Roma in the Population Censuses of 1921 and 1931 on the Territory of Croatia

The author’s aim in this paper is to analyse the demographic structure of the Roma population on the territory of Croatia, Slavonia and Međimurje in the period between the two world wars. Statistical analytic methods are applied that indicate the age, gender, educational and religious structure of the Roma population in Croatia. The number of Roma on the territory of Croatia in the period between the two world wars was somewhere between 6,000 and 15,000. Most of the Roma were permanently settled and only a small part continued to carry on a nomadic life style. According to the analysed data, the Roma population was concentrated mostly in the area of Eastern Slavonia and in Podravina, whereas Dalmatia, the Croatian littoral, Lika and Krbava had a lower proportion of Roma. The Roma population lived mostly in rural settlements; only a small part lived in urban areas: Zagreb, Karlovac and Varaždin. The author emphasises the equal proportions of males and females in the Roma population, as well as their very young age structure. The majority of the Roma population accepted the dominant religion of the population of the territory in which it settled, and thus most of the Roma declared themselves as members of the Roman Catholic Church, and only a small part as Eastern Orthodox Christians. The author notes that most Roma were illiterate, and that only a small part was totally or partially literate. He emphasises that only a third of the Roma declared themselves as members of the Roma ethnic group, which indicates a low level of mutual connections and the progress of the assimilation process. Based on the population censuses of 1921 and 1931, the author concludes that as a young, illiterate and mutually non-connected group, the Roma population found itself on the margins of Croatian society, and that precisely this marginality was to become a target of the assimilation policies implemented by the regime of the WWII Independent State of Croatia