6 HERITAGE AND MINORITY COMMUNITIES

 

There is a growing awareness among heritage organizations that Europe’s religious minorities have largely been absent from heritage in two ways.^[1] Firstly, although minorities have always been present and played a key role in European culture and society, their history has generally not been reflected in the most prestigious sites of national heritage. Museums, castles and cathedrals, for example, have generally focused on the dominant social groups or the majoritarian population. Secondly, many of the minority communities who now make up a large and growing part of European societies have, until recently, not taken part in the process of assigning meaning to public heritage. Several factors have coincided to raise public awareness that a change is needed. New international guidelines, such as the Faro Convention and the UNESCO Strategic development goals, have called for the democratization of heritage. Many of the central documents of the European Union state that a shared heritage is the foundation for the EU’s democratic, inclusive ambitions. For example, the Preamble to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (1999) states:

Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law.^[2]

In Faro, in 2005, the Council of Europe proposed a new framework for heritage policy that shifted the focus from buildings and objects to people and their values. The Faro Convention establishes the right of all inhabitants of Europe to participate in cultural heritage. Such participation does not amount to simply engaging with pre-existing authorized heritage, but includes the active ‘identification, study, interpretation, protection, conservation and presentation of the cultural heritage’ and ‘public reflection and debate on the opportunities and challenges which the cultural heritage represents’.^[3] This makes cultural heritage a two-way street. Established heritage institutions, such as museums, now have an obligation to encourage participation of minorities and excluded communities. At the same time, these communities have a right to develop their own heritage and bring it to the awareness of the wider public. This ambition makes heritage a key domain in which Europeans can participate in democratic life, create common values and encourage civic engagement. Youth and adult education has an opportunity to contribute to this, but to date this has been given little attention.

Although educators working in grassroots organizations, museums and universities are aware of the need to make heritage inclusive, they often lack the skills and means to make this a reality. This was the finding of a needs analysis for the follow-up project to REBELAH, called MIRETAGE (European Pathways to Minority Religious Heritage: Inclusive Heritage in Adult Education), which was launched in 2023 by partners in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. In a discussion conducted with members of the Rotterdam-based Moslim Archief, Anissa Foukine, an art historian and museum educator specialized in Islamic art, stated that: ‘Dutch museums want to work with minority groups, but often don’t know how to reach them. If they are hosting a group, say students from an Islamic secondary school, they need to know how to make them enthusiastic and feel at home’. Inclusive ‘co-creation of heritage’ is more easily talked about than actually undertaken. According to Kashif Amin, who is active in museum outreach and anti-discrimination agencies in the Netherlands, what we require is ‘a polyphonic approach to heritage’.^[4]

Kamel Essabane, founder of the Moslim Archief, connected minority religious heritage to Europe’s reckoning with its history of slavery and colonization now taking place across the continent: ‘Many people who come from societies with their own experience of colonization are moving to the Netherlands. They feel at home in the Netherlands, but the older generation is slowly passing away and with them there is the danger that we lose the connection to the past’.^[5]

A broader problem concerns the need to motivate younger generations to engage in the preservation, active care and appreciation of heritage monuments across Europe. Without this, many local religious buildings will fall into disuse and disrepair. The solution requires interreligious dialogue and communication about the value and social function of heritage.

With these issues in mind, REBELAH sought to develop the means to teach members of minority communities in a co-creative fashion, with the aim of helping them further develop into what the Faro Convention On the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005) calls ‘heritage communities’: ‘A heritage community consists of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations’.^[6] We took inspiration from organizations and individuals representing minority groups who have begun their own heritage projects. These projects are involved in recalling obscured histories and giving them the breath of public life through their acknowledgement as heritage, and they are doing so from above as well as from below.

One example of the pluralization of heritage ‘from above’ is the ‘Jewish Country Houses’ project, which is a collaboration between Oxford University and the National Trust in the UK. Posh manor houses made available to the public by the National Trust are the jewels in the crown of British national heritage. While highlighting the Jewish identity of some of their owners may not seem revolutionary, diversifying this core area of British national heritage fractures its implicit identification with a Christian, white gentry, which is familiar to viewers worldwide through films and televisions series, from Upstairs Downstairs to Pride and Prejudice or Downton Abbey.^[7]

