For A Life Beyond Borders

And on the day of the year that celebrates international Roma day I present the Roma flag, created in 1933 and first adopted as standard on the 8th of April 1971, at the first World Romani Congress, Here the blue represents the heavens the green represents the earth and the 16 pointed chakra refers the thistory and connectedness of the Roma traddditions as represented in their language and culture.The Roma were a nation without a government that started a millenia before the birth of Jesus who have wethered every form of organised nation state and government with all their attendant cruelties and misrespect for entities not like themselves.

The Roma have a spoken lanaguage but do not have any standard written language, though attempts were made in the 1990s to create such a script. For being such an oral culture, their culture has to be both liminal and sgtrong to endure, and has to accept being outside every written culture there has ever been, though what written there has been has been happy to borrow from Latin and Cyrillic languages.

With an estimated ten to twelve million Roma in Europe and a further estimated three million disbursed further, where they are less likely to be countable by census they remain a vibrant and struggling minority often known for their vibrant contribution to world music than for anything less transient.