Kher, that is the house

In a way, the Romani culture shamed Polish culture by following similar routes and using similar models yet finding no limits of a visual, formal, or pragmatic nature.

The tragedy of the Polish Roma and Sinti began 70 years ago, on 24 May 1952. On that day the Polish government approved the resolution “on aiding Gypsy people switching to her settled style of life” (literally: “W sprawie pomocy ludności cygańskiej przy przechodzeniu na osiadły tryb życia”). The aid declared in its title should, however, be considered a sarcastic euphemism, for no one asked whether the parties concerned needed it and actually wanted it. From the moment the resolution was adopted, the Romani in Poland were subjected to strict registration and were forced to give up their previous style of life and become permanently bound to a single location. Aid granted by the Polish state was no more than a profound intrusion into private life, and in place of gratitude, inspired anxiety and rebellion. With its characteristic subtlety, the Polish state reacted to the Romani refusing to register by issuing successive, even keener regulations, whose final goal was to incorporate the standards-eluding community forcibly into the blood circulation of communism being developed in Poland. The end of the game of hide and seek and the final blow came in 1964 when Władysław Gomułka finalised what Bolesław Bierut had begun and prohibited nomadic life in Poland. From now on, the Romani were to live at the locations their caravans reached for the winter. The community escaping the frames imposed by a totalitarian state was literally arrested by that state, and by fair means or foul forced to move into the buildings completed in the new residential estates of post-war Poland.

In that hostile atmosphere pervaded with violence, the Romani of Poland were confronted with a phenomenon many of them found new: a change of lifestyle in the wake of setting up a permanent abode. This is how non-mobile Romani architecture was born in Poland. From that moment, flats in the newly built blocks were settled by and turned into homes by Romani families. In many cases, they found themselves in an alien, coercive space: pure architecture of misery. One of such locations were the settlements of Nowa Huta, being built at the time, with examples including Willowe and Wandy residential estates delivered at the threshold of the 1950s. Some of the intangible heritage of Kraków’s youngest district were the colourful tales of the performances by a Romani band in Gigant restaurant in one of the buildings by the Przy Poczcie Square, the district’s first market square. Yet the memory of the Romani history in Nowa Huta goes beyond the nostalgic memories of bygone amusements. Their stories brim with sorrow and suffering. Inability to find themselves in a new place, performing the worst types of labour, broken family ties, depression, alcoholism, numerous suicides. Nowa Huta was the witness and venue for plenty of Romani dramas.

There could have been around 30,000 Romani living in Poland immediately after the war. A number that has not significantly changed to this day. For comparison’s sake, the number of the Romani living in Slovakia ranges from 100,000 to 500,000, in Romania it may even reach 800,000, a number similar to that in Hungary. The Polish Romani population between the two world wars was greater. Even if the official records quoted 30,000, that number was significantly understated. The possibility of determining the actual headcount of a group that remained in constant motion was limited. It is assumed that Germans murdered around 35,000 of the Polish Romani and Sinti in Poland during the Second World War in both the roundups of the caravans and in death camps. The forced post-war relocation to the blocks completed their drama. Destruction of their unique culture came in the wake of physical extermination. Only few managed to adapt to that situation. Walenty Gil of Jurgów worked in the forges of the Lenin Steelworks. His photograph with Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz pinning a Silver Cross of Merit to his lapel made it to Jerzy Ficowski’s book “Cyganie polscy” (literally: “Polish Gypsies”). At the pinnacle of socialist realism, it exemplified a “positive” case: a former Romani cauldron maker was now literally forging the foundations of communism. Three decades later, Mieczysław Gil was one of the founders of the NSZZ Solidarity Independent Trade Union in the Nowa Huta Steelworks, to become later one of the legends in Kraków anti-communist resistance of the martial law era and, after the watershed of 1989, a Member of the Polish Parliament.

Jerzy Ficowski, a philosopher, poet, and soldier of the Home Army quoted above, joined a Romani caravan soon after the end of the Second World War. One of the first in Poland to study the Romani community and culture, he developed a typology of the Romani living in Poland, whom he assigned to four major groups. Currently, his distinction between the Lowland and the Mountain Gypsies is questioned or at least considered obsolete. However, it must be noted that, since Ficowski made his descriptions, the Romani world has undergone a profound transformation, with many phenomena now being its constituents still non-extant at the time of writing. One of them has been the phenomenon of a permanent abode. The Romani culture had not faced that issue on a greater scale in pre-1950s Poland. After 1952, the problem of permanent residence became one of its crucial challenges. Jerzy Ficowski did not include that process in his books. What he described was a world that was slowly receding into the past. Currently, Jerzy Ficowski is generally not only remembered as the pioneer researcher of the Romani culture also as an important figure of Polish pop culture, as he was e.g., the author of the lyrics to Maryla Rodowicz’s hit song that “Dziś prawdziwych Cyganów już nie ma” (“True Gypsies are no more today”). What belies the nostalgia in the lyrics of this popular song is a sad realisation that the colonial social engineering of the People’s Republic of Poland was successful, as it resulted in the Romani culture in its then form breaking down.