The UK has also been the site of innovative grassroots heritage efforts from below. For example, Marcus Roberts developed a walking tour of the Lincoln Cathedral which leads viewers to consider negative and positive depictions of Jews in the cathedral sculptures. It thereby integrates Jews into the history of medieval England prior to their expulsion in 1290. Moreover, Roberts’ work in Lincoln connects to a larger project called ‘J-Trails’, which inserts Jewish heritage into the network of pilgrimage and tourist routes across Europe.^[8] In a parallel development, the journalist Tharik Hussain has delved into the past of South England and designed a series of Muslim Heritage Trails that allow visitors to discover Muslim built heritage in and around the town of Woking. By inscribing these sites into the national heritage map, religious minorities are given purchase on the symbolic past of the country and disrupt the notion of a single national heritage.^[9]

Heritage can also be used to foster interreligious conversations, which are very much needed, particularly where the shared use of religious buildings by different faiths is concerned. In this regard, it is necessary to consider problems that arise from religious and cultural sensibilities. For example, some congregants of Reformed Dutch churches have objected to sharing their under-utilized churches with Pentecostal or Muslim congregations, while in other countries conflicts have recently flared over buildings that have interreligious histories.^[10] Hagia Sofia, for example, which had been a site of shared Christian and Muslim cultural heritage in Istanbul, was recently redesignated a mosque by Turkish authorities. Moreover, despite Spanish celebration of the interreligious heritage of the ‘convivencia’ of Jews, Muslims and Christians in medieval Spain, the Catholic Church has resisted efforts by some Muslim activists to allow dual use of the former mosque – and now cathedral – in Cordoba.^[11]

While the shared religious use of historic buildings has sometimes proven problematic, the shared caring for these buildings as heritage has been less so. For example, without the help of non-Jewish volunteers, many of the historic synagogues across Europe could not remain open to the public. An analogous situation is faced by under-utilized or unused churches in immigrant neighbourhoods in European cities. As the Christian congregations there dwindle and residents with past family ties to the churches move away, who will care for the churches? A pioneering example in this regard is the collaboration between the Churches Conservation Trust and a local activist, Inayat Omarji, who is Muslim, to jointly transform the All Souls Church in Bolton into a community centre.^[12]

Heritage sites can and are being used for interreligious education. In 2020, the Groningen Historic Church Foundation inaugurated its ‘School Church’ in the town of Garmerwolde, which features an exhibit in the church tower that uses Muslim and Christian holidays as a fun way to entice school-age children into understanding these two religious cultures. The focus on holidays highlights the cultural side of immaterial religious heritage, but the makers of the exhibit did not shy away from conceptual artworks that try to provoke reflection on spiritual matters.^[13]

There is a growing consensus among heritage organizations that they should promote minority heritage, but how is this to be balanced with the need felt by many Europeans to also honour dominant religious traditions? Certainly, the notion of a shared heritage of Latin Christendom played an important role in the drive for European unity in the 1950s by an international alliance of Christian Democrats.^[14] The public power of traditional churches is still very much present today in the heritage of this past era of state churches, and it can also be seen in the religious education in schools, special broadcasts in the public media and even in the nature of our public holidays.

National courts have also generally upheld the right of public institutions to display their religious symbols – such as the crucifix – related to those churches that once enjoyed the status of being established by law, arguing that these form cultural heritage. The European Court of Human Rights has generally supported member states in these decisions.^[15] Local community identity, particularly in Southern Europe, is very often wrapped up with processions and festivals celebrating patron saints of towns and villages. Such attachments need to be taken into account when promoting more inclusive forms of heritage. If inclusive efforts do not take place in dialogue with majoritarian conceptions of heritage, they run the risk of contributing further to social polarization, given that it is already being used by right-wing populists for this purpose.

Cultural historian Willem Frijhoff has likened heritage to a buoy that anchors the present to events and places in a real historical past. Yet, as it is jostled by the waves of memory, culture and politics, heritage drifts far from its original anchorage site. In other words, heritage is constantly being constructed and is subject to competition and negotiation.^[16] This means that although critical research can uncover neglected or suppressed histories that can help minority communities create public space for their heritage or enter into the imagined ‘national’ heritage, these developments are not solely or even largely driven by the scholarly quest for more accurate understandings of historical reality. This would be to confuse the buoy with the anchorage. Thus, the reason why the diversification of heritage has become a ‘best practice’ for heritage organizations is, I would argue, not because this will provide society with a more accurate depiction of its history. Rather, it is because a diverse society requires a diverse heritage.

As the other chapters of this handbook illustrate, heritage education requires creative methods to help minority communities achieve the aims set out by the Faro Convention, which is the democratization of European heritage. The creative methods presented here and the exercises in the activity book can be utilized for teaching any of the myriad heritage communities throughout Europe, based on all sorts of identity, as well as ethnic and historical connections that bring these communities together.

