Belgrade- Belgrade recently became home to Serbia's first Museum of Roma Culture - an institution that seeks to fight prejudice and serve as an educational tool for the marginalized minority. The museum's first exhibition - on Roma written culture - opened last month. It features Bibles, dictionaries, grammar books and texts in Roma - some of them dating from the 16th century.
The exhibit also includes the first issue of Romano Lil, a Roma daily, which began publication in 1935 in Belgrade.
"This is not the first institution that calls itself a Roma museum, but it is the first real museum with exhibitions that will change periodically and have different programs and events," the museum's director, Dragoljub Ackovic, told the German Press Agency dpa.
The museum is situated in a small storage room in a public building in downtown Belgrade. Its walls are covered with photographs and documents in the Roma language.
Ten computers hold the museum's biggest treasure - data, photographs and documents about the Roma people - their history and culture, their music, and their holocaust in World War II.
The Roma, also commonly known as Gypsies, are one of the most marginalized minorities in Serbia and the Balkan region. Although official figures show that some 100,000 Roma live in Serbia, the unofficial number is much larger - some 500,000.
The discrepancy between the official and unofficial numbers is due to the hesitance by some Roma to identify themselves as such. This is because many lack personal documents or are wary of a system that is hostile to Roma.
The majority of Roma are uneducated, unemployed and live in slums with no electricity or running water. Hostility towards Roma by many ethnic Serbs makes it difficult to integrate young Roma into wider society.
Many normal Roma children are sent to special schools just because they don't speak Serbian, a teacher who didn't want to be identified told dpa. Those who make it to regular schools are likely to meet with the teasing and bullying of their schoolmates, who have adopted their parents' prejudices.
"It is very difficult for those Roma children to fit in, especially if their parents are poor have no means to provide them with books, clothes or at least soap and running water," the teacher said.
Roma leaders agree that education is the biggest problem, and Ackovic hopes that the new museum, opened with the help of Belgrade City Hall, will improve the lives of Roma in Serbia and show that there is more to them than meets the eye.
"If you realize that the Roma people have their own language, culture and tradition, then you will have a different opinion of them and then the acculturation will begin. That is what we want," Ackovic said.
"We do not want assimilation ... but we want acculturation, and this museum's aim is to help with that," he added.
Although prejudices in Serbia towards Roma run deep, their music is highly appreciated. Roma brass and string bands are almost obligatory at big weddings.
With that in mind, the museum is preparing a new exhibition for early 2010 on Roma musicians and bands in Serbia in the period between 1901 and 1941.
Ackovic, who is the author of the museum's first exhibition and several books on Roma people, disputed the widespread notion that the Roma have no language, noting that their language, derived from Sanskrit, is among the oldest in the world.
However, the museum and its efforts to popularize Roma heritage have very little meaning to one mother who was begging on a Belgrade street with her two children.
"What do I care about some museum?" said the woman, who gave her name as Esme. She spoke in broken Serbian while her children, barely dressed, played with a piece of bread. "If they gave me food or clothes for the children, then I would go. You don't know nothing about my problems."
The beggars had little success with the passers-by, who mainly ignored them. One elderly woman threw some coins into a box in front of Esme, complaining that "these gypsies are the worst."
"They mutilate their children and then force them to beg. Where is the culture in that?" she told
