Professor of Roma history Vadim Toropov claims that the first Romani people to arrive in Crimea came to the peninsula in either the 14th and/or 15th century, having previously lived in the area of Byzantium, while Crimean Tatar writer Nedzhati Seidametov claimed they were Turkmen who came to Crimea alongside the Golden Horde, and Pavel Nikolsky says that they came in separate waves, first in the 13th century alongside the Golden Horde and then later Roma moved to Crimea from the Balkans; more and more historians accept the mixed origins theory for the ethnogenesis of the Crimean Roma, with the consensus being that different Crimean Roma groups arrived in Crimea from different places at different times.

[5] In the Crimean Khanate, the Roma, like people of other nations, were not harassed; the authorities did not persecute them and they were not treated with contempt.

[6] In Crimea, they led a sedentary and semi-sedentary lifestyle, engage in productive labor and music.

[9] The Krimurja,[b] are descendants of Romani people who migrated to Crimea from the Balkans in different waves, but came later than the other Crimean Roma groups, some as late as the 19th century.

[16] The Urmacheli are Tatarized Romani people whose ancestors migrated from the Balkans to Crimea in the 16th century, and are probably the largest subgroup of the Crimean Roma.

[8] However, Urmacheli do retain some Romani vocabulary, and do sometimes refer to other Crimean Tatars of non-Roma origins as "gadjo".

[8] The Urmacheli divided themselves up by profession [9] The exact origins of the Tayfa/Dayfa, formerly called Gurbets/Kurbets[c] has been a subject of debate among anthropologists for centuries.

[12] Seraya Shapshal observed the Tayfa during his visit to Qarasubazar in 1910 and attributed their origins to the Turkmen, and presuming that they were called Gypsies by outsiders due to their semi-nomadic lifestyle at the time.

[12] Two years later in 1912, Alexander Samoylovich observed the Tayfa in Qarasubazar and attributed their origins to being Tatarized Romani people.

[15] Under Nazi law, Romani people had the same status as the Jews, and were targeted for extermination because of their ethnicity.

[28] In April 1942, the report of Einsatzgruppe D wrote that with rare exceptions of some in Northern Crimea, there were no longer any Crimean Roma left.

In postwar depositions of surviving relatives of the from the massacre in Burlak-Toma village, where 45 Crimeans were rounded up and gassed, the surviving family members of the victims testified that they were non-Roma Crimean Tatars and falsely accused of being Roma by the village headman Matvey Ivanovich Krivoruchko; surviving witnesses also testified that the victims were ordinary Gadjo Crimean Tatars and not Romani.

[38] As of the early 2000s, Crimean Roma are the only Romani community in the world to be considered a subgroup of another ethnic group.