The Roma were a wandering people, who lived communally, generally did not posses permanent or stationary jobs or homes, and for whom music, storytelling, and mystical arts were a central part of their lifestyles. In the modern era, “Bohemian” came to be used to describe Roma people, or gypsies as they were also called, in much of Western Europe.

But how did a term which literally referred to a medieval kingdom in Central Europe, part of today’s Czech Republic, come to define a lifestyle which so transformed western culture? It was in fact in Paris in the early 19th century that the term “bohemian” came to be associated with people living an artistic and unconventional lifestyle. John Sloane et al atop Washington Square Arch About eighty years later, the musical Rent, about life in the East Village in the late 1980’s, was actually an updated version of the opera ‘La Boheme,’ about ‘bohemians’ living in Paris in the 1840’s. It is a notion which has come to in many ways define and transform neighborhoods like the East Village and Greenwich Village, which are more strongly associated with the term than almost anyplace else on earth.Īs illustration, in January, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Drick, and John Sloane climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch, started a bonfire, and declared that Greenwich Village had seceded from America, forming the Independent Republic of Bohemia. ‘Bohemian,’ as commonly used in the West for the last two centuries, means a person who lives an unconventional lifestyle, often with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic, or literary pursuits.

On April 17, 1423, an event took place which, implausibly enough, lead to the creation of the modern notion - or at least nomenclature - of ‘bohemia.’

The Last Bohemians by Kit Kimberly