170 OF BODIES AND DOCUMENTS: A REPORTAGE FROM A TRANSYLVANIAN VILLAGE ANA CHIRITOIU DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY, CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder. — Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem Preamble On 20 September 1993, in the village of Hădăreni, set in central Transylvania, a seemingly casual scuffle took a sudden tragic turn. An elderly man returning home with his horse and carriage noticed three young men talking to a girl in the bus stop. Assuming they were bothering the girl, the man admonished the youngsters, and when they replied rudely, he took out his horse whip to strike them. As the exchange became more heated, the old man’s son, who was playing football with his friends on the nearby stadium, came to his father’s defence. One of the three young men stabbed him and he died shortly afterwards. The scene quickly escalated into what some would later call a ‘pogrom’. The young men whom the elder admonished were Roma ethnics, while all the other participants — the elder, his son, and the girl waiting for the bus — were not. (Had the three young men also been Romanian ethnics, the old man would most likely not have been bothered that they were talking to a girl in the first place.) The Orthodox priest allowed a couple of men — whom he later said he had not seen before in church — to sound the church bells, so that villagers would gather in the village centre. Upon hearing that the old man’s son had been stabbed by ‘Gypsies’, a large crowd of non-Roma locals armed with bats and torches quickly assembled and pursued the three Roma men. These sought refuge in a nearby house, which the crowd set on fire. The few policemen who had meanwhile arrived at the scene promised the three men protection in exchange for their surrender, so that two of the men inside the house came out, but they were seized and lynched by the crowd. (There is no agreed-upon version whether the policemen could not, or would not prevent this act.) The third Roma man burned to death inside the house. The mob then set ablaze a dozen households belonging to Roma families, who ran for their lives to nearby forests and hills. After the riot, locals did not allow the family of the three Roma victims to bury their dead in the village cemetery. Their funeral took place in another village, where the family had come from a few decades before, and was attended by members of the incipient Roma-rights movement, who also organised rallies in nearby towns to denounce antigypsyism. (One prominent activist told me in an interview how disappointed he was when it turned out that many of the rank and file Roma ethnics present at the rallies had been enticed to participate not by the cause as such, but by local leaders’ promises of ‘aid’.) A few days after the conflict, the mayor of Hădăreni assembled the villagers on the stadium and praised their civic spirit. Despite a popular theory claiming that tensions, once aired, would dissipate, some non-Roma villagers in fact persevered in their vigilantism, and kept attacking those Roma locals who wanted to return to their houses. Riot police were stationed in the village for weeks on end.