The Chains Europe Forgot: 500 Years of Romani Slave Trade
For over 500 years, the Romani people were enslaved in the Romanian principalities. You were not taught this. Not because it was forgotten, but because remembering it would require reparations. From the 14th century until abolition in 1856, we were chattel slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia. Longer than the transatlantic slave trade. Longer than most European empires lasted. The silence around this history is not empty space. It is deliberate erasure serving material interests, the interests of states that built wealth on our stolen labour, of churches that held us as property, of a European project that required our elimination to justify itself. But this silence was never complete. It was filled with resistance. With songs sung in chains. With names remembered in the dark. The Architecture of Bondage The system was meticulous, codified, and absolute. Roma were classified into three categories of property: Crown slaves owned by the state, Church slaves owned by monaster...