The goal of the text is to sum up the existing works on religion and religiosity of the Gypsies in the Czech Republic and, to a certain extent, also in the Slovak Republic. We summarize the tendencies to be found in the academic texts on this topic and propose the positive way for the future studies and texts, which consists in the clear definition of the subject matter, and explicit use of the conceptual tools and theories.
The text describes the history of the first Czech village in Bulgaria – Sesek. It is the first attempt to present systematically all known information about this village scattered in publications, unpublished materials and archives. One of the main purposes of the study is to prove that “Sesek” was de iure as well as de facto standard village inhabited by (primarily though not exclusively) Czech families – migrants from the Czech village Svatá Helena in Rumanian Banat, not just a “place” these went through on their way to later founded Vojvodovo (usually presumed to be the only Bulgarian Czech village).
In the tradition of imagology, as it was elaborated in the works of V. Todorov and Z. Urban, the author presents an image of the Czech community living in a village of Vojvodovo in Bulgaria from the beginning of the 20th century till 1950, as it was seen through the eyes of their neighbors. As a source the author uses published texts as well as unpublished memoirs dealing with Vojvodovo, and testimonies gathered during his fieldwork in Vojvodovo in a period 1997–2009. Derived from the mentioned sources, the final image of the Czechs in Vojvodovo is very positive. It presents them as a noticeably united group of puritans, who were industrious in an exemplary manner, primarily peasants, nevertheless very good traders, neat and culturally advanced, honest and willing, which made them good neighbors, except the fact that they were not very hospital to strangers.