Today, 20th of February, marks the 169th anniversary of the liberation of the Roma from five centuries of slavery in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which form today’s Romania. The number of the Gypsy slaves in the Romanian lands at the time of their official liberation in Moldavia (1855) and Wallachia (1856) is estimated between 200,000 and 300,000 people. Slaveholders were compensated in money – about 10 galbeni for each freed slave. Part of the freed slaves left Europe for the Americas – USA, Brazil, Argentina. Those who remained often continued to live in the lands of their former masters, they would survive the fascist regime of Antonescu and the communist regime of Ceausescu.
Probably any other people that experienced all this would have developed serious psychological problems and a strong intolerance towards their former masters. We have the example of the former slaves in Haiti who after being freed, began to take revenge on the white people. But the Romanian Roma have managed, miraculously, to put all their terrible past behind them and get on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Today you will not hear them complaining that their great-grandfathers were slaves or that their grandfathers were persecuted in the Holocaust.
And yet this remains one of the most shameful pages in European history. That is why it is not in the history textbooks of European schools even now, in 2025 – 169 years after the abolition of the slavery. European children know about Black slavery in America because they study “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” at school, but they don’t know anything about Roma slavery in that part of Europe called Romania, which actually lasted longer than the Black slavery. Nor is it a subject that is studied in universities. A strange paradox in the 21st century.
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