HUNGARY: A Roma village makes its house walls an exhibition with a series of frescoes

Record ID: 1529925

  • Title: HUNGARY: A Roma village makes its house walls an exhibition with a series of frescoes
  • Date: 15th June 2011
  • Summary: CLOSE OF FRESCO DETAIL
  • Embargoed: 30th June 2011 15:47
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Hungary, Hungary
  • Country: Hungary
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment,Human Interest / Brights / Odd News,People,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVA42YSQ28Q9ZOLBWQFA7B70PYQ1
  • Aspect Ratio: 4:3
  • Story Text: A Roma painting depicting an old folk tale comes to life in an unusual location: the wall of a house in an impoverished Roma village in the north-east of Hungary.
    The latest addition to the artwork is a monumental fresco by Serbian Roma painter, Zoran Tairovic. He is the first international Roma artist to come to Bodvalenke to join his fellow Hungarian fellow artists, who began the fresco work two years ago.
    Bodvalenke village, near the Slovakian border, has 13 of its house walls painted in various Roma art and has become Europes unique fresco village.
    More Roma artists from across Europe, among them Spanish-Polish Roma artist Bogumila Delimate, will join in the coming months in the hope of creating an open-air exhibit of European Roma Art.
    Tairovic hopes that the Bodvalenke art project can help the integration of the Roma.
    "Artists are always asking questions not giving answers and with this painting I am asking people in the world whether they are willing to accept the Roma as people who have lived with them for centuries and have been an integral part of Europe," Tairovic said.
    The Roma Fresco Village programme is a last-ditch effort to relieve third-world conditions and decades of unemployment in Bodvalenke, one of hundreds of such Roma colonies around Eastern Europe.
    People here live without running water and many buildings have bare walls and earthen floors that soak through each time it rains. Only two people have a job out of the 234 inhabitants, who are almost all Roma.
    When the project started in 2009, creators of the programme hoped that the frescos would lure tourists and create much-needed jobs.
    Villagers say that tourists have indeed began to come and they are starting to feel the benefits.
    "Many tourists and visitors are coming and the village women are cooking lunch or dinner for them so we always get a little money at least," Katalin Egri said.
    Others are encouraged to keep old traditions like wicker weaving alive.
    "When visitors are coming villagers who have something to sell like baskets can sell them," Jozsef Rusznyak said.
    The creator of the fresco village project, Eszter Pasztor, got the idea for the fresco village from a trip to Egypt where she visited a village in the desert that, with similar problems of poverty and deprivation, turned itself into a tourist destination by decorating all the walls of its houses with frescoes.
    Pasztor hopes that because Bodvalenke is situated near a National Park of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Aggtelek Caves, tourists will find their way to the village attracted by the unique fresco site.
    She believes that the fresco village project could work as a catalyst and help counter the prejudices as well as lift the self-esteem of the Roma people.
    "They who has always been condemned, yes despised by most of the majority population they begin to pull themselves out and they said Im proud and Im proud of these Roma painters and through the Roma painters Im proud of being Roma. And that also helped them to better communicate with the non-Roma. And I think that was an incredible power that straightened their backs," she said.
    Most Roma face discrimination and extreme poverty all around Eastern Europe where their numbers are significant and growing. Tensions are intensifying regionwide. The danger is that the underclass becomes permanent which might stifle economic growth and exacerbate social tensions, observers say.
    Pasztor hopes that in five years time the project which would later also include a restaurant, a camp site, a mushroom/tomato dryer plant, etc - will bring jobs to everyone in the village and ensure a way out of their deep poverty. She also hopes the government will realise the potentials of their project and provide some funding for the job creation.
    "This will still be a poor village but it will not be desperately poor, it will have a dignified life," Pasztor said.
    The Roma of Bodvalenke know the house painting programme is by no means a sure-fire way out, but they have learned to value even the smallest sliver of opportunity.
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