Arhivski vjesnik, Vol. 60 No. 1, 2017.
Review article
Emilij Laszowski’s Contribution to Researching the History of the Roma Population in Croatia
Danijel Vojak
Neven Kovačev
Abstract
The research on the history and culture of Roma in Croatia has always been a marginal topic in Croatian science, especially in historiography. Having this in mind, it is no wonder we can observe only sporadic fragments of the research activities in Romani studies of some Croatian scientists, who only occasionally covered the aforementioned topic. The end of the 19th century saw the growing interest in the research on Roma – it is then that the important results of research on Roma culture, language and customs were published. Emilij Laszowski was also among these scientists. He was one of the most prominent Croatian historiographers at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. Our research was based on the analysis of the part of his personal archival fonds – which is kept in the Croatian State Archives – related to the history of Roma. Laszowski’s historiographic work encompassed numerous fields of social history; he rose to prominence mostly due to his papers on Croatian early modern cultural and economic history and historical topography. It is, though, less known fact that Laszowski researched the history and culture of the Roma population in Croatia and in Europe. The impulse for studying the Roma population came from Mara Čop Marlet, the first Croatian ethnographer, who was part of the wider European circle of scientists exploring the ethnography of the Romani population. In the last decade of the 19th century Laszowski started collecting and analyzing the relevant literature and documents pertaining to Roma in Croatian archives. He had published the results of a part of his researches in an article in the newspaper Narodne novine in 1894 – this article may be regarded as the first Croatian historiographical work on the topic of Roma. Laszowski continued researching the history of Roma after publishing the 1894 article, including the history of Roma during the Second World War, but the aforementioned article remained his only published paper on the subject.
Keywords
Emilij Laszowski; Roma; Croatia; history; Romology
Hrčak ID:
194830
URI
Publication date:
4.9.2017.
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