However, in the following modules in this section, we focus on two minority communities that the 2018 Special Eurobarometer on Discrimination highlighted as suffering high levels of discrimination in Europe: Roma and Muslim communities. Both are native European cultures, whose heritage has been present across wide territories of the European continent for centuries. The next two modules provide some basic historical introductory information about Roma and Muslim cultural groups in Europe. We encourage trainers, or any reader of this handbook, to explore and document the past and present of any heritage community that might be of interest to them.

The history and heritage of Islam in Europe can be traced back to the very first generation that lived around the time of the Prophet Muhammad. A Muslim fleet is known to have successfully landed on the island of Cyprus around 649 CE, a mere 15 years after Muhammad’s death. This is still acknowledged locally on the island by the claim that a woman called Umm Haram, a contemporary of Muhammad, is buried in a tomb at the Hala Sultan Tekke, a mosque and Sufi lodge built overlooking salt plains close to the town of Larnaca in southern Cyprus.^[17]

Less than a century later, in 711, Muslims from North Africa made their way across the straits of Gibraltar to establish an Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula that would last seven centuries and shape modern Portuguese and Spanish culture: from local languages through to the food, music, art and architecture of the region. However, the most spectacular reminder of the Islamic presence here is probably the physical remnants. They include the Moorish Castle in Sintra, near Lisbon; Europe’s first mosque, now the Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba; and the Alhambra Palace City in Granada. This period of European Muslim history is largely remembered for its tolerant and inclusive attitude to followers of other faiths, in particular to the Jews of Europe, who were often persecuted elsewhere on the continent and whose culture was also influenced by Iberian Muslim culture.

Simultaneously, in southern Italy, between the 9th and 11th centuries, Muslims from North Africa established the Emirate of Sicily, a similarly flourishing and tolerant kingdom that also had a lasting effect on local Sicilian – and thereby, Italian – culture and heritage. This is most apparent, firstly, in the way later rulers of Sicily, in particular the Normans (1038–1198 AD), adopted many of the Muslim social and cultural traits to become ‘Arabized’. For this reason, the Normans of Sicily are remembered today as Arab-Normans and much of their architecture, including their splendid churches across Sicily, are noted for the influence of the Sicilian Muslim architectural and artistic style. However, secondly, and probably the most fascinating living legacy of this period, is to be found in the Maltese language. The Maltese were also part of the historical Emirate of Sicily and, as a result, inherited the distinct Arabic spoken by the Muslims and later Christian Normans of the region known as Siculo-Arabic. In fact, so much of modern Maltese is made up of ancient Siculo-Arabic that it is the EU’s only official Semitic language.

After this period, the most lasting Islamic cultural influences on Europe and Europeans are broadly the result of four factors: the growth and expansion of the Muslim Ottoman Empire; the growth and expansion of the Muslim Khanates; post-colonial migration following the collapse of the European colonial powers in the second half of the 20th century; and, finally, refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing conflict from Muslim-majority nations such as Somalia and Syria.

The Ottoman and Muslim Khanate expansions are the reason for the conversion of many local populations to Islam in countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania. As the historical Iberian and Sicilian Muslims were eventually expelled, these Eastern European Muslims now make up Europe’s indigenous Muslim population. It is no surprise that they mostly reside in lands once ruled by the Ottomans and the various Khanates, such as the Western Balkans and parts of modern-day Russia.

There are also isolated historical examples of other ways in which Muslim populations have found their way into Europe. One example of this would be the Baltic Muslims, who are among Europe’s oldest surviving Muslim communities. They are the descendants of a small group of Muslims who played a pivotal role in the survival of ancient Lithuania (and Poland and Belarus). They were Crimean Tatars who arrived – by royal invitation from Lithuania’s Grand Duke Vytautas – in 1398 to help defeat the threat of the Christian German Teutonic Knights and save what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After successfully doing so, the Muslims were invited to stay and settle in small villages south of the Duchy’s capital, Trakai. Over the course of the next six centuries, they went on to make considerable cultural and social contributions in their adopted nations of Lithuania, Poland and Belarus, and many of the descendants of the original migrant community still live in the same villages today. Several of these villages are home to the community’s unique Baltic wooden mosques and ancient Muslim cemeteries.

Other ways in which Islamic culture influenced European culture include trade and the inevitable exchange during the European colonial period, when countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands ruled over large populations of Muslims in places such as the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and South East Asia.

