Documents from First Evangelical Gypsy Baptist Church' s collection.
Extent: 2 notebook collections of Evangelical songs; 1 booklet of History of the Evangelical Baptist Church in Lom; 1 archival document; 1 brief manuscript history of the Gypsy Church in the village Golintsi.
Condition of original material: Some of the manuscripts with Evangelical songs have spots and are difficulty readable.
Custodial history: Materials present the culture of the first Baptist Evangelical Romani society in Bulgaria. It was founded in the village of Golintsi ('Mladenovo' quarter nowadays), town of Lom. The Church building officially opened doors in 1930.
Author(s)/Creator(s): T. Petrov; unknown author; E. Iolov.
Arrangement: The materials have been stored in a paper box. They were arranged as found.
A note about terminology: Some of the material in this collection relates to Цигани [Tsigani / Gypsy] communities. Since 1989, these communities are often referred to using the term ‘Roma’. However, not all members of these communities accept the term Roma or identify as Roma. In Bulgaria, this is a heterogeneous community that comprises different groups with different ethnic identification (Romani, Bulgarian, Turkish or Rumanian), mother tongue, way of life, religion, and occupation. Moreover, the original material in this collection pre-dates 1989, when the term ‘Roma’ was unknown in Bulgaria. For these reasons, the term ‘Gypsies’ is used to describe these communities in the catalogue rather than ‘Roma’ because this more accurately depicts the identification of the communities recorded in this collection at the time the documents and photographs were created. The Protestant missionaries who worked among this population and whose results are related to the material in the collection, also used the term 'Gypsies'.
