Tera Fabiánová (née Kurinová) was born in Žihárec (formerly Czechoslovakia, today Slovakia) on 15 October 1930. She grew up in southern Slovakia, a region with a Hungarian-speaking minority. She spoke Ungriko Romani as her mother-tongue and, since her marriage, the so-called Servika dialect, as well as Hungarian and Slovak. At the age of sixteen she left Slovakia with her parents and siblings to work first in Moravia and shortly thereafter in Prague. She died in Prague on 23 March 2007.

Apart from poems, Tera Fabiánová wrote tales, short stories and feature articles. In 1970, in her column ‘Zadáno pro Teru’ [Reserved for Tera] in the first volume of Romano l’il, the journal of the association ‘Svaz Cikánů-Romů’, founded in 1969, she published the very first literary work in Romani in the former Czechoslovakia (Hübschmannova 2015: 349). Her texts, together with the activities of the Romani studies specialist Milena Hübschmannová, influenced and encouraged many Roma in today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia to start writing.
For a detailed biography, see ‘Tera Fabiánová’ by Hübschmannova (2003); a list of her works can be found in Steklá (2007).

(Philipp Sperner)

Literature

Fabiánová, Tera. 2000. Tera Fabiánová II: Miro dživipen – Můj život. In: Romano džaniben 3/2000, 72–79 (= http://www.dzaniben.cz/download.html?f=727526b1be03e2e3a9fd2f41fe058723.pdf = https://perma.cc/8VJT-Q4P9)

Hübschmannová, Milena. 2003. Tera Fabiánová. In: RomBase – Didactically edited information on Roma. http://rombase.uni-graz.at/cgi-bin/art.cgi?src=data/pers/fabianova.en.xml (= https://perma.cc/4WSS-QZVN)

Hübschmannová, Milena. 2015. Meine Begegnungen mit dem Šukar Laviben der Roma. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Susanne Costa. In: Erika Thurner/Elisabeth Hussl/Beate Eder-Jordan: Roma und Travellers. Identitäten im Wandel. Mit einem Vorwort von Karl-Markus Gauß. Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, pp. 325–366. DOI: 10.15203/2936-95-0-21 (= https://www.uibk.ac.at/iup/buch_pdfs/roma-und-travellers/10.152032936-95-0-21.pdf
= https://perma.cc/93B6-M68Q)

[Redakce]. 2000. Tera Fabiánová. In: Romano džaniben 1–2/2000, 100–106 (= http://www.dzaniben.cz/download.html?f=98f34d87efb2bb6c6ba67f3356c14661.pdf https://perma.cc/KQE4-8H7F)

Steklá, Radka. 2007. Romea.cz Ohlédnutí za tvorbou Tery Fabiánové. In: Romea.cz (22.4.2007). http://www.romea.cz/cz/zpravy/ohlednuti-za-tvorbou-tery-fabianove (= https://perma.cc/5DY7-LP7J)