One example of the long-term relationship can be found in Britain. In popular imagination, the influence of Muslim culture on Britain began following the mass migration of post-colonial Muslims in the second half of the 20th century and there is a widely held belief that Britain’s culture was not affected by Islam prior to this. However, Britain is home to one of the most curious ancient Islamic artefacts in Europe. Known as ‘Offa’s Dirham’, it is a gold coin minted by the Anglo-Saxon King Offa, which pays homage to Al Mansur, the Muslim Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. It features the Islamic declaration of faith and is dated to the Islamic year 157 AH (c. 774 AD) – all in Arabic. The coin also has the Latin inscription ‘Offa Rex’ on it. The naïve nature of the Arabic script and the fact that coins from contemporaneous Muslim cultures have been found across Europe, has led scholars to lean towards the theory that trade was the likeliest reason that King Offa minted his curious coin, although in truth nobody actually knows the real reason. What is clear, however, is that Britain – on the opposite side of the European continent to Cyprus – also encountered Islam just over a century after the religion was ‘born’.

Britain is also a good place to appreciate the Islamic cultural exchange that came about due to European colonialism. Like every national museum found in the capital cities of former colonial powers, the British Museum’s Islamic collection is one such obvious legacy. However, a more fascinating example would be Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, built in 1889 in the town of Woking. The mosque also led to the founding of two historic British-Muslim cemeteries: the Muhammadan Cemetery, founded in 1884, Britain’s first Muslim cemetery; and the Woking War Cemetery, the country’s only Muslim soldier’s burial ground, established in 1915.

As the name of the mosque suggests, there are links between the founding of the mosque and what was then the British colony of India. The mosque was largely financed by the Begum of the Indian princely state of Bhopal and the founder, Wilhelm Gottlieb Leitner, had spent several years living and working in India. He also established the cemetery, which became the final resting place of a number of individuals linked to Britain’s colonial activities, including former Yemeni kings and Malay princes.

Meanwhile, the military cemetery was built specifically to bury the Muslim colonial subjects that died fighting for Britain. The mosque and the cemetery are today used largely by a community of Muslims who migrated there following the end of the British colonial period, from countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As well as inheriting the historic mosque and cemetery, like all Muslims who migrated to Europe during the latter part of the 20th century, they are now influencing European culture, as did their Muslim forebears over the past thirteen centuries or so – whether the British-Bangladeshis changing the culinary landscape of a nation with their curries, or the North Africans building spectacular French mosques that echo the architectural heritage of historical Muslim Iberia.

 

Roma are found in many parts of the world today, with the largest groups living in Central and Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, Spain has the largest Roma/Gypsy population. The estimated number of Roma/Gypsies in Europe is between 10 and 12 million. In Hungary, where the REBELAH partner Kepes is based, there are around 700,000 to 900,000 Roma/Gypsies.

Studies of ethnic identity give prominence to the issue of categorization. This process has a two-fold structure: on the one hand, it is always based on self-categorization, but on the other hand, the identity of each ethnic group is also influenced by external categorization. The latter is of particular importance in shaping Roma ethnic identity, as debates over the very name of Roma or Gypsy reveal.^[18]

In academic research, some now consider the term ‘Roma’ to be the only appropriate and acceptable term, due to the negative connotations of the term ‘Gypsy’ in public and political discourse. Gypsy/Roma intellectuals at the First Roma World Congress in London in 1971 decided in favour of the term ‘Roma’. However, there are now national and international examples of groups that consider themselves to be ‘Gypsies’ and do not accept the term Roma – which originates from the Romani language – for their community, such as the Boyash or Bayash Gypsies or some Romungro groups, which continue to refer to themselves as Gypsies. Other examples also suggest that several groups, despite the negative connotations of the term, are reclaiming their former self-designation as Gypsies as an important component of their identity. Thus, in this essay I use the names somewhat interchangeably.

In the case of Roma identity/identities, research has considered the transnational nature of the Roma group as a key component. Since the Roma have not established a sovereign state throughout their history, they have a minority identity wherever they live. Apart from living a diaspora life, another important component of Roma identities is heterogeneity, the fact that Roma/Gypsies are neither territorially nor culturally homogeneous. There are many groups of Roma/Gypsies, and they are linguistically/culturally distinct from each other. They therefore have their own ethnic identities, which define them not only over and against ‘non-Gypsies’ but also over and against groups other than themselves, the ‘other’ Roma. Some researchers consider this aspect of Roma/Gypsy identity a distinguishing feature of Gypsy identity and describe it using the term ‘multidimensionality’. In doing so, they emphasize that Roma identity is shaped and interpreted exclusively in relation to other social groups; hence, it cannot be considered either separate or homogeneous.

Structural conditions are decisive in determining the settings for the shaping of Roma identity. Today, Roma identity is directly influenced from three ‘sides’: 1. at the level of a nation-state framework; 2. in terms of belonging to one’s own group; and 3. through external categorization. Individual identity is shaped at the micro level; Roma identity-discourse at the meso level; and, at the macro level, a State’s ‘Roma policy’ plays an important part.

Recent research identifies four factors that can be considered common to Gypsy life-worlds: 1. there is no single Roma/Gypsy history and culture, there are Gypsy cultures and Gypsy histories; 2. Gypsies/Roma are a transnational ethnic group, so they can always be considered a diasporic people who lived/live in minority everywhere; 3. relationships between Roma/Gypsies and the majority society can be described along the lines of the models of coexistence, as opposed to the paradigm of the history of suffering and persecution; 4. the Roma inhabit forms of minority-majority relations that are not typical of those of other ethnic groups.

The formation of the Roma/Gypsy people

The framework for the transformation into a ‘people’ was probably provided by the jati system, which still exists in today’s India and allocates specific social and economic functions to certain village communities and ethnic groups. This is far from being an Indian specialty: the linking of professions to settlement communities and ethnic groups, and the passing on of professional skills within them is widespread throughout the world, and some elements of it survived in Central and Eastern Europe until the modern era (e.g. ‘Bulgarian gardeners’, ‘tinker Slavs’, Armenian merchants). From European sources, it can be assumed that the Gypsies were engaged in metalworking in their homeland. The Gypsies brought this knowledge with them during their long migration, which accounted for the position they assumed in European economic production.

Gypsies were already present in the European territories of the Byzantine Empire by the 13th century at the latest. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, they moved further north and appeared in the Romanian principalities sometime around the middle to the last third of the 14th century. At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, they crossed the boundary between Eastern and Western Christianity, and within a few decades had spread all over Europe. In Hungary, and to the east and southeast, the Gypsies created a parallel but matching society and lived in it until the end of the 19th century.

For half a millennium, before the belated but more rapid industrialization of Central Europe, the Roma lived as craftsmen, an active and much needed part of the society and economy, among other peoples. At the heart was travelling craftsmanship, primarily metalworking, along with woodworking and other skills with which they served the small pre-industrial communities that could not have afforded a permanent resident craftsman such as a blacksmith. In Western Europe, however, the same was not achieved. The economic system there did not embrace Gypsies’ knowledge of production, so they were driven out in large numbers, and only a few (less than 1000th of the total population) were allowed to stay, a number that allowed only a marginal existence.

Roma/Gypsy communities in the Carpathian Basin

We can gain a sense of the diverse patterns of social and economic integration of Roma by looking into their history in Hungary and the Carpathian Basin prior to the late 19th century, when industrialization undermined the Roma’s ability to adapt to the majority society. There are three general groupings of Hungarian Roma/Gypsies, the Romungro Gypsies, the Vlach (‘Oláh’) Gypsies and the Boyash or Bayash (Beash) Gypsies.^[19]

The Romungro Gypsies arrived continuously from the 15th century onwards, at the time of the Hungarian kingdom, with most of their groups arriving in Transylvania from the Balkans. Their language contains many Greek and Slavic elements. They arrived in horse-drawn carts and were gradually integrated into Transylvanian society. In Carpathia, the Romungro were craftsmen who lived in villages and towns. A smaller number of them worked the land as serfs on landowners’ estates. Others, under the protection of the imperial treasury, were engaged in gold mining in the Apuseni Mountains. Another group were called tax-paying fiscal Gypsies.

There were also groups which lived on the outskirts of the villages, working irregularly for their landlords, and therefore they received little remuneration. In some villages, they worked as day labourers digging trenches, making bricks and harvesting crops, etc. By the end of the 19th century, this group had linguistically assimilated into the Hungarian population. The most middle-class groups were called ‘house Gypsies’, many of whom married Hungarians and took up farming or regular craftsmanship.

A second large group of Gypsies/Roma in Hungary are the Vlach (Oláh in Hungarian) Gypsies. They spent longer periods of time in the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Until the middle of the 19th century, they lived as slaves in these Romanian principalities, with their language and culture strongly influenced by the culture of the Romanian people. To escape slavery, some emigrated to Hungary as early as the 18th century, along secret routes through the Carpathian passes. Their number increased dramatically in the 19th century because they found a safer life there.

The third major linguistic/cultural group of Gypsies/Roma are the Boyash or Bayash Gypsies. They speak a dialect of the medieval variety of the Romanian language and have based their livelihoods on making and selling wooden objects (e.g. wooden spoons, spatulas, vessels). Wooden spoon makers were called ‘lingurari’, and in Hungarian communities are also called ‘kalányos’ and ‘gerebenes’.