The relocation to the city forced the Romani culture to answer the question about the shape of the house. It was no longer a wagon and the caravan as all of a sudden their place was taken by a flat in a block. As has been said, these first permanent abodes somewhere in Nowa Huta or in the new residential estates of Wrocław being brought from ruin, Łódź, Olsztyn or Gorzów Wielkopolski were as often as not unhappy homes. The modernist progress promised a door to a better life yet in fact proved a trap or a gaol.

The change came in the 1970s. The state’s eagerness to “aid” the unruly Romani gradually began to subside with the advent of First Secretary Edward Gierek. The oppression decreed among the highest echelons was weakening. The Romani could not and were not able to return to the caravans. Yet they were no longer the object of endeavours of the state apparatus. At that time, the first legal solutions that allowed people to run privately-owned enterprises and build single-family houses opened new options to the citizens of the People’s Republic. An opportunity that the Romani people living in Poland could also grasp. A developed network of contacts and powerful family ties reaching beyond the Iron Curtain offered them a significant source of support in this new reality. The Romani, like other citizens of the communist Poland, began travelling to the West, the US included, to work. The money earned there, objectively insignificant, found high multipliers in Poland. At least until the 1990s and the beginning of the Polish systemic transformation, the Romani in Poland experienced a period of particular prosperity resulting from the options that continuous travel to different countries in search of work gave them. At the time, many Romani families decided to build their own houses. That marked the advent of the era of the buildings that emphasised the group identity and expressed the original qualities of the Romani culture. Piotr Marciniak, precursor of studies on Romani houses in Poland, borrowed a term from the work of a French sociologist and theoretician of kitsch, Abraham Moles, and called them “the architecture of happiness”.

Many myths have accrued around the Romani architecture in Poland. In most cases the buildings are presented as a manifestation of extreme kitsch and exaggerated expression of personal wealth. However, the analysis of that architectural phenomenon is impossible without putting it into a much broader perspective and trying to find a representation of identity and material status of Polish citizens of the late communist and early transformation years in the forms of single-family houses. Observation of the changes that had taken place in the identity of the community living in Poland will certainly be helpful to understand the context of Romani architecture development.

The 1970s were a time of profound transformation for the Polish residential construction and landscape. The plattenbau construction of buildings, making use of large prefabricated panels, sped up in the cities, whose outskirts as well as the countryside became the field of triumph for the phenomenon known as “kostka polska” – “the Polish cube”: a specific formula of the family house, whose near-cuboid form resulted from the binding standards and limited access to construction materials. Building-wise, hollow concrete blocks and lime-and-sand bricks reigned supreme. The floor space of such houses was artificially reduced by the binding norms. A ploy to circumvent such limitations was to design a garage in the low ground floor and run a workshop or a similar enterprise within. The trick allowed you to raise your house by an extra floor and add residential space, but was catastrophic for the proportions and forms of the building, while the range of available construction materials combined with many-year-long absence of plasters on the walls deteriorated the appearance even further.

The vernacular modernism of the buildings built from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Tatras in the South in the 1970s and the 1980s is one of the most puzzling phenomena that defined the Polish cultural landscape. It needs emphasising that the residential architecture of that period quickly began to undergo various forms of “domestication” and entering into cultural discourses. At the time when the mass imagination was in the thrall of cinema versions of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “Trilogy” directed by Jerzy Hofmann, and the standards of living were drawn among others from Jerzy Gruza’s “Czterdziestolatek” series, the Polish cubes, not unlike the flats in the plattenbau blocks, began to fill with wooden wall panelling, carpets and rugs on the walls, portraits of the alleged forefathers from the nobility, and various decorations gleaned in historical and folk architecture. Popular motifs included a wagon wheel turned into a ceiling lamp, concrete balusters fit into the balconies, and plaster rosettes on the ceilings. All those sources of personal status, often mismatched and gleaned in misunderstood national tradition, were unrestrainedly combined with other forms of decorations, for example cladding of broken glass or ceramics, or even broken plates, imposed on the external walls. A Polish house was deemed to have grown from tradition and applied practical solutions. The aesthetic qualities sometimes failed to keep up with that paradigm or led to the production of particular hybrids. After 1989, the Polish cube was displaced by a gable-roofed creation furnished with a double garage and fronted with a variation on the theme of the portico – a manor house, albeit turbocharged.

