Hungarian Gypsy Picture Book by Gábor Bencsik / The Historic Iconology of the Gypsies in Hungary 1686-1914 / Magyar Mercurius 2013 / Paperback

Magyar cigány képes könyv

Paperback 2013

ISBN: 9789639872240  /  978-9639872240

ISBN-10: 9639872245

PAGES: 315

PUBLISHER: Magyar Mercurius

LANGUAGE: English

English Summary:

For centuries, Gypsies have lived in Central Europe without getting any attention from historiography. Barely mentioned in written sources, they have been confined to the periphery of historical consciousness, reduced to stereotype. Picture data from the past centuries, however, abounds in information regarding the history of Hungarian Gypsies. The present volume is an attempt to harvest this information, utilizing historical iconography, a form of anthropological picture analysis.

The book is illustrated with 200 images, some of them coloured and boasting impressive technical quality. The volume itself is divided into three chapters according to theoretical and fundamental considerations: the first, The Depiction of Gypsies, provides a historical account and overview of the figures of the Gypsies from the first testimonies in the sixteenth century to the expression of an ambivalent, two-folded perspective towards the end of the nineteenth century. The first witnesses testified to the strangeness of the Gypsies, emphasized through typical horizontally striped clothing and the broad-brimmed hats. The next two centuries and the different periods of Hungarian history saw the forming of a set of visual stereotypes that can be found in almost all pictorial representations of Gypsies; sitting on the ground with bare feet, the bare heads of adults, the nakedness of children. It is astonishing that Gypsies appear to be a tolerated part of the multi-cultural Transylvanian society, whose services and products such as cauldrons, braids and clay bricks provided significant contribution to accommodating the rural population.

GABOR BENCSIK, Ph.D., is a Hungarian historiographer, journalist and publisher. His primary research area is the modern history of Hungarian Gypsies. He has published his results in the volumes Ciganyokr6él (On Gypsies, Budapest, 2008), A negacidk népe, avagy a kézép-európai cigány történelem strukturális keretei (The People of Negations - a Structural Framework for Central European Gypsy His- tory, Polgari Szemle, Budapest, 2012) and the study Image and Picture: the Romani People (South East European and Middle East Studies, University of Graz, 2013).