Lomari

The Lom, called Bosha, are a Romani people of the South Caucasus whose ancestors reached the Armenian Highland from India via the Iranian plateau in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their Lomavren language keeps an Indo-Aryan vocabulary on Armenian grammar and was increasingly reserved for private speech as most Lom adopted Armenian.

Traditionally itinerant, they worked as sievemakers and blacksmiths, the women trading and telling fortunes. Records place them in Kars, Erzurum and other western Armenian cities, and by the 1720s a Bosha quarter existed in Yerevan.

Christian Lom lived under Georgian and Armenian princes around Akhaltsikhe, while those who remained in the Ottoman eastern provinces turned to Islam in the nineteenth century. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829, Archbishop Karapet led a group from Erzurum into Russian territory; by the late nineteenth century most were semi-sedentary, working in fixed quarters.