Word: romas
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...Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Sulukule "ugly", and expressed bewilderment over anti-demolition protests. That the neighborhood is in desperate need of a cleanup is clear, but critics accuse officials of failing to involve one of the city's oldest communities in plans for its redevelopment. Instead, the Roma have been offered two options: They can sell their property at a rate far below market prices (or face having it expropriated), or they can move to public housing in Tasoluk, some 25 miles outside the city, for which they will have to pay a mortgage over a 15-year...
...houses, stopping occasionally to expertly shimmy their hips and twirl their wrists. They're chased by several whooping boys, who inevitably catch them and haul them off to "jail," a spot by a wall. The gypsy children of Istanbul's impoverished Sulukule neighborhood - home to the world's oldest Roma community - call this game Cops and Bellydancers, a homespun version of Cops and Robbers amended to reflect their own experience of being born into a life of dancing and dodging the police...
...Byzantine era that the ancestors of the Roma kids of Sulukule first settled on this particular spot of land, close to the Golden Horn and just outside 5th century city walls of old Constantinople. The earliest record of the community, from about 1050 AD, refers to a group of people, believed to have come from India (where, indeed, most historians believe the Roma originated) who camped in black tents outside the city walls. After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the community was granted offical permission by Sultan Mehmet II to make their homes on what is now Sulukule...
...centuries the Roma community eked out a living as fiddlers, fortune tellers and dancers for the Ottoman court, and later for Turks from all walks of life - a tradition captured on-screen in the James Bond movie From Russia With Love. Their fortunes took a downturn in the 1990s, when their "entertainment houses" - private homes in which gypsy families would cook, strum and dance for wealthy Istanbulites - were shut down on allegations of gambling and prostitution...
...Roma of Istanbul are very poor, earning on average around $250 a month, but the land they inhabit, once unimportant and peripheral, is now prized real estate minutes away from the city center. If contractors and the local municipality have their way, the entire neighborhood of Sulukule - home to 3,500 residents - is to be razed by the end of the year to make way for a gated community of 620 up-market neo-Ottoman townhouses...