Comment by i_am_a_peasant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by i_am_a_peasant | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Eastern Europe among many minorities. I had friends who were Lipovans (Russian old believers who escaped persecution in Russia in the 17th century), Armenians that escaped the genocide by the turks, descendants of Phanariots (ottoman Greeks), and of course Gypsies both "white" and otherwise. We would refer to white gypsies as "blonde gypsies". I am pretty sure the guy who we would call "blonde gypsie" was a person of yenish background because he did speak a language of his own, and I did notice words of hebrew origin that in yiddish my community would have used the germanic version of rather than the hebrew (my family is Jewish). He had a proclivity to getting into trouble a lot and liked pulling pranks on everyone, but underneath it all he was a very warm person that had a lot of goodness and love within him.

We had also a macedonian person in highschool that spoke some dialect that i could understand 10% of.

Not sure where I'm going with this story, but I do feel like I grew up in some pre-nationalism bubble where it was completely normal for everyone to come from very diverse backgrounds that were very well preserved despite all of us living together in the same society and getting along just fine.

People often liked discussing the similarities and differences between each other's cultures. I remember a gypsie person being fascinated by the fact that gypsies and jews share some customs, such as covering the mirrors when people die and putting away their shoes.

>People often liked discussing the similarities and differences between each other's cultures.

Yes, that's fun to do, if done without denigrating them.

>I remember a gypsie person being fascinated by the fact that gypsies and jews share some customs, such as covering the mirrors when people die and putting away their shoes.

Well, that makes a kind of sense, if you consider to be true the theory that gypsies came to Europe from north-west India (Rajasthan and nearby areas) by way of Iran, the Middle East, etc. Since the Middle East had many Jews, and migration would have been slow in those days (no fast modern transport), the gypsies may have picked up some Jewish customs like those you mentioned, by interacting with Jews while en route to Europe.

And going to Europe may not have been their original plan anyway. One guess is that they could just have slowly, organically, drifted further and further away from India, possibly staying in each place until they had to leave, for trading for livelihood, or because forced out, or for any other reason.

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> Yes, that's fun to do, if done without denigrating them.

In eastern europe ethnic humor is much more popular than in the west. A lot of the jokes considered perfectly fine in the balkans and a bit up north would be very much a no-no in Germany. People of course draw the line at genocide and race. But other than that basically anything is fair game.

I used to hear this one a lot:

Q: You know what's the shortest Jewish joke in the world?

A: "I don't have" (in some languages this is expression is 1 word so it works better).

Interesting. There are a lot of old faith Russian communities in Alaska. I'm from a small town and we'd often have "locals vs Russians" teenage feuds through the summers. They're good fishermen.

Yes exactly! They lived off fishing in my hometown as well!

For others:

Old Believers (a new term to me) are Russian orthodox catholics that didn't fork with the rest of Russia in the eastern orthodox schism in the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers

They are predominantly not catholic, still eastern orthodox. But I think the eastern orthodox church had some reforms that they did not agree with.

> They are predominantly not catholic, still eastern orthodox.

I don't know what the grandparent meant, but the official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church is "Orthodox Catholic Church", so the phrase "Russian Orthodox Catholics" is technically correct, if prone to confuse the uninitiated. It is possible their native language isn't English, and in their native language, (the equivalent of) "Orthodox Catholic" is a common phrase, as opposed to the confusing obscurity it is in English.

While in popular (English) parlance the Roman Catholic Church has somewhat of a monopoly on the word "Catholic", theologically speaking all Christian groups which accept the Nicene Creed claim to be (or to be part of) the "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" in which that creed proclaims belief, and hence Orthodox and (creedal) Protestants officially believe they are Catholics too. (Some less ecumenically-minded Orthodox and Protestants will even go so far as to believe that they are the only real Catholics, and Roman Catholics are fake Catholics.)

> But I think the eastern orthodox church had some reforms that they did not agree with.

The Russian Orthodox Church decided to abandon some of its own liturgical traditions and replace them with imported Greek ones instead. This upset the Old Believers, and the Church refused to compromise, so they left. Later, it decided to become more tolerant, and allow individual congregations to keep the old practices, so some of them (the Edinoverie) returned. But other groups of Old Believers insisted the reforms were heretical, and hence the Russian Orthodox Church were a bunch of heretics and it was a sin to rejoin them, even if they were now willing to allow the old practices to be retained.

All that info went way over my head :) I always had a fascination for people who are deep into this however. Monks living in monasteries, surrounded by so much history. The church played a very big administrative role in medieval times. And it is the orthodox church chronicles that contain some of the most intimate aspects of what life used to be like centuries ago.

When I think of all those ruins lying beneath the hills of Dobruja. And some old tome in the basement of some church in the middle of nowhere is the only document attesting to the existence of those ruins.

There's gold waiting to be discovered everywhere around us if we're willing to dig.

There's a fascinating family of old believers who escaped to the Russian Taiga in 1936 to escape persecution, with the surviving daughter living there to this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68

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