The Stojka family

The book traces the history of a Romani family from the territory of today’s Slovakia across the 19th and 20th centuries. Working with a large body of diverse historical sources as well as with a wealth of ethnographic data, Markéta Hajská places the story of the Stojka family in two historical arenas: the history of Czechoslovakia, as an example of a newly-emerging Central European nation-state during a highly turbulent period of complex political changes, and the history of Roms in Central Europe as a heterogeneous ethnic group that has historically formed part of local multi-ethnic societies.

The Stojka family belonged to a particular group of Roms, a minority within the diverse Slovak Romani population, self-identifying today as Lovara or Vlax Roms. The Lovara economies were based on regular trade routes of varying lengths across today’s Czech and Slovak Republics, Austria, Poland and Hungary. At the same time, contrary to the popular misconception of “travelling Gypsies” as non-belonging nomads, and notwithstanding the continuity of policing practices and securitisation of varying intensity directed at the people subsumed under this term by the changing state authorities, the Stojka family was also residentially and socially anchored in a particular local rural community through a network of diverse social relations including house ownership.