As a Romanian (not to be confused with Romani, the Roma ethnic group), living in a country with such a big Roma population, I got to meet their culture at a very young age.

Moving past all the remnant racism, and being warned as a child that "I'll be given away to the gypsies if I don't act nice", I found their way of living absolutely fascinating.

From the fact that there are very few ways to permeate their society, since the language is transmitted almost exclusively by oral tradition, to the completely distinct way they dress and finally, their obsession with gold.

So I dug myself a rabbit hole, and started to research.

Who are the Roma people?

The Roma (also called Romani, and still sometimes Gypsies, though that word is now considered a slur) are an ethnic group of about 10 to 12 million people, making them one of the largest minorities in Europe. They originated in northern India, and began migrating towards the West about a thousand years ago. By the 14th century, they had already spread across most of Europe.

Their language, Romani, is related to Hindi and Sanskrit, not to any European tongue. Which is part of why they've always stood out.

They were never a nation in the political sense. No homeland, no state or king with an army. Just a group of people, scattered across every country they passed through, living mostly on the margins. In Romania, where I grew up, they made up a sizeable part of the population, with one of the biggest Roma communities in the world. The Roma - Romania naming is strictly a coincidence. They're two different ethnic groups.

An important mention is that they were enslaved for nearly 500 years. No, that's not a typo. Slavery of the Roma was only abolished here in 1856, roughly the same time as in the United States.

After emancipation, they were freed without land, without citizenship in any meaningful sense and without access to the institutions the rest of society used to build a life. Then came the 20th century, and the Holocaust, in which an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Roma were murdered. In Romani, they call it the Porajmos, which means "the devouring." I had goosebumps. That's a striking name for a movie.

The point of this history isn't to make you feel bad. It's to understand the structural position they've occupied for a millennium: a people inside Europe but never of it.

Why did the Romani historically choose gold?

Why not land or other assets?

As I said, the Roma people were heavily persecuted across the centuries. They arrived in Europe around the 14th century, and because they looked, behaved and spoke differently, they were never welcomed anywhere they went.

The Roma were always weary of the gadje (their term for the non-Romani), but the Porajmos made them close off to the outside world even more.

They had little to no access to mainstream services like banking or land ownership, so gold became the easiest way to store wealth.

When sh*t hit the fan, your wealth was already around your neck, wrists and fingers. Easy to carry, easy to sell and universally recognized.

But why is Gold still important to the Roma of today?

One could argue that today, the Roma people can easily have bank accounts and that efforts have been made to integrate them in societies across Europe.

So why do Roma still love and use gold so much?

The de facto truth is that Roma have not forgotten what the gadje did to them these past few centuries. The distrust has become ingrained in their way of life.

For so long, they were refused access to formal education. Access to finance services, arts, and land ownership.

And when the mainstream society locks you out of their status game, through centuries of systemic marginalization, you invent your own game.

A symbol that is older than money. A symbol that all the Roma people understand as well as the gadje outsiders. A symbol you wear on your skin.

And so, gold became the default storage of status.

Status is a very interesting concept because for someone to be attributed status, there needs to be a common shared language of what is deemed valuable.

For example, if I show you my new sculpture made by Brancusi, unless you know who Brancusi is, you're not going to know that I paid 70 million dollars for it.

Now you may not be into art, you may not pay that much for a sculpture yourself. But if you know what a Brancusi is worth, we established a shared language of status, and in your eyes, I have great status.

Which is why art is a very subtle status game, reserved for intellectuals and elites. It belongs to those educated to recognize and speak that status language.

Gold, however, requires no translation.

Gold is the ultimate universal status symbol.

Shiny, rare and portable, worn for everyone to see, admire and envy.

Gold is status democratized.