Koloman Mirga

* 1945

  • The song is without words.

  • “The woman asked me whether I knew why we could not have children with my wife. I said that we did not know, but that I would like to know it. And thus I learnt that the doctor did it so that my wife would have no children any more. Allegedly there were already two Gypsy women who had sued him for having done the same thing to them. You know, I went home and I wanted to report this doctor, but the doctor had already died. I don’t remember his name anymore, but he was a nasty man.”

  • Our house is from mud and stone / poverty / no money / there are no money / not even a shirt / I am poor / from a poor mother

  • “He pulled out two thousand Crowns from his wallet and he exclaimed: ‘Listen everybody! Kalman will now play a song!’ And the others then had to do the same. Do you understand? Only at that moment I understood what the Olach tradition was like. I thus began playing and after a while I had sixty thousand in my pocket. Perhaps it was God himself who advised me to hide the money well. I went to the toilet, and I tore my inner pocket all the way to the lining of my jacket and I stashed the banknotes inside of my jacket through this hole. Their women were moving around me and they could not understand where I was putting the thousand-Crown banknotes.”

  • “I was born as a Gypsy, I am a Gypsy and I am not ashamed of it. Now they call us Roma people. Perhaps they think that they would comfort us by this, but it is not so. It is important how people treat me. If they call me a Roma and they swear at me and do not behave properly, so what should I do? In the past they did not call us Roma, we were Gypsies, and we used the word Roma only among ourselves. Roma is a Gypsy who already has a wife and children. That man is a Roma. The whites began calling us like this only recently and I don’t know who was the smart guy who came up with that. But I do not worry about it. People have always respected me. They did not tell me: Gypsy, come here. They always called me Kalman. I was Kalman everywhere. Among children, among old people. Young Kalman. My father was old Kalman and I was young Kalman.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 11.12.2016

    (audio)
    délka: 03:25:33
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I am a Gypsy and I am not ashamed of it. I only regret that we have not had more children

Koloman Mirga in 1965 / cut-out from his wedding photo
Koloman Mirga in 1965 / cut-out from his wedding photo
zdroj: archiv Kolomana Mirgy

Koloman Mirga was born October 1, 1945 in the village Rakúsy in the Kežmarok district in eastern Slovakia. He grew up in miserable conditions as the eldest of twelve children. His father worked as a helper on construction sites and the family often had nothing to eat. Since he was a little boy, Koloman has been learning to play the violin and other musical instruments. When he was fifteen years old, he began working as a non-skilled construction worker and at the age of eighteen he became a crane driver. At the same time he was playing with a music band in the area of Kežmarok. He married in 1965 and with his wife Marie they have two daughters. In 1975 he learnt from the head nurse of the maternity ward in Kežmarok that they would not be able to have any more children. The head nurse voiced her suspicion that a sterilization procedure had been done on his wife by the head doctor of the obstetrics department. In 1980 the family moved to Ostrava in search of a better life. Koloman works on construction sites and in ironworks and he also performs in concerts in the Ostrava region and in western Slovakia. He records music with cimbalom bands in the Ostrava radio studio.