Rosa Taikon

Rosa Sofia Ingeborg Taikon (30 July 1926 – 1 June 2017), formerly Janusch and Widegren, was a Swedish Romani silversmith and activist. From the Kalderash subgroup, Taikon first received public recognition for her work as a silversmith. Following the murder of her brother in 1962, Taikon and her sister Katarina became noted Romani activists against antiziganism in Sweden as well as abroad. For her contribution to Romani rights, Taikon was awarded the Olof Palme Prize in 2013.

Biography

Taikon was the daughter of Johan Istvan Taikon and Agda Karlsson, and the older sister of the writer Katarina Taikon. Her mother was from Härryda, while her father, a fairground owner, merchant, coppersmith, and musician, first visited Sweden in 1898, and opted to stay there in 1914 after the Swedish government introduced a ban on admitting Romani people into the country. Taikon married Masha, a Russian immigrant, after settling in Sweden; they had no children. During the 1920s, Taikon met Karlsson while she was waitressing at a restaurant in Gothenburg. Karlsson moved in with Taikon and Masha, and had four children together: in addition to Rosa and Katarina, they also had a son, Paul, and another daughter, Paulina. The children grew up understanding Masha to be their grandmother or great-grandmother.

In 1932, Karlsson died of tuberculosis shortly after Katarina's birth, when Taikon was six years old. Soon afterwards, her father remarried a woman from Sundsvall. The family frequently had to travel around Sweden in search of work, which was difficult to find due to anti-Romani discrimination. Taikon later reported that the family had to move every three weeks due to anti-loitering laws; historian Jan Selling subsequently said that such laws did not exist, but that it was likely that local law enforcement implemented informal "three-week rules".