Over the years, I have photographed weddings and henna nights in different parts of Anatolia. In July 2016, an invitation to a Roma wedding near Pavlikeni, in Bulgaria’s Veliko Tarnovo region, introduced me to a celebration unlike any I had previously witnessed. Rather than a single evening, the ceremonies unfolded over two days, each with its own setting, gestures and rhythms. I was there as a guest with my camera, watching a family mark the passage from one stage of life to another.
The Roma families I met in the village worked mainly in agriculture and service occupations. Many spoke Turkish and used Turkish names among themselves alongside their official Bulgarian names. Their wedding made visible the layered history of a community shaped by movement and settlement, by family traditions, and by centuries of contact with its neighbours. The Roma’s distant roots in the Indian subcontinent are well established through the history of the Romani language, an Indo-Aryan language, although the exact routes and dates of the earliest migrations remain subjects of research.
The first day belonged to the bride’s family. The groom arrived with his relatives carrying packages of sweets, a gesture of goodwill towards the household they were joining through marriage. In a temporary space prepared between the houses, the bride emerged with her friends, and henna patterns were applied to her hands and feet. Music and dancing accompanied the preparations. I recognised the intimacy of the henna nights I had photographed in Anatolia, but here the designs also recalled the elaborate bridal mehndi familiar across South Asia.
Henna is a particularly revealing example of cultural connections—and of their limits. Its use at weddings extends far beyond India, through the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia and the Balkans. Across these regions it can express joy, blessing, beauty and the bride’s transition into married life. The resemblance between the Bulgarian Roma ceremony and South Asian mehndi is striking, but it cannot by itself prove that this particular custom survived unchanged from the Roma’s distant Indian past. Traditions travel, are shared, and acquire new meanings wherever communities make their homes.
On the second day the celebration moved to the open ground in front of the groom’s house. His mother and father took the bride by the hands, leading her forward and presenting her to the assembled guests in a sequence of steps that was both a welcome and a public acknowledgment of the new family bond. Movement was not simply entertainment: it allowed relationships to be expressed before the whole community, without the need for formal speeches.
The bride and groom wore garments that, to my eye, evoked Indian festive dress. During their dance a scarf was placed around the groom’s neck, and the bride used it to guide him. I understood this playful gesture as her public declaration of their new relationship. The clothing and choreography invited me to think about the community’s South Asian ancestry, yet the meanings of these particular details are best understood through the family’s own explanations, rather than attributed automatically to an ancient Indian rite.
Later, the couple walked arm in arm with their attendants, whom I knew as their sadıç—wedding companions or guides—while friends followed carrying candles. The small flames, the slow procession and the closeness of the participants created a very different atmosphere from the exuberant dancing. The bride then kissed her mother-in-law’s hand, a gesture of respect familiar in Turkish and Balkan family life. These moments brought several cultural languages together within one celebration.
The wedding ended in a collective Gankino horo, a Bulgarian folk dance associated especially with the north of the country and known for its lively, asymmetrical rhythm. After the intimate rituals of henna and the formal gestures between families, the circle of dancers opened the celebration to everyone. For me, this was the most memorable aspect of the wedding: not a simple survival of one distant tradition, but a living Roma ceremony in which echoes of South Asia, customs shared with Anatolia, and the rhythms of Bulgaria met naturally in the same village.