This book focuses on one of Britain's most marginalised and underrepresented ethnic minorities, Scotland's Traveller communities. The term ‘Travellers’ describes a series of interlinked social and familial communities that have existed in Scotland as distinct from mainstream society since at least the twelfth century (Kenrick and Clark 1999: 51). Recently, writers interested in these communities raised the issue of the underrepresentation of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history in current scholarship: ‘“what field?”’, they ask, noting that ‘Gypsy and Traveller history remains something of a backwater, seemingly cut off from this same flow of historical attention’ that is given to other minority ethnic populations (Taylor and Hinks 2021: 629). The same might be said of Scotland's Travellers’ cultural heritage and this book therefore examines the unique storytelling traditions of these communities. It also reveals how stories make meaning within the communities that share them and showcases their enduring relevance to contemporary Scottish culture, and beyond.

As of 2011, Travellers have been officially recognised by the Scottish Government in the form of a separate ethnic category. The 2011 census carried out by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) included a separate response category to allow people to specifically identify themselves as ‘White – Gypsy/Traveller’ (NRS 2014: 2). According to the Scottish Government, the 2011 census results reported around 4,000 individuals as belonging to the ‘White – Gypsy/Traveller’ category (‘A Comprehensive Analysis of the 2011 Census’ 2015: 5). The same governmental report also states that it ‘should be noted that some organisations working with Gypsy/ Travellers in Scotland estimate that the population figure is much higher’ (ibid.: 6).

Letter to Yorgos Lanthimos

Dear Yorgos, there are no words to describe the national pride we all feel these days …

In the week leading up to the Ninety-First Academy Awards Ceremony in 2019, the Association of Greek Cinema Directors and Producers (ESPEK) released a video to wish Lanthimos good luck. His third English-language feature film, The Favourite, had been nominated for ten Oscars, the culmination of an international reception that included the Grand Jury Prize at the Seventy-Fifth Venice Film Festival, an array of Golden Globes, Baftas and other mentions during that ‘award season’. The film eventually won Olivia Colman the Academy Award for the best performance by an actress in a leading role.

The Greek Cinema Association's video is titled Letter to Yorgos Lanthimos,1 and it was filmed in the seaside town of Kinetta, the location of Lanthimos's first feature-length film of note in 2005, Kinetta. It starts with actor Makis Papadimitriou, well-known from a spate of recent Greek films such as Chevalier, A Blast and Suntan, reading the first lines of his ‘letter’ to the famous director while on a coach heading to Kinetta. He continues via voice-over while we see him wandering through empty streets, beaches and hotels.

Virginia Woolf's study of photographs, portraits, and faces is part of her investigations of the enigma of character and the ungraspable something surrounding each human being. Critical of the biographical paradigm of the Victorian era, she attempted to depict an aspect of human life that is not about action or dialogue, but rather about emotional, thoughtful, and imaginary life. While she gave prevalence to the inner worlds of her characters, she also explored the role of visual communication. Using the technique of “showing seeing,” she dwells on situations when action and dialogue stop and a visual activity takes over. The reading of faces, with their gestures, miens, and often unreturned gazes, is a key activity in her novels, although often carried out discreetly, in scenes involving portrait photographs and painted portraits, as well as the “natural” faces of her characters. It could indeed be argued that her contribution to modernist literature is not merely her exploration of the isolated “thought worlds” of each human being, but also her reflection upon the limited access we have to other “thought worlds” and our perpetual effort to connect with others. Indeed, Woolf's brilliancy was her ability to describe the distance between people and unfold the problem of communication. She understood that in a situation where people do not understand each other and partly have lost faith in words, they are more than ever confronted with each other's faces and with unspoken feelings of sympathy, reserve, or dismay.

The physical remains of the Abbasid palace gardens in Lower Mesopotamia have largely disappeared and archaeologists have mostly ignored these gardens. In a letter to the orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker, dated 25 March 1911, Herzfeld wrote, ‘In Berlin ist man über die ornamentierten Wände sehr erfreut. Und Seine Majestät hat 15,000 Mark gestiftet. Ich hoffe noch weitere Mittel zu bekommen … .’ Herzfeld's publications and personal notes attest that the prime interest of the German expeditions during the two campaigns in Samarra that took place from 1910 to 1913 was merely to clarify the general plans of the buildings and specifically to discover new varieties of stucco wall decorations. As a result, the gardens, as vast open spaces adjacent to the palace buildings, were largely regarded as unimportant to the aims of their investigations. Subsequent excavations at Samarra led by the Iraq Directorate-General of Antiquities since the 1930s have predominantly concentrated on specific structures, and the garden expanses rarely had a place in their investigations.

