A legion in India?

[Arminius Primus]

Ave Fratres,

Among other things , I am supposed to be a sort of Minority Community representative. Really more like an innocent bystander than active participant in minority community affairs. One of my minority communities are the Roma andI have great difficulty keeping their numbers up in the Defence and Intelligence Sectors . As far as their origins go , they have multiple stories....some seem very fanciful and romantic , others seem to have an element of truth about them. Some of the more colorful stories that give the Roma a place in the earlier history of europe, is that are the descendants from the defeated Persian armies that tried to invade europe. Another story is that they were originally expert iron workers imported from egypt by Alexander to supply his armies with weapons. I have a sub group here of those folks in my part of the Balkans that call themselves Aegypti and have their own political party. True to the story of their heritage most of these families are blacksmiths, iron workers and some have moved into large vehicle repair. Not all of the Roma here are migratory, there are some established agricultural villages that are 100% Roma,...and they are quite prosperous.

So if you believe a peoples own origin stories the Roma have been in Europe for a very long time. To bring this back closer to the original thread , I always thought that maybe there was a bit of historic truth to the stories. An interesting side note is that a favorite Roma symbol is the wheel. It has been incorporated into the Roma flag, Blue over Green field with a wheel placed in the center. To me it is reminescent of one of the shields depicted in the Notitia Dignitatum under the Magister Peditum, the Legion Romanensis shield depicts a wheel.

So political chicanery or cultural memory. I am not qualified to say, other than they are a fascinating people with a long and complicated history,...that may or may not be closely intertwined with the empire and it's dealings with India.

Regards from a sunny and pleasant Balkans, Arminius Primus aka Al

[bachmat66]

Salve,
fascinating read about the Roma/Gypsy (old Polish Cyganie) and their ironsmithing in the Balkans -
I recall from my childhood in Poland many wondering Roma ironsmiths who would sharpen your knives and axes, repair iron pots and pans, and sometimes might sell my grandmother excellent knife or two. But their women would sometime try to liberate some hens or ducks from the neighbourhood (Polish small town dwellers riased their own eggs, chicken and ducks in the 1960s and 1970s - Soviet occupied Poland - it did work well and was healthly as oppose to today's supermarket massproduced fowl and other meats ), foretell future from one's palm, and usually would beg for old clothing, shawls, rugs, hats tc.
My father and I used to visit their summer camps on the lakeside (they camped there every year in the 1970s) in the center of the town, to listen to their wonderful music and see dances being performed to the light of their bonfires, usually followed by some competitive wrestiling match or much more serious local boys-Roma fight (often involving knives ). Prior to World War II they also traded in horses - vide famous Russian-Moldavian movie -' Tabor Ukhodit v niebo'
We do have this very old saying - kowal zawinil, a cygana powiesili - The blacksmith was to blame,but they hung a gypsy - that I think it seems to make a strong but indirect association( the proverb is about other things though) between the Roma and the ironsmithing, since time immemorial, in our Polish culture.

[PhilusEstilius]

Dariusz. That was also in our own culture of Great Britain for I also can remember when we used to have the Gipsys and smiths who would come around sharpening knives and scissors in the street, this was of course in my younger days during the IIWW and I remember the gear they had.
It was just like a wheel barrow only one wheel but 4 shafts and the guy would tip it up onto the shafts and put the belt over the wheel then it worked from a foot treddle, I still have vivid memories of this way back in 1938-39 I used to stand there in fascination at the sparks flying off the grinding wheel.
Then I would run down the street to watch my father shoeing horses at the blacksmiths shop, however this blacksmith did not do this kind of task for these small jobs where done by the Gipsys who came around regular.