My second day I set up formal portraits but I abandon that method quickly for a more informal street-shooting approach. Each visit began with the offering of a chair and my camera at the ready. Whether my new Roma friends were eating, sleeping, joking, playing, working—all was open territory for photographs. The young girls were mischievous and invited me to take photos of their older brothers and cousins still sleeping in or the married daughters-in-law endlessly scrubbing clothes and washing dishes.
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I returned to the Roma camp many times throughout the summer months and the early autumn of 2018. Several times a week, I guided my motorbike down our serpentine road beyond the Village and into the Roma compound. As the months passed, I learned that Marinos and Evangelia, an older couple who sold fruits and vegetables from their truck, were the prime residents of the camp, living in the two room sheds with tin roofs all year long. The crowds of people coming and going all summer were family—kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews, cousins, siblings—visiting from other Roma settlements as near as Aliveri, Volos, the closest town on the mainland, all the way to more distant cities in Greece—Karditsa, Larissa, Lamia.
Throughout the summer, I also immersed myself in reading everything I could find about Roma people—their history, their customs. The Roma people first migrated from India to Europe around 1100. The word “gypsy” to describe them was someone’s guess that because they were dark, they must have traveled from Egypt. Roma speak their own language, Romani, related to Hindi as well as the language where they settle.
Although the days of traveling caravans were bygone for most Roma, the taste for travel lived on as both a necessity and a pleasure. Mitsos and his cousins boarded the ferry each week traveling from the mainland to neighboring islands trading and visiting family members. The Roma loved and honored religious holidays, weddings and funerals, all an excuse for families to gather, eat, drink, dance and find suitable marriage partners for their numerous teen-aged sons and daughters.