3.9
The Sepečides from Izmir and surroundings
The Sepečides ‘basket weavers’ in the area of Izmir on the Western coast of Turkey are a group of several hundred Roma who until a few decades ago had their traditional profession of weaving and selling baskets. They spoke a variant of Romani typical of the Romani dialects spoken in the Southern Balkan countries and Greece. Their ancestors originally lived in the area of Thessaloniki in Greece and migrated east when the Turkish Republic was founded after the Greco-Turkish War in the 1920s.
