Location

• Bratislavská 67, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
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Languages

• Czech
• English
• Slovak

Website

• www.rommuz.cz

Name of collection

• Collections of Museum of Romani Culture

Provenance and cultural activities

• After the events of the Second World War, several thousands of Roma were murdered for racial persecution, on the on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Following the communist coup, the Roma were still seen as second-class citizens, furthermore, they were prevented from making attempts to emancipate and maintain their culture and nationality. The Museum of Romani Culture was founded in 1991 on the initiative of Roma intellectuals as a non-governmental non-profit organisation. The museum originated from the effort to capture essential details of Roma culture, their language and history, as there was no institution in Czechoslovakia that would deal with this in complexity. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Roma population reached 800,000 inhabitants in Czechoslovakia, the second largest minority, after the Hungarians. The museum was created with the aim of capturing, collecting, preserving, specifying and evaluating the key aspects of Roma. Furthermore, it can present itself at exhibitions and events for the public and contribute to a deeper understanding of the Roma, thereby helping to improve the relationship with the public. Initially, the museum was not a state institution, so it was founded under an organisation created for this purpose. In the beginning most of the museum's staff, including those who joined them some time later, were Roma. The collection of items proceeded to initially be mostly from personal donations; the museum's staff began to collect various items and thus began to store them in the funds as well as storing recordings of interviews with witnesses which were very valuable to the museum's work. The museum began to collect items from various topics, specifically about the history of the Roma, the way of life and the culture of the Roma, and about the way of livelihood, food, housing, clothing, culture, etc. During its existence, the museum organised collecting trips around the Czech Republic, but also abroad, especially in Slovakia. The history and culture of Slovakian Roma is also represented in the museum, whether in the form of collection items containing art from Slovak Roma authors, or written material related for example to the Gypsy-Roma Union (Zväz Cikánov-Romov), in Slovakia.

  Regarding the original historical items, part of the collection is presented in the permanent exhibition called The Story of the Roma (Le Romengero drom). Apart from the permanent exhibition, the Museum offers a wide range of temporary exhibitions to the public. It also organises a number of other public events: the annual Museum Night, lectures and meetings, film evenings, fashion shows, concerts or book promotions and sales of music of which the museum and other producers have manufactured, etc.

  The collections in the Museum of Romani Culture are firmly connected to the subject of cultural opposition and, in particular, to the issue of racism against minorities. The museum owns materials for the activities of the Union of Roma and Gypsies, their activities of reviving the Romani language, publishing their own magazine or their emancipation efforts and discussions on the issue of Roma nationality. The museum, in a unique way, and mainly in its scope, documents the Romani culture and its manifestations also from the period of socialism, when the state was rather trying to destroy the Roma culture. The efforts of the Roma community to preserve culture and emancipation were unique and the evidence of this activity can be found at the Museum of Roma Culture.

Description of content

• The Museum of Romani Culture has extensive collections that relate to the history and culture of the Roma in Bohemia and Moravia. The most extensive materials are related to the history and activities of the Union of Gypsies - Roma. This is not a single fund, because the individual archives are divided according to their type. In the fund, it is possible to find written material, for example, the programme to the Constituent Congress of the Union of Gypsies - Roma in Czechoslovakia of August 30^th, 1969, the entire estate of Miroslav Holomek, who was chairman of the Central Committee of SCR (Roma-Gypsy Association), between 1969-1973, personal cards and business cards of individual members, the complete edition of the Newsletter of the Central Committee of the SCR, the SCR Memorandum in Czechoslovakia on the fundamental issues of Roma (Gypsy) issues and the definition of the social status of Roma (Gypsies) dating back to the 1970s, the Statutes of the Constituent Congress and information on the activities of the Association on the recognition of the Romani Holocaust. On top of this, you can find a rare invitation by the Central Committee of the Union - the Committee of Former Prisoners of the Concentration Camps at the Ceremony of Victims of Fascist Persecution in Hodonín u Kunštát on March 18th, 1973, as well as many materials for the Association's activities which are also in English or Slovak. The Association also has extensive photo-documentation of the Association's activities, including, for example, photographs of the Commemoration act in Hodonín u Kunštátu or photos of Andrew Pešta, which document the life of Roma during socialism through the viewpoint of one of them.

  Another important part of the collection consists of materials devoted to the preservation of the Romani culture, such as song and musical folklore, the preservation of oral verbs and the Romani language. Again, it is not a compact fund, but rather materials placed in different funds. It is possible to find, for example, an invitation to a concert "Roma Singing, Playing and Dancing" or the Roma Contest of the South Moravian Region in singing, music, dance and recital in 1972 in Hodonín. Interesting are also materials that are related to the effort to preserve Romani as a language, where one of the most important is "Romaňi Čhib - Introduction and Texts (Romani)" by Milana Hübschmannová, who also elaborated "Romane phenibena", a proverb of Slovak Roma. From the video recordings, it is interesting to note the recordings of the programme "Roma playing, singing, dancing", the recording of the winners of the competition in Jihlava in 1970, organised by the Union of Gypsy-Roma, and the recording "The melody of passion and sentiment - songs and dances of Gypsies", in 1977.

