The Female Factor: Subtle Shift at the Gypsy Bride Market

Meet the tinkers of Thrace, semi-nomadic Roma who in the early 21st century are among the few in Europe hewing to ancient ways. A woman may govern Germany and men in Sweden may care for infants. But in this corner of southeastern Europe, that thinking is quite foreign, with — so far — limited impact.

Technically, the young women at this traditional St. Todor’s Day “market” were not for sale. But it is at this fair, held each year on the first Saturday of Orthodox Christian Lent, that the Kalaidzhi (as the estimated 18,000 Thracian tinkers are known) conduct the complex negotiations on a bride price that traditionally lead to marriage.

The identity of this semi-nomadic Roma group is based on the ancient craft of its menfolk: producing and repairing pots, pans and caldrons. For centuries, these smiths have scattered in ones or twos in Bulgarian villages to practice this craft, and they get together rarely for events like the St. Todor’s fair.

This is therefore one of the few opportunities for teenagers to meet other Kalaidzhi — and potential spouses. Dating is not really an option when teenage boys and girls are forbidden to meet without an adult. Marriage outside the group is equally taboo.

Leaning against his car, surveying the scene, Hristos Georgiev, 18, was pleased to be wrapping up negotiations with the father of Donka Dimitrova, an 18-year-old he expected to marry weeks later. Bargaining had narrowed to between 10,000 and 15,000 levs, or $7,500 to $11,300, well more than a year’s worth of the average Bulgarian’s wages of 8,400 levs. He said he saved the money working construction in Cyprus.

According to Velcho Krustev, an ethnographer with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, “the man is not buying a wife, but her virginity.” The payment ensures the bride will be treated well by her new family, he said.

Good looks nevertheless command a price. “If she’s really beautiful, the price can go up” to 20,000 or 25,000 levs, Mr. Georgiev said, within easy earshot of his prospective bride. (Others said a great beauty might fetch 40,000 levs.)

“I don’t approve,” said Ms. Dimitrova, who unlike less educated Bulgarian Roma girls recently completed a landscaping course. “You shouldn’t look at the money,” she said, “but at the person, his way of speaking, thinking, feeling and all the rest.”

Her cousin Todorka was blunt. The money, she said, “is no guarantee that the marriage will last forever. They can still find another better one 10 days later.”

Kalaidzhi families usually marry off daughters between the ages of 16 and 20 and take them out of school by eighth grade, allegedly to prevent their being “stolen” by suitors. (How often true bride theft occurs is not clear. Young people said it is often a face-saving family story when a daughter elopes.)

Kalaidzhi women have long woven their daughters’ dowries, and stoked the fires for their husbands’ craft. They are wives, mothers and assistant tinsmiths.

Education has not been a priority: the Open Society found in 2004 that one in five Bulgarian Roma women are illiterate — almost double the share among men. Only 10 percent of Bulgarian Roma women have secondary education, according to the World Bank, compared with 16 percent for the men.

However, support for marriage traditions is waning. A 2007 study by Amalipe, a nongovernmental organization in Bulgaria, found that 52 percent of Roma opposed parents' choosing the spouse of their children, with 35 percent in favor. Only 18 percent of Roma supported the bride price; 69 percent rejected it.

Kalaidzhi are among the most tradition-bound of Roma. But even they are changing — to the distaste of elders like Ivan Kolev, 73.

 

Past Holds Clue to Goldstone’s Shift on the Gaza War

The violence, he found, was endemic, but a covert government campaign was sponsoring black killings to undermine the opposition. Heads rolled, hands were shaken and Mr. Goldstone was hailed as the most trusted man in the country, going on to a distinguished international career.

In 2009, he tried to do the same thing in the other country close to his heart: Israel. Mr. Goldstone, a Zionist who believes that political reconciliation will result when both sides face the unbiased rigors of international law, agreed to lead a United Nations inquiry into the war between Israel and Hamas, telling friends that the mission could make a real contribution to Middle East peace.

The resulting report that bears his name accused each side of wrongdoing — deliberately making civilians targets. But the report not only failed to bring peace to the region and universal honor to its author. It also hardened positions and brought a storm of attacks on Mr. Goldstone, especially from within his community.

In trying to understand why he published an essay on April 1 in The Washington Post retracting his harshest accusation against Israel and toughening his stand toward Hamas and the United Nations — an essay that has been rejected by the fellow members of his investigation panel — the South African precedent is important. For Mr. Goldstone, it was the model of how the Gaza report would work. Instead, it helped drive Israeli politics farther to the right, gave fuel to Israel’s enemies and brought no notable censure on Hamas.

“I know he was extremely hurt by the reaction to the report,” said Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Foundations, who has known Mr. Goldstone for years and remains close to him. “I think he was extremely uncomfortable in providing some fodder to people who were looking for anything they could use against Israel.”

In describing his new position, Mr. Goldstone wrote, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.” He has declined requests to elaborate. Interviews with two dozen people who know him suggest a combination of reasons: the hostility from his community, disappointment about Hamas’s continuing attacks on civilians, and new understanding of Israel’s conduct in a few of the most deadly incidents of the war.

The year and a half since the Gaza report was published have been hard on Mr. Goldstone. Hailed by the Arab world and the anti-Israel left, he has been censured by those with whom he had always identified. One of his two daughters, who spent more than a decade in Israel and now lives in Canada with the man she married here, has been furious with him, according to a family friend; he was nearly unable to attend the bar mitzvah of his other daughter’s son in South Africa because of plans by some members of the Jewish community there to demonstrate against his presence.

“He told me last year that he was dreaming of the day when he would be able to sleep again at night,” a longtime friend said, asking for anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Goldstone by speaking about private conversations. In the past two weeks, he has been embraced by some who had shunned him.

When Mr. Goldstone was asked to investigate the three-week Gaza war, which started in late 2008, he was told by many friends of Israel that he was stepping into a trap. There had never been a United Nations Human Rights Council investigation into possible war crimes in Chechnya or Sri Lanka, but there had been multiple ones into Israel’s actions.

Mr. Goldstone persuaded the council’s president to agree that the mandate would not be limited to Israel. He believed that both Israel and Hamas could be prodded to change their ways.

As he said in an interview with the newspaper The Forward: “I was driven particularly because I thought the outcome might, in a small way, assist the peace process. I really thought I was one person who could achieve an evenhanded mission.”

Some attribute that sentiment to a well-developed sense of ambition. With a nod to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the United Nations secretary general, some called him Richard Richard-Goldstone, according to Benjamin Pogrund, a South African journalist.

But from the beginning of the Gaza endeavor, Mr. Goldstone’s expectations were dashed. As a longtime supporter of Israel, he thought he could persuade its government to cooperate. He had been a governor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, chairman of the university’s South African Friends and president of World ORT, a Jewish vocational training organization.

Yet Israel declined, citing the bias of the council and the fact that the written mandate was never officially altered. This meant that his team was not permitted into Israel to witness the destruction caused by Hamas’s rockets.

And what it found in Gaza shocked Mr. Goldstone: thousands of destroyed homes, hundreds of leveled workshops and factories, the Parliament building in rubble and up to 1,400 dead, many of them civilians. Israel lost 13 people.

Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem, and Jennifer Medina from Los Angeles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 19, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the crime for which Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer, was falsely convicted in 1894. It was passing secrets to Germany, not murder.? The article also misstated his military affiliation. He was an artillery officer, not at a naval officer.