Acknowledgement
This book is written and published as a part of the research project RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation between the Two World Wars which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 694656). It reflects only the authors’ view and the agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
The realisation of the book became possible thanks to the joint efforts of the project team from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, headed by Principal Investigator Elena Marushiakova, Senior Research fellow Vesselin Popov, and Post-Doctoral Fellow Researchers Sofiya Zahova and Raluca Bianca Roman.
Numerous colleagues from different countries also were directly involved in the preparation of this book as authors of individual parts: Alicja Gontarek (Department of Social History and Education at Marie Curie-Skłodovska University in Lublin, Poland); Ieva Tihovska (Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia); Tamás Hajnáczky (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary); Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania); Ion Duminica (Centre of Ethnology at Institute of Cultural Heritage, Moldova); Dragoljub Acković (MP at National Assembly of Serbia & Roma Museum, Belgrade); Egemen Yılgür (Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Anthropology Department, Yeditepe University, Turkey); Viktor Shapoval (Moscow City University, Russian Federation); Plamena Slavova (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences); Risto Blomster (Finnish Literature Society & Finnish Cultural Foundation); Lada Viková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic); Dušan Slačka (Museum of Romani Culture in Brno, Czech Republic); Carmen Quesada (Florida Atlantic University, USA) and James Deutsch (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington D.C., USA).
We would like to thank all who contributed so that this book became reality. Many people from different countries of Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe supported us directly or indirectly in the preparation and writing of this book, too numerous to be listed. Our gratitude goes to all colleagues and friends who supported us in our work, and the staff of the archives, libraries, and museums we visited, who are too numerous to list. However, we would like to mention especially our gratitude to the late Nikolay Bessonov and his daughter Valeria Yanysheva, as well as Valdemar Kalinin, who allowed us to work in their personal archives and use all the necessary materials.
Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov