Marime

Two washing bowls sit under the tap, and they are never swapped. One is for crockery. The other is for the body. If they are ever confused the crockery goes into the bin, and it goes into the bin whether or not anything has visibly happened to it. None of this is about germs.

The word for what has gone wrong is marime among the Vlax Roma, written variously marimé, mahrime and marhimo. In England and Wales the word is mochadi or moxado. In Poland it is mageripen, among the Sinti prasepen, among the Kalderaš the compound pekelimos-mahrimos. These are not translations of each other so much as parallel inheritances of one idea: the Vlax term came out of Byzantine Greek during the long westward passage through Anatolia and the Balkans, while the English and Polish words go back to an older Indian root meaning smeared. The concept reached Europe twice, in two languages, and stayed.

Against it stands vuzo, or wuzho, or žužo, meaning ritually clean. The pairing is not the same as clean and dirty. Romani has a separate and harmless word for ordinary grime, and Judith Okely, who lived with English Travellers through the 1970s, put the distinction as bluntly as it can be put: a person’s face and clothes can be black with dirt and not be mochadi at all, so long as the inner body is clean.

Among the Vlax Roma the line is drawn at the waist. Above it the body is vuzo, and the head, furthest from everything below, is the purest part of a person. Below the waist the body produces what defiles. The hands sit between the two zones, transitional, clean or unclean depending on when they were last washed, which is exactly what allows them to serve both halves. From that one line everything else follows. Hands are never washed in the sink that takes the dishes. A cloth that has cleaned a bath never touches a cup. Men and women keep separate bars of soap and separate towels, and children are given their own so the habit forms early. Skirts are dangerous because they hang against the lower body, so a woman cooks in an apron and steps behind a seated man rather than in front of him.

The English geometry is not the same, and the difference is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. Okely found the crucial division running not between upper and lower but between inner and outer. The outer body is the public self, a covering, and carries the shed skin and the dirt of the world. The inner body is the private and ethnic self, and what goes into it through the mouth must be ritually clean. What matters is that the outside is never recycled through the inside. Non-Roma fail this test permanently for the simple reason that they do not make the distinction at all.

In the 1930s a group of women were picking berries. One of them, going about her work, stepped across the fruit already gathered. Nothing touched it and nothing marked it, and the whole picking was thrown away. Jan Yoors, who travelled with Lovara families for a decade and wrote the incident down, records no argument about it.

Contagion is the part outsiders find hardest. Pollution moves. It moves from hands to water, from water to a sink, from a sink to a plate, from a plate to food, from food to whoever eats. Cats and dogs are polluted because they groom themselves with their tongues. A man does not walk under a line of drying skirts. A woman does not take the flat above a man. A prison sentence makes a person marime because a cell is a room where you sleep beside a toilet. Childbirth defiles, so it happens away from the household, and mother and child are kept apart for a week and then partly apart for a further thirty-three days, with crockery set aside for the purpose and destroyed at the end of it.

The accounts do not entirely agree about what marriage does. A Romani informant interviewed in New York in the late 1990s described a married woman as clean from the neck up and polluted from the shoulders down, while her husband is polluted only from the waist. Walter Weyrauch and Maureen Bell, writing in the Yale Law Journal in 1993, report both spouses as waist-down. Nobody has reconciled the two, and the difference is not academic to whoever is doing the laundry.

There is no origin story. No deity hands the code down and no tale explains where it came from, which is unusual enough to be worth saying, and it is a large part of why marime is one of the few pieces of Romani tradition that scholars trust. What can be traced is the writing about it, and that shelf is short: a 1922 paper in the journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Yoors in 1967, Elwood Trigg in 1973, Carol Miller and Anne Sutherland in 1975, Okely in 1983, Marlene Sway in 1988. Almost everything an English reader can find rests on that handful of books, most of them written by outsiders, most of them describing Vlax families in North America or Travellers in England.

Yoors watched a brawl among Lovara men that nobody could break up. One of the wives warned them, tore off one of her skirts and swept it over the lot of them. The fight stopped in the same instant, because every man in it was now polluted, and no relative of theirs would come near any of them until a court had lifted it.

That court is the kris. Ordinary quarrels can be settled informally, but a pollution charge skips straight to the formal tribunal, because the answer decides whether a person remains inside the community at all. The proceeding is deliberately expensive and deliberately shaming. Its heaviest sentence is to declare the accused marime, which is expulsion, sometimes temporary and sometimes for life, and which falls on the family as well as the man. One Rom described the effect to Jean-Paul Clébert: nobody will speak to him, not his wife, not his mother, not his children, nobody will seat him at a table, anything he touches must be destroyed however valuable it is, nobody will even kill him to end it because going near him is a risk, and when he dies nobody walks behind him to the grave. Only the kris can put a person back.

This is the part that makes marime more than a hygiene code. Theft from another Rom, fraud, breaking a territorial agreement, assault: all of them are marime, in precisely the same register as the wrong sponge. Rena Gropper noted that where outsiders separate crime from sin, the two are one thing here and both go before the court. Enforcement begins before anyone else finds out, because the pollution lands on the offender the moment he offends, and Trigg observed that a man in that state is avoided by his own family out of fear for themselves.

Its limits are real and the code’s own keepers have imposed some of them. Skirt-tossing was used so freely in the United States and Canada through the late 1960s and 1970s that kris panels began ruling both parties polluted until the matter was heard, and the practice is now rare. The Finnish Kaale hold a concept of marime but do not hold that it is catching, do not regard the outside world as dangerous, and have no kris at all; they settle their quarrels by feud. The Polish Roma keep the strictest version anywhere, with prohibitions nobody else recognises, including a ban on metal weapons in a fight. Among long-settled communities in the Carpathians and the Balkans the whole system has thinned out or gone.

Not everyone kept it. A 2024 study interviewing Romani women in Slovakia about menstruation found that not one of them recognised marime. They were, all the same, emphatic about cleanliness, and gave a reason that had nothing to do with the old code: it was how you refused what people said about you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does marime mean?

Marime means ritually polluted or defiled in Romani, and its opposite is vuzo, ritually clean. It is not the same as being physically dirty, for which Romani has a separate and harmless word. A person can be covered in grime without being marime, and a spotless plate can be marime if it was washed in the wrong bowl.

What makes something or someone marime?

Among the Vlax Roma the body is divided at the waist, and anything from the lower half that reaches the upper half pollutes. Washing hands in the dish sink, a cat or dog licking a plate, a woman’s skirt brushing a man, or laundering men’s and women’s clothes together all cause it. Serious wrongs against other Roma, including theft, fraud and assault, are also classed as marime.

What happens to someone sentenced marime?

The Romani tribunal known as the kris can declare a person marime, which means expulsion from the community for a set time or for life, and the sentence can extend to the person’s family. While it lasts, other Roma will not eat with them, touch them or shake their hand, and objects they handle may be destroyed. Only a kris can lift the sentence and restore them.

Is marime the same as mochadi?

Yes. Marime is the Vlax Romani word and mochadi, also spelled moxado, is the English and Welsh Romani word for the same idea; Polish Roma say mageripen and the Sinti say prasepen. The rules attached to the word differ from group to group, and the English version divides the body into inner and outer rather than upper and lower.

Is marime still practised?

It varies enormously. It remains active among Vlax, Kalderaš and Polish Romani communities, while the Finnish Kaale never held that pollution was contagious and long-settled families in the Carpathians and the Balkans have largely let it go. A 2024 study of Romani women in Slovakia found that none of the participants recognised the term at all.

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