THE UK’s first Roma cultural centre is set to open in the coming months on the southside of Glasgow.
An initiative of community organisation Romano Lav (Roma Voice), it is hoped it will open in the autumn or early winter of this year.
The centre, which will be located on Nithsdale Road, will serve an extraordinary array of purposes.
In addition to being a meeting place for Roma people and their friends, the venue will host permanent and temporary exhibitions about Roma history and culture.
The centre – which Romano Lav is creating with support from the Co-op Foundation’s Future Communities Fund, the People’s Postcode Trust and the Scottish Government’s Equality and Human Rights Fund – will also house a community archive and become the home of an artist-in-residency programme for emerging Romani artists.
Furthermore, the venue will become the focus of Roma youth activism, particularly as the meeting place for the Community Catalysts initiative, by which young Roma people become community leaders and begin teaching the next generation of community activists.
I spoke with Rahela Cirpaci (below), a project coordinator for Romano Lav and one of the leading lights in the cultural centre project. The centre has, she tells me, been her “dream” throughout the six years that she has been involved in the community group.
“I’ve always wanted a space where Roma people could come together, like a Roma hub”, she explains. “Now my dream has finally come true, it’s unreal.”
For Cirpaci, the centre will be a place where Roma and non-Roma people can celebrate and learn about all aspects of Romani culture, ranging from music, to food and, of course, language.
She is already a teacher of Romanes, the Romani language that is spoken in more than 100 dialects around the world.
The community leader, and mother of three young children, is the author of the textbook Romanes with Rahela: A Romano Lav Language Resource. The publication is edited by her collaborator Ashli Mullen and is available online via the Romano Lav website.
The cultural centre will become the venue for Cirpaci’s Romanes language teaching. She intends to extend her classes, both at basic and intermediate levels, not only for learners who can attend the centre, but also online.
The centre will also promote Roma integration within Scottish society. “We want the Roma community to integrate and communicate with the non-Roma community”, says Cirpaci.
Good community relations are a two-way street, she insists. The centre will offer non-Roma people the opportunity to learn about Roma culture and history. It will also seek to help Scotland’s Roma people to learn more about the non-Roma Scots around them.
For Cirpaci, the cultural centre can help to create a “bond of trust” between Roma and non-Roma people in Scotland. Contrary to the prejudices of those – such as the racist vandals who have, disgracefully, desecrated the Roma Holocaust Memorial in Glasgow’s Queen’s Park on multiple occasions – this is far from a pipe dream.
In fact, the project of promoting integration and good community relations through the Roma Cultural Centre is building upon excellent work that has been done in the Govanhill area in recent years.
From the establishment of Romano Lav almost a decade ago, to the participation of the Roma community in the annual parade of the Govanhill International Festival and the path-breaking CineRoma festival of films by and about the Roma people, strong community links have already been created.
Significantly, Roma and non-Roma people march together through the southside of Glasgow every April on International Roma Day, to celebrate Romani culture and stand up against the racism Roma people face in Scotland and internationally.
Cirpaci believes that the cultural centre will build on this process of education and activism.
Many non-Roma people and, indeed, even some Roma themselves need to learn more about the history of persecution of the Roma in Europe, the community activist tells me. That includes, of course, Holocaust education.
Between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti people (collectively designated as “Gypsies”) are believed to have been murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. The uncertainty about the death toll is due to the lack of records kept by the Nazis of their Roma and Sinti victims.
Moreover, Cirpaci adds, the centre can help educate people about the fact that, from the 1370s, “Roma people were slaves for over 500 years in Romania.”
As the Romanian Roma author Margareta Matache has written: “Years before fast sailing ships with enslaved people from Africa made it to the shores of North and South America, the Roma people on the territories of modern-day Romania had already been forced into a system of chattel enslavement.”
It is a source of considerable pride for Cirpaci that the cultural centre is creating a positive community resource in a building that was previously being used as a cannabis factory.
Bigots attempt to promulgate the racist slur that the Roma community is a “drain on resources”.
It is a slur, we should remember that has been used against every incoming migrant community in Scotland, from Irish people fleeing a famine manufactured by the British state, to Jews seeking refuge from the Russian Empire, Italians looking for a better life in northern Europe, post-Second World War migrants from the Indian sub-continent, and more recent migrants and refugees from across Africa and Asia.
The restoration of a former criminal enterprise into a beacon of cultural education and good community relations is proof, were it needed, of the benefit to the city of Glasgow of being home to the Roma community. The building has been badly damaged by the nefarious purpose to which it was previously put, Cirpaci explains.
“It needs a huge refurbishment”, she says. “It’s really disturbing what has been done to the building. Some of the ceiling is coming down.”
It is incredible to think that, by the end of the year, the Nithsdale Road property will have been transformed into a vibrant cultural centre for Scotland’s Roma community and their friends.
For further information on the work of Romano Lav, visit: romanolav.org
