Lovari Erotic

The Lovari carry their trade in their name. Ló is Hungarian for horse, and for the better part of two centuries a Lovari family made its living off horses: buying, doctoring, trading up and moving on, working the fairs and market towns of Hungary, Transylvania, Slovakia, Poland and Austria. They belong to the Vlax Roma, the branch that formed during the long centuries of Romani enslavement in Wallachia and Moldavia and scattered outward after abolition in the 1850s. The Lovari took shape in the Hungarian lands, close enough to the Kalderash coppersmiths and the Churari sieve makers to share a grammar and a code of conduct, distinct enough to keep their own name and their own reputation. The horse dealing is largely gone, killed off by tractors and trucks, but the commercial instinct behind it is not: the same families moved into cars, scrap, carpets and market stalls. What holds this group together was never a territory. It is kinship, an occupation and a language.

That language is the most durable thing they have. Lovari is a Vlax dialect of Romani, Indo-Aryan at the root, with a thick layer of Hungarian and Romanian borrowing on top, and in Hungary it is the variety that got institutionalized: taught, published in, and sittable as an accredited state language exam, which is rare for any Romani dialect anywhere. Hungary counts three Romani communities, and the Lovari sit with the Vlach or Oláh Roma, separate from the Hungarian-speaking Romungro and from the Beás, who speak an archaic Romanian. Most are Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic or Orthodox depending on where the family settled, with Pentecostal congregations drawing steadily since the middle of the last century. But the rules that order daily life are internal ones: romanipe, the obligations of being Roma; the purity code that marks what and who is marime, polluted, and therefore kept at arm's length; the kris, an assembly of respected elders convened to settle disputes that outsiders' courts would only worsen; and the pomana, the memorial feast held for the dead at set intervals. Two things broke the older pattern. The Nazi genocide tore through Lovari families in Hungary, Austria and Slovakia, an atrocity the Austrian survivor Ceija Stojka forced onto the public record in the 1980s, in memoirs and hundreds of paintings, when almost nobody else would. Then the socialist states banned traveling outright and settled the wagons in place. What survives is a people now mostly urban, mostly sedentary, and still conspicuously unwilling to dissolve into the majority around them.