Luck Is a Thing You Make: Photos of Lithuania’s Roma Youth
· Vice
This photo essay is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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BAXT: /bacht/ n. Romani
luck; fate; destiny; fortune; karma; kismet
“For the Roma people, ‘baxt’ is the most important word in their language. One young woman described it as a kind of luck that follows you through life, and that luck depends on how you live your life. She said if you go against your fate, you can lose this luck. It guides how you live.”
No matter where they go, the Roma have a hard time making friends. “They’re a historically beaten people,” says Andrew Miksys, who’s spent 25 years photographing Lithuanian Roma for his project, BAXT. “They don’t have their own country. They left India a thousand years ago. They’ve made their home all over Europe in whatever countries.”
For centuries, the French assumed they were Czech, the Eastern Europeans thought they were from the Great Steppe, and the Western Europeans called them Egyptians. The Soviets treated them like criminals and the Nazis accused them of witchcraft. This uncertainty and suspicion bred thousands of years of hostility and persecution, which manifested itself in measures ranging from sedentarization to state child-seizure to death camps, and the kind of vibes that must be annoying when all you want to do is put on your favorite leather jacket and go to the local disco to dance with your pals.
ANDREW MIKSYS: “This became the signature image of BAXT. I almost left it out because his left fist looks unnaturally large. It contains many key elements of the project: hearts, a flower curtain, and Spartacus in a boxing pose with a cigarette in his mouth.”“I first came to Lithuania with my family in the mid 90s,” remembers Miksys, whose father was just a baby when his grandparents fled the country on a horse and buggy during World War II. “That’s when I photographed the first Roma family and went to the village disco. When I started, I heard all the usual stereotypes about Roma people being thieves and liars. There were no photography projects about or by the Roma that I could find in Lithuania. They almost didn’t exist except in negative newspaper articles that pointed to their otherness.”
ANDREW MIKSYS: “Liuba was 15 when I photographed her at her wedding. She posed briefly, then began to cry and asked me to stop. You can still see the tears in her eyes. Before publishing the new edition of BAXT, I asked her about that time, and she told me her wedding was actually a happy moment in her life.”Miksys started work on BAXT in a tight-knit Roma community out by Vilnius airport known as Taboras. He had long hair, a Seattle accent, and didn’t speak Romani, Lithuanian, “or any other useful language.” Many of those he met instantly presumed he was out to screw them over. “I got out of the car and a super angry guy came, telling me to get out—‘We don’t need any journalists here!’ I tried to explain that I’m not a journalist.” He earned the trust of some by knocking back vodka shots; others, by returning a few days after a shoot with a print or contact-sheet photo as a gift. Romani is an oral culture, with very few books written in the language. As such, photography plays what Miksys describes as “an outsized role” in gathering up the moments in time that make a family history—and for the Lithuanian Roma, family comes first over everything.
ANDREW MIKSYS: “Sonia in Taboras, a place long viewed through the lens of racism and xenophobia as the worst neighborhood in Lithuania. It makes me think of Bill Cunningham’s idea of fashion as personal armor. The Roma’s bold public style binds them together and, I think, offers a sense of protection in the face of hostility, keeping outsiders at bay.”“I interviewed a guy in northern Lithuania,” says Miksys. “I went to his apartment, we were having coffee in his kitchen, and I look up and it’s a photograph I took of his dad, years ago, taped to a piece of cardboard. I was like, ‘Wow.’”
ANDREW MIKSYS: “Misha and Boris wanted to be photographed together, looking cool. At the time I thought they were posing too much, but later I appreciated the exaggerated toughness and the oversized black leather jackets that feel very ‘1990s Eastern Europe.’” ANDREW MIKSYS: “They were quite shy, especially the girl. At first, she didn’t really want to be photographed. But by the end, they’re totally posing: he’s got a cigarette and she’s… Well, she wasn’t posing like that at the beginning. I wasn’t telling them to pose. It was all them.”If the Roma in Taboras seemed suspicious of outsiders, they had good reason. During World War II it was a genocide site; half of those who lived in the town were killed by Nazis and local collaborators in what the Roma call “porajmos” or “the devouring.” Post 1945, the Roma were told to turn their back on their nomadic heritage and settle in Taboras. They built a community of 500 but it acquired a reputation for being a drug-plagued ghetto. In 2004, in came the police and bulldozers. “I felt helpless that day and went around trying to photograph as many houses as I could before they were all gone,” recalls Miksys. Many of those whose houses weren’t razed by the city did the job themselves, told to demolish their own homes with their bare hands or face a fine. When the destruction was complete, and the last home in Taboras had been leveled, Vilnius mayor Remigijus Simasius celebrated by posting a photo of the carnage on Instagram, tagging the location as “Cigonu, Taboras” or “Gypsy camp.”
ANDREW MIKSYS: “For this picture, it was funny—I was at his house photographing his dad and his brother but he was in jeans and a T-shirt, so I was like, ‘I’m not going to waste any film on him.’ He was annoyed, then he was like, ‘OK, hold on…’ He went inside and came back with this outfit on, these boots… I’m like, ‘Of course I’m going to photograph you now.’” ANDREW MIKSYS: “I photographed Reda and Aleksander beneath a painting commemorating their wedding. It may not be the perfect setting they imagined, but it feels warm and human to me.”The indignities didn’t end there. In 2017, an exhibition of the pictures that make up BAXT was canceled after the venue objected to accompanying text Miksys had written that made reference to the Holocaust and Roma Genocide. The photographer lost a subsequent legal battle, despite the Roma submitting a letter of support to the court on his behalf.
ANDREW MIKSYS: “Taboras, the neighborhood where I took this photograph, was often demonized by outsiders, including journalists and politicians. I’m not claiming it was an ideal place to live, but people there maintained a sense of dignity, visible in the simple religious icons on the wall behind Mustafa.” ANDREW MIKSYS: “Manuela also grew up in Taboras. One mayor described it as a place where children had no dreams. But this photograph proves him wrong and shows a typical teenager’s room and a girl in a punk T-shirt, full of possibility.”It’s funny how things turn out. Today, Miksys has relocated from Seattle and lives in the Lithuanian city of Žagarė; the Roma he first photographed in the country 25 years ago are now his friends and neighbors. (One of them, Spartacus, appears on the first and final page of this story, captured a decade and a half apart.) “I have twins now, they’re four. A boy and a girl. I work on my Lithuanian a lot. We speak English, too.” That deep immersion lends his work a quality that is becoming hard to find. “I was at a book fair and so many are made in a rush,” says Miksys. “They’re books, but they’re ‘Instagram books.’ They might have great design but they’re missing that process of building a connection with people over a long period.”
To speak candidly, there aren’t many traditional photos in this issue. It feels at times as though the power of photography is on the wane. These portraits made it in because, for whatever reason, they are images that stay with you. There’s a ubiquity to the way that people look today, which tends to be blamed on homogenized global fashion, social media beauty standards, and cheap high-street surgery. The people in BAXT seem to live outside of that machine.
ANDREW MIKSYS: “I found this in my archive while preparing the new edition of BAXT. Horses appear throughout the project. Although Roma communities no longer live nomadically, horses seem to maintain their connection to the independence they had on the road.” ANDREW MIKSYS: “This was taken almost 15 years after I first photographed Spartacus. He knows that the original portrait has been shown in museums around the world. When I asked to photograph him again, he immediately returned to his boxing pose.”“Someone said once that fashion is like armor,” says Miksys. “For the Roma, having a distinct style helps when they’re outside of the house. It projects confidence that they can handle their personal space. You see in those pictures and their poses the pride that keeps them going.”
This photo essay is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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