy Roma and their palaces challenge social
representations of informality and marginality (poverty) attached to their (constructed) ethnic
identity.
Wealthy Roma, owners of Palaces: who are they?
No more than any other group do all Roma belong to the same economic strata. Despite the
poverty stereotype discussed earlier, Roma, as each ethnic group or minority in Romania, do
have élites of different sorts. Some of them are integrated into the business and the political
community. As it has been observed among the Roma, certain ‘families
tend to monopolise
some type of trade or occupation or even social behaviour. According to a research we have
coordinated in Moldavi
the new, innovative, intellectual and entrepreneurial Roma élites
are almost exclusively recruited among the
Ursari
(originally bear showers). Others are more
visible and constitute what the late Prof. Adrian Neculau (2009) called ‘cardboard élites’
using a metaphor underlining the artificiality or the bluffing aspect of their status.
In Western Romania, in the city of Timisoara, the owners of already famous palaces
are all
Matase
which means silk workers. In Bucharest,
Caldarari
(cauldron or pot makers)
are the owners of the palaces (Delepine 2007). Not all of them are rich or really newly rich;
some gathered their fortune during the Communist times, notably by collecting gold and
making other shady informal dealings
Although it was common for them to have
3
I prefer to speak of families rather than clans, since these groups are not organised as traditional clans
in the ethnographic sense but rather as extended families.
4
See Neculau, 2009.
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