Našardi Bori and her Stories : Framing Elopement in a Romani Community

The sociocultural heterogeneity of Roma people is closely connected with their geographical diffusion and a variety of religious, linguistic, aesthetic, economic and other factors. In fact, the idea of “Romani marriage” cannot be generalized as a pan-Romani characterizing feature either. The same applies to elopement, which has been occasionally recorded in the literature dealing with Romani marriage patterns. The tangible reality of the fieldwork calls our attention to a particular community encircled by other Roma groups and a larger sociocultural context. The present is an excerpt of the ongoing research, commenced in the late 1990s with southern Gurbets, viz. Muslim Roma from Kosovo and Macedonia. Travelling in a transnational space between their native lands and some of their emigration destinations (esp. Italy), the paper addresses the practice of elopement undertaken by young women and relevant customary regulations. Being the research based on an extensive fieldwork, selected case studies are included as an empirical support to the main corpus of the paper.