Against this background the Romani mansions built from the early 1970s are a creative extension of the house-form notions developing in contemporary Poland. In a way, the Romani culture shamed Polish culture by following similar routes and using similar models yet finding no limits of a visual, formal, or pragmatic nature. The tactics of designing and building those houses were very similar, with one difference however: in the Romani ones, there was more of everything. More of particularly construed glamour and more freedom in reaching for the aesthetic models found on the TV or during visits in popular historical buildings.

The first descriptions of Romani houses, appearing in the press in the 1980s already and frequently repeated at the time of transformation, reek with the colonial stench of superiority over anything that breaks out of the canon of the so-called “good taste” and insults the forms of the national architectural mythology. The houses of the indigenous business champions and stars of popular culture, erected in Konstancin near Warsaw and eagerly exhibited on the pages of the “Sukces” monthly, which enjoyed cult status in the early 90s, did not differ stylistically from the Romani mansions eagerly ridiculed at the time. They used a different type of ornamentation, closer to the models gleaned from the TV than from historical periods. Today, photographs from internal decoration magazines from that time often elicit a nostalgic tear, yet at times laughter. The Romani houses never won admiration in official discourse and even today remain on the margin of any discussion. Their uniqueness is eagerly emphasised, yet hardly ever is that uniqueness recognised to be mostly illusive. Returning to the aesthetic norms of the 1990s, it is also worth noting the cohesion of the idea underlying the houses of the then stars and the Romani: the expression of the values that at the time were in short supply, namely prestige, recognition, and status.

Initially, the descriptions of the Romani architecture boiled down to notes from ethnographic excursions to the estates of Zgierz, Opole, and Gorzów Wielkopolski. The authors often lacked terms for the forms they had to describe. There were too many or too few columns in colonnades, the angles of the tympanums were too acute, and the sheer numbers and shapes of the domes made one dizzy. On top of that, sharp colours were complemented with gold. The descriptions eagerly use the notion of kitsch, serving for a very long time in Poland as both an insult and a verdict. Some assigned the houses of the Romani to the broad realm of changes in the aesthetic norms of the very end of the 20th century and tied their unorthodox shapes to post-modernist strategies. It took several decades to start using neutral language for that architecture, and to recognise it a valuable opportunity of insight into a community asking what it actually communicates.

Being a spatial form linked to the settled way of life, a house was a challenge for a community that had had no proper cultural models for it. Like the abovementioned Polish house, invented late in the People’s Republic and later repeatedly transformed, is a particular creation, a combination of myths and pop cultural representations of own history and identity, the houses of the Polish Romani became a space for syncretic combination of visual representations of identity, notably respect and social acceptance. Piotr Marciniak, a researcher of Romani architecture emphasises that, while observing others, the Romani rejected cultural and social limitations. In his studies, Marciniak distinguished four major types of Romani architecture: Oriental structures, castles, manor houses, and European buildings.

The first, supposed to make references to the roots of the Romani culture reaching India, made a profuse use of domes, ogee arches, and gilding. It was also closest to the famous designs of Romani houses from Romania and Moldova. At the same time, it resulted from beliefs about the origin and the primordial beginnings of own culture. As a creation based on community representations and myths, it was the only to emphasise distinctiveness and independence.

The second and third types drew strongly from the Polish cultural traditions. The castle type used such elements of decorations as crenelations, breastworks, pointed arches, and all types of turrets and towers. To a degree, it was also an element of rivalry with native Polish investors. Castles have always enjoyed a great interest in Poland. The Romani venturing to design such constructions had, and still have, plenty of competition across the country. The castles in Bobolice, Poznań, Tykocin, and lately also in Puszcza Notecka Woods show how strongly the nostalgia for a castle has been rooted in the Polish identity. The best-known castle folly from the days immediately following the martial law is the never completed castle in Łapalice, a gargantuan structure built by a furniture producer from Gdańsk enamoured with history. The Romani residences of the castle type have been unable to trump that absolute highlight.

Romani architecture has plenty to say about another Polish topos, namely the manor house of the Polish nobility that Adam Mickiewicz described in the Invocation in Pan Tadeusz. That portly classicising structure with a portico, bulging columns, and a battery of forms creatively used by several generations of Polish architects from the early 20th century to the period between the two world wars colonised the popular imagination as regards the shapes of typical Polish houses. Beginning with the 1980s, also the Polish Romani began to build their manor houses. Perhaps the best-known manorial creation of the type is the Ciechocinek residence of a star of Romani music, Don Vasyl, brought up at Papusza’s side. Relatively simple on the outside, the building surprises with the lavishness of its interior decor. In the last two decades, it must have been the most frequent fixture on the pages of colourful magazines and breakfast TV programmes, and thus has taken root in the Polish mass mind as an emanation of a Romani residence. It needs to be emphasised that Romani architecture goes beyond just the two historical models described above, and, other than to mediaeval castles and classicist manor houses, it also reaches for other forms to other periods. Analysing the forms of Romani family mausoleums in the Osobowicki Cemetery in Wrocław, Rafał Eysymontt pointed to the similarity of some of those to the domed chapels popular in 16th- and 17th-century Poland, for example the chapel of Bishop Padniewski in Wawel and the chapels of the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska sanctuary.

As much as they never enjoyed recognition among professional architects, the Romani residences grabbed plenty of attention among the potential purchasers and investors, who simply found the panache of buildings of the type impressive. One could venture saying that it is hard to tell whether the architecture of the Romani houses was more keen on the form of the manor houses of the nobility, or, perhaps, the contemporary Polish turbo-manors have creatively drawn from the aesthetic qualities of such houses as the aforementioned residence of Don Vasyl. However, it goes without saying that a walk or ride in the outskirts of any Polish city provokes a reflection on the phenomenon.

Over a decade ago, a sales offer of a house in Piaseczno near Warsaw truly riveted the attention, as its price tag exceeded PLN 100 million and let it be advertised as the most expensive in Poland’s history for many years. Worth emphasising is the fact that it concerned a house reminding of Warsaw’s Belweder, whose cornice had mediaeval battlements added. There were no two matching elements, and the impression was complemented by the interiors that could have been taken from the photo stories about the Romani residences. With his eccentric investment, the mysterious seller of the house with the floor area of nearly 3000m² (32,300ft²) and the interiors that, as the selling slogan went, stood out with their golden colour range and the one-and-a-half-ton crystal chandelier, showed the real aesthetic needs and dreams of many Poles.

The last type of a Romani house described by Piotr Marciniak makes reference to broadly construed global models, European by name, yet with Hollywood rather than the Old Continent in its roots: a hybrid of solutions gleaned from such popular 1990s series as Dynasty, and elicited from the practical experience of constructors and architects, whose portfolios included experience at construction sites of the US and West Germany. Unfortunately, the impact of the experiences of construction workers who for several decades could have been met on Monday mornings waiting for a job at the petrol pump at the corner of W. Belmont Ave and N. Milwaukee Ave in Chicano’s Jackowo on the Polish architecture of single-family houses has not yet been researched. Without understanding the phenomenon of learning and adopting American culture and architecture at their sources in the critical period of the 1980s and 1990s by the throngs of Polish construction workers counted in thousands, the phenomenon of the forms found in American film series seeping to the to the construction sites by the Vistula will never be fully grasped. It must be emphasised that as far as this type of aesthetic preferences goes, architecture of the Romani residences was again a step further, as it proved a far stronger determination to follow the American models, especially their attachment to decorations and glamour.

Piotr Marciniak recognises the architecture of Romani houses “a culture of local experiences”. The Romani are sensitive to the context of local culture, yet they draw from it in a highly creative and daring manner, seeing no limitations ahead, also of financial nature, and emphasising expressions of freedom, also by highlighting the owner’s property status. Anything can happen here as well as anything can meld into one here: no model, no aesthetic inspiration can be ignored. To understand the architecture of the Romani houses some researchers refer to “manolo”, a phenomenon of Romani music that is a syncretic amalgamation of various, often disparate, sounds. “House” in the Romani language is kher. But what is “kher” actually? While visiting the settlements of Romani residences, you are surprised by the fact that some of them have been deserted or abandoned. Many of those were built beyond the financial capacity of their owners. With the first financial problems looming ahead, the houses were vacated or their construction ceased for good. The period of prosperity based on continuous shuttling between the East and the West ended for the Romani early in the 21st-century. With the accession of Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe to the European Union many of the previous forms of accruing wealth, for example trading in second-hand cars, lost their financial appeal.

Some Romani houses were never inhabited or were only used in part, acting as luxurious white elephants. Some were deserted after a few years’ use and practically abandoned. A culture that believes the house to be anywhere someone travels needs no proofs of the status in the form of houses with gardens. The architecture of mansions built by the Polish Romani in the 1980s and 1990s must have encompassed the scream of objection against the decades of debasement and artificially enforced limits. It was a scream expressing uniqueness and proving independence. Beginning with the early 21st century that scream has slowly been dying down, the house is of the Romani people are increasingly modest, and, unlike in the earlier days, they do not diverge so much from the catalogue standards. The architecture of the last decades of the previous century remains a mirror that tells the story of how aesthetic standards in Poland developed at the time of transformation: of the dreams secretly shared by many people in Poland, yet which only the Romani dared to make come true.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Krasnowolski