~Gypsy Wagon
1951 Gypsy children- Gypsies are believed to have originated in India, and to have gradually migrated to the Near East and Western Europe, reaching Scotland in the early sixteenth century. They generally travelled in family groups, and were associated with professions such as hawking and pedling, acting as tinkers and street performers, and most common of all, as fortune-tellers.
This photograph was executed at Bucharest, in 1869 (Photographed by Carol Szathmari, Bucharest.) At the arrival of spring, it is the custom in Roumania, Servia, and Bulgaria for a group of Gypsy children, quite alone, or under the guidance of a woman or an older girl, themselves only halfclad or actually naked, and having their heads and loins wreathed about with green branches of wild plants, to go from one house to another, before each of which they dance and sing a certain song.