Archaeological evidence attests to the existence of gardens attached to three palaces at Samarra: Balkuwārā, the Caliphal Palace and Jaʿfarī. The physical traces of the garden of Jaʿfarī Palace are minimal and primarily indicate its proximity to the river and a large rectangular pool, which have already been discussed in Chapters One and Three. Thus, this chapter will focus on the gardens of the Caliphal Palace and Balkuwārā, which both have particular significance to the study of gardens of the Abbasid period but for distinct reasons. Balkuwārā is the only site where a clear outline of the garden is evident, whereas certain key features of the garden of the Caliphal Palace can be discerned which permit reasonable speculations as to its layout and principal design.

As we move towards the second quarter of the twenty first century, close attention to the intangible cultural heritage of Scotland's diverse Traveller communities is puzzlingly sparse. In a 1989 newspaper article, Hamish Henderson famously quipped that collecting the songs and stories of Scotland's Traveller communities at the annual berry harvest in Blairgowrie was akin to ‘holding a tin can under the Niagara Falls’ (2004: 2). Yet the abundance of material that was collected from Scotland's Traveller communities during the twentieth century – now housed in the SSS Archives, a sizable proportion of which has been made available digitally through TAD – is often underutilised. The central purpose of this book has been to address this scarcity and offer the reader a glimpse of the cultural abundance recognised by Henderson. Along with our archives, the living tradition-bearers from the Traveller communities represent robust and vibrant Scottish cultural identities. A dramatic change in working lifestyles – lamented by Duncan Campbell at the beginning of this study (1910: 24–25) – and a mainstream shift toward sedentary ideals should not mean the obliteration of marginalised cultural identities. One commentator recently put it as strongly as this: ‘Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are Britain's internal refugees – shunned and abandoned by their country of birth […] perceptions need changing. Biases need questioning. Discrimination needs challenging’ (Henry 2022: 3).

This book has shown how we can begin to address such concerns by looking closely at the cultural heritage that the communities hold dear. Despite the Rehfisches bemoaning the gallons of ink and effort that have been spent developing theories around the origins of Scotland's Travellers (1975: 272), this book gives us better understandings of how the most recent generations of the communities express their culture.

Gardens built during the period of Abbasid rule in their Lower Mesopotamian heartland have hitherto been one of the least investigated subjects in the fields of garden studies and Islamic architecture. This lack of inquiry can be primarily ascribed to the inherent nature of these gardens, which have left fewer tangible remnants, coupled with a general disinterest in excavating these expansive areas. Yet, excavations at some palace complexes, particularly those in Samarra during the early twentieth century, complemented by aerial photographs, offer a glimpse into the gardens associated with these palaces and their relationships with broader architectural and environmental settings. Furthermore, textual sources from the period contain a wealth of information about the palace gardens, which offer detailed descriptions, necessary context and historical insights. Combining this meagre material evidence with contemporary textual sources transforms these fragments into a valuable resource, offering a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the spatial arrangement, functions and cultural significance of these overlooked landscapes. This interdisciplinary approach not only permits the examination of these gardens from diverse perspectives but also forces us to revisit some prevailing notions regarding the spatial arrangement and function of the adjoining covered spaces. These ideas, formulated primarily by the archaeologists who excavated these palaces in the early twentieth century, have been adopted but not fundamentally questioned by later scholars.

Oral narratives can and should be interpreted in the same way as artistic texts. In the same way as printed literature, oral narratives can embody sophisticated negotiations of contemporary social and cultural issues. This elevates the stories to a position where their contents shift from ‘vestigial’ understandings of an apparently simpler world to sophisticated negotiations of cultural identity. A central function of Traveller storytelling is to provide an arena where cultural identity and continuity are represented, conditioned and sustained. To demonstrate how this function manifests, Part II begins by examining a series of ‘identity strategy’ stories from two strong tradition-bearers who we met in Part I – Stanley Robertson and Duncan Williamson. What these stories represent are meaningful negotiations of Traveller identity through nuanced explorations of superficial appearances. What we find in these stories is the theme of an enigmatic inner Traveller identity, an identity that is juxtaposed with a specious outward identity.

As a recurring theme in Travellers’ stories, Braid propounds that the inclusion of this contrast functions to ‘strengthen the bonds between Travellers […] and to maintain autonomy and identity in the face of pressure to assimilate into settled culture’ (2002: 46). The core duality within these stories is that of Traveller and non-Traveller, and the function within each story is to articulate this very distinction. These stories juxtapose dualities from a distinctly Traveller perspective, where we encounter themes of justice and injustice being negotiated through protagonists with seemingly contradictory identities. We also find the concept of immutable familial bonds being used to expose the oppositional forces inherent to social existence.