  One of the most interesting additions to the Fine Arts Fund is certainly the paintings by Rudolf Dzurko, who created an extraordinary glass grinding technique and which depicted not only the life of the Roma but also their suffering after the war. The best known is the picture "The Devil (Communists) took a violin from a Gypsy".

  The museum also has an extensive library where it holds various publications, either professional or fictional, which are related to the Roma themes.

Content

• applied arts objects (folk art, decorative arts, etc.): 10-99
• artifacts: 10-99
• clothing: 100-499
• film: 10-99
• furniture: 10-99
• grey literature (regular archival documents such as brochures, bulletins, leaflets, reports, intelligence files, records, working papers, meeting minutes): 100-499
• manuscripts (ego-documents, diaries, notes, letters, drafts, etc.): 100-499
• memorabilia (posters, flyers, stamps, etc.): 10-99
• music recordings: 1000-
• paintings: 10-99
• photos: 500-999
• publications (books, newspapers, articles, press clippings): 1000-
• video recordings (including oral history recordings): 500-999
• voice recordings (including oral history recordings): 500-999

Operator(s)

• Museum of Romani Culture

Owner(s)

• Museum of Romani Culture

Geographical scope of recent operation

• national

Topics

• alternative lifestyles and resistance of the everydays
• censorship
• democratic opposition
• ethnic movements
• film
• fine arts
• folk culture (e.g. folk dance movements)
• human rights movements
• independent journalism
• literature and literary criticism
• minority movements
• music (rock, punk, alternative, classical, etc.)
• samizdat and tamizdat
• social movements (general)
• survivors of persecutions under authoritarian/totalitarian regimes

Founder(s)

• Museum of Romani Culture

Date of founding

• 1991

Place of founding

• Brno, Czech Republic
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Creator(s) of content

• Dzurko, Rudolf
• Holomek, Miroslav
• Museum of Romani Culture
• Pešta, Andrej

Collector(s)

• Museum of Romani Culture

Supporters

• Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic

Important events in the history of the collection

• Constituent Congress of the Union of Gypsies-Roma

Featured items

• Memorandum of the Union of Gypsies-Roma on Essential questions of Roma Issues, 1970
• Painting "The Devil (Communists) took the Gypsy violin" by Rudolf Dzurko

Access type

• parts are closed to the public

Publications

• Horváthová, Jana, Alena Křížová, and Jana Kramářová. Poklad Romů: amare somnaka : tajemství romského šperku : doprovodná publikace ke stejnojmenné výstavě Muzea romské kultury, 7.10.2016-30.4.2017. 2016.

  Pešta-Corrado, Andrej, Jana Horváthová, Adam Holubovský, Tomáš Pospěch, Dušan Slačka, Milada Závodská, Jana Habrovcová, Karolína Ryvolová, and Eva Danišová. Andrej Pešta: o fotki. 2017.

  Muzeum romské kultury (Brno, Česko), and Helena Danielová. Sbírky Muzea romské kultury: [přír°ustky] 1991-2006 : textil, šperk, nesbírkové kolekce textilu a šperku = @Collections of the Museum of Romani Culture. Brno: Muzeum Romské Kultury, 2007.

  Sadílková, Helena, Slačka, Dušan, Závodská, Milada. Aby bylo i s námi počítáno. Brno, Muzeum romské kultury 2018.
  
  

  Lhotka, Petr, Michal Schuster, and Milada Závodská. Svaz Cikánů-Romů 1969-1973: doprovodná publikace k výstavě Muzea romské kultury "Svaz Cikánů-Romů (1969-1973) - z historie první romské organizace v českých zemích". Brno: Muzeum romské kultury, 2009.

Author(s) of this page

• Vrtálková, Anna

References

Horváthová, Jana, Alena Křížová, and Jana Kramářová. Poklad Romů: amare somnaka : tajemství romského šperku : doprovodná publikace ke stejnojmenné výstavě Muzea romské kultury, 7.10.2016-30.4.2017. 2016.

Pešta-Corrado, Andrej, Jana Horváthová, Adam Holubovský, Tomáš Pospěch, Dušan Slačka, Milada Závodská, Jana Habrovcová, Karolína Ryvolová, and Eva Danišová. Andrej Pešta: o fotki. 2017.

Muzeum romské kultury (Brno, Česko), and Helena Danielová. Sbírky Muzea romské kultury: [přír°ustky] 1991-2006 : textil, šperk, nesbírkové kolekce textilu a šperku = @Collections of the Museum of Romani Culture. Brno: Muzeum Romské Kultury, 2007.

Lhotka, Petr, Michal Schuster, and Milada Závodská. Svaz Cikánů-Romů 1969-1973: doprovodná publikace k výstavě Muzea romské kultury "Svaz Cikánů-Romů (1969-1973) - z historie první romské organizace v českých zemích". Brno: Muzeum romské kultury, 2009.

Muzeum Romské Kultury – Rommuz.cz. Accessed August 10, 2018. http://www.rommuz.cz.

Habrovcová, Jana, interview by Vrtálková, Anna , February 16, 2018. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection