Travelling Architecture: Vanishing heritage of Gypsy caravans in Poland

Lucyna Nyka; Jakub Szczepański

Travelling Architecture: Vanishing heritage of Gypsy caravans in Poland

Abstract

The wandering Gypsy/Roma groups began arriving in the territory of Poland in the fifteenth century. Leading a nomadic life, they did not develop any form of a built house until the nineteenth century, until the first wooden caravans appeared. In the twentieth century, the architecture of Gypsy caravans began to thrive. They developed into several different forms of meticulously decorated wooden mobile houses. At the same time however, the introduction of a new law imposed a ban on wandering, which forced Gypsies to abandon their nomadic lifestyle. Deserted caravans gradually vanished from the landscape. This paper presents an inventory of original wagons based on the archives and literature studies,as well as on-site analysis of their structures and details. It proposes a hypothetical reconstruction drawing for one exemplary non-existent wagon illustrated in the archive photograph from the first decades of the twentieth century.