Crimean Roma are a relatively small ethnic group that emerged on the Crimean peninsula in the Black sea in the last few centuries. Through their contact with the Crimean Tatars, many Roma have adopted Islam, and their mother tongue has gone through important transformations.
The exact time and the origins of the Roma that arrived to the Crimean peninsula and laid the foundations to the new sub-group are unknown. The high probability that the different Roma groups migrated to this territory from different places and at different times makes it more difficult to state some details certainly. However, some documentations of different travelers and other evidence help us draw a bigger picture.
Yanush Panchenko and Mykola Homanyuk, in their work concerning the indigenous people of Ukraine, remind us to distinguish between the terms “Roma of Crimea” and the “Crimean Roma”. While the “Roma of Crimea” refers to all the Roma who have lived on this territory, the Crimean Roma also form a separate ethnic group that identifies itself as “Krýmy, Krýmsk’a Romá, and Krým’a” have their own language, and a sense of shared identity. Today the majority of the group lives outside of Crimea in other parts of Ukraine, in Russia, and in South Caucasian and Central Asian regions. According to Vadim Toropov, at the time of the publication of his book in 2009, which is also the latest data we have, the total number of Crimean Roma reached around 12-15 thousand people.
On the other hand, Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, Bulgarian scholars, distinguish between two groups of Crimean Roma: Daifa and Krimy. According to their research, the Dayfa community migrated to Crimea around the 16-18th centuries from Asia Minor. Their name – Dayfa/Tayfa – signifies a clan, a family in various Tatar dialects. During this period, the Crimean Tatar Khans were the rulers of the Crimean Khanate and were vassals to the Ottomans. Therefore, it is highly probable, that the Roma moved around in this part of the Ottoman-influenced region. This is also confirmed by the works provided by the Turkish traveler Evlija Chelebi during his travels to Crimea in the mid-17th century.
According to the Bulgarian scholars, the other group of Roma – Krimy, Krimurja – arrived in Crimea in the 17-18th centuries from the Balkan peninsula through Wallachia and Moldova. Unlike the other group, Krimy retained more of their Roma origins and through their interactions with the local Tatar population laid the foundations to the new Crimean Romani language. Whereas the identity of the Daifa community was closer to that of the Tatars and spoke the Tatar language.
The annexation of Crimea by Tsarist Russia at the end of the 18th century caused multiple major emigration waves in Tatar communities and, therefore, among the Roma that closely identified themselves as Tatars. The loss of influence by the Ottomans in the region left the Muslim communities vulnerable to the hostility of the Russian empire. As a result, huge numbers of Crimean Tatars, some voluntarily and others under pressure, left their homeland and moved to modern-day Turkey. The Crimean War in the mid-19th century escalated this process. The Tsarist regime increasingly targeted the Muslim populations in the Black sea coastal regions, fully eliminating the “unwanted” communities in the Caucasus region. In the aftermath of the war around two thirds of the remaining Tatar population left Crimea, mostly to Turkey. We can assume that many Crimean Roma were part of the exodus as well.
After the fall of Tsarist regime in 1917, Crimea entered a chaotic period that culminated with the establishment of the Bolshevik power in the region. The civil war and Soviet policies triggered more migration from the peninsula. The collectivization campaign under Stalin’s rule created devastating waves of famine in the early 1930s throughout the Soviet Union and particularly in Ukraine and other major grain producing regions. To escape the hardship, many Crimean Roma moved to the regions of the USSR that were less affected by the campaign.
The Crimean Roma went through some of the worst of repressions during the Nazi occupation of the peninsula. In the second half of 1941, the Germans began to implement their policies of the Roma genocide along with the genocide against Jews. Mass killings of Roma were carried out as a part of the Roma Genocide, also known as Porajmos. The Roma were considered socially and racially inferior by the German National-Socialists and, therefore, were subject to elimination by the local SS.
The Nazi occupation of Crimea ended in 1944 after the Soviet offensive that forced the German troops out of the peninsula. Unfortunately, this did not end the suffering for Roma. In 1944 mass deportations took place on the Crimean Peninsula. According to the decree of May 11, 1944, issued by the State Defence Committee of the USSR, the Crimean Tatars were ordered to be resettled to the Uzbek SSR. The collective punishment, that was to serve as a punitive action against those who had aided the Nazis and had fought against the Soviet partisans during the occupation, was applied to the whole population. Hundreds of thousands of Tatars were evicted along with other ethnicities considered to be “anti-Soviet elements”. The Roma people, some of whom were registered as Tatars and the others as Roma, were deported to different parts of the Soviet Union.
Even though the documented evidence confirms the participation of some of the Tatars and the Roma in the German support legions, the punitive policy of the Soviet Union targeted these groups indiscriminately. The attempts to denationalize the Crimean Tatar community and de-Tatarize the region also resulted in the Roma cleansing on the peninsula. This period also ended the centuries-long coexistence of the Roma and Tatars. The report from 1949 “On the Number of Special Settlers-Gypsies Evicted from the Crimean ASSR” indicates the number of Roma – 1109 – and the places of their displacement: Uzbek SSR, Tajik SSR, and others. However, it’s confirmed that this list is inconclusive. There are documents indicating the numbers of Roma expelled from Crimea in the regions of USSR not stated in the aforementioned report.
Starting from 1956, in the course of “destalinization” under Khruschev’s rule, many deported people were allowed to go back to their homelands. Unfortunately, the Crimean Tatars, and with them the Roma that were classified under Crimean Tatars, were excluded from this process. The 60s and the 70s saw many attempts of illegal returns of the Tatars, a big part of which led to re-deportations and waves of protests. After the weakening of the Soviet power, in 1989, the Crimean Tatars were officially permitted to go back to the peninsula. As a result the Tatar population in Crimea grew from 17,400 in 1987 to approximately 259,000 by the end of 1993. Some Roma also went back to the peninsula as a part of the resettlements, however, we cannot be sure about the numbers.
Nowadays the demographic data or the geographic distribution of the Crimean Roma population is not confirmed. A big part of the community still remains in Crimea, while the others are settled in mainland Ukraine, in Russia, in Caucasus and in Central Asian regions.