Close examination and contextualisation of Travellers’ stories are potent allies when seeking meanings within the stories. Both personal and collective cultural identity strategies are at work; the stories of the strong tradition-bearers we have examined already display themes that other members of the Travelling communities can identify with – strong tradition-bearers can ventriloquise the sentiments and worldviews of broader communities of Travellers. We have focused our inquiries on the inner lives of the Travellers, and how these inner identities manifest themselves within the stories that they share. This is a theme that we return to in subsequent chapters. The present chapter scrutinises a macabre external factor that has had a demonstrable impact on Traveller storytelling. The Travellers’ oral history and storytelling traditions are replete with references to the so-called ‘Burkers’. The term ‘Burker’ is a reference to William Burke and his murderous activities as a provider of cadavers to Edinburgh's medical colleges in the early nineteenth century. A brief overview of the salient points of Burke's activities, to contextualise the term ‘Burker’, is where we begin. This overview clarifies how the term itself is understood within the Travellers’ traditions and is contrasted with more mainstream representations of Burke and his associates. We see how a combination of factors affected the way that Burkean anxiety penetrated the consciousness of the Travellers and settled population alike. The aim here is to gain a clearer understanding of the impact that such heinous crimes had on Scotland's collective imagination, then to take a close look at how the Burkers manifest in the Travellers’ tradition to the present day, presenting a new way of thinking about what they mean.

In the decades before and after 1900, portrait photographs offered new ways of studying and perceiving the human face. As we have seen, Proust, Kafka, and Woolf all took an interest in the medium and depicted how their characters engaged in the reading of portrait photographs. Yet this literary attention to the medium should be correctly understood. When Proust, Kafka, and Woolf describe the cultural and affective practices surrounding portrait photographs, these scenes are not merely representations of a set of trivial media habits, subordinated to the respective novel's course of action. Rather, such scenes serve as fictive laboratories for the study of portrait photographs and their relation to the beholder. They could be described as modernist media labs, exploring the attraction of portrait photographs and the uncertain status of the mediated face. Even if such scenes are usually not in the foreground, they are of great significance. Reading them attentively, we see that Proust, Kafka, and Woolf took the impact of portrait photographs seriously and explored the ways in which such pictures work on the beholder.

When literary texts reflect on the media situation, this allows us to consider the media as part of a lived environment and to comprehend the emotional and relational implications of media change. As media theorist Friedrich Kittler states, modernist literature was highly sensitive to the new media technology:

A few pages later, you will find a scene that, I have come to realise, could be used as a key to understand this book as a whole. In 2016, Yorgos Zois, a young Greek director, gave an interview to ARTE, the French/German art TV channel in 2016: ‘The new Wave of Greek Cinema produces films that are as absurd as the financial crisis that has hit the country’, begins the journalist. ‘Welcome to Athens, the capital of Greece, the supposed weakest link of Europe’. As Zois's work came to international attention for its relationship to the socio-political situation that in recent years has come to be known as the ‘Greek Crisis’ all over the world, he is asked to speak about a controversial scene that he has directed, in which a young man is seen throwing a Molotov cocktail in an almost choreographed manner. While they were shooting, so Zois says, ‘there was a real demonstration happening in the background’,

So much in this scene – including the absurdity of the question ‘you used a real Molotov cocktail?’ – speaks to the questions that serve as a starting point for this book. What did an international and national audience expect from Greek Cinema during this recent turbulent period? How did it deliver? How can you make films with such expectations, but also in that socio-political context? How real should you be? How realist? And also, how strange, how weird is it to be thrown into a predefined role and then to try, like the Greek director in this interview, to both stay on script, but also to showcase the levels of absurdity that that script has already reached?

A Dog in the Middle of the Sea: Oik(t)os

From the very first scenes of Babis Makridis's Pity (2018, based on a script by Efthimis Filippou), it is striking to see how frequently all the characters appear in frames: not only framed by the rectangular film image, but also by architectonic and scenic elements in the mise-en-scène, an effect commonly referred to as a ‘frame within a frame’ (cf. Treske 2011). They stand in front of new, shiny buildings; they loiter next to spotlessly clean windows with views of the Athenian coast; they sit behind expensive rectangular furniture; they walk past recent additions to the coastline of Athens (from the early 2000s), including some major commercial and corporate landmarks. The buildings are largely empty, as is the coastline; yet, they offer enough vertical and horizontal lines to frame the characters moving around them even further.

A father-and-son duo visit their wife and mother while she is in a prolonged coma in hospital, only to find themselves more elaborately framed: by hospital doors, stands, beds and medical equipment. Later, one sees a dog abandoned in the middle of the sea by its owner, from a drone shot, as a spot at the centre of the blue horizon. There is no point or character in the diegesis that could make us think of this as a point-of-view shot. Neither is this constant framing and ‘measuring’ of living beings accidental. From a certain moment onwards, it becomes so excessive that it becomes the film. You are meant to interpret it as something more than the idiosyncrasy of the mise-en-scène.