Five hundred years of Turkish presence in the Balkans left many indelible marks, tangible and spiritual, on our people. In material culture, there have been many garments that were influenced by, or borrowed from, Ottoman Turkish culture. Continue reading
North of the Sava and Danube rivers, there is a vast plain sandwiched between branches of the Carpathian and Alpine mountain ranges. In prehistory, it was a great inland sea; today, it is an area of fertile land, peppered history and vibrant folkloric heritage. This is the Pannonian Zone.
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Homolje is a mountainous region of northeastern Serbia. It is a beautiful, rugged countryside centred around the Braničevo and Bor districts, with the Peka and Mlava rivers cutting through them. It borders the Stig district toward the Danube, and Timok region to the east; Beljanica and Crni Vrh mountains are to the south. It is a district inhabited by Serbs and Vlachs, with lively folklore and beautiful costumes.
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The preparation of textile fibres and the production of fabrics engaged Serbian peasants for much of their year. While some tasks were performed by both men and women, it was the woman’s prerogative to produce threads and yarns from processed fibres using their spindle and distaffs, their preslice and their vretena. Continue reading
I’ve been fortunate to have acquired a lot of interesting costume pieces over the years, some as purchases but many as gifts. Not all of them have been big items, or rare ones. Socks are an overlooked piece of folk dress and I’d like to share some of the beautiful Eastern Serbian examples I have.
There is perhaps no costume element more elegant than the libade, a woman’s garment that became part of the urban costume. Its adoption into Serbian textile culture and spread throughout Serbian lands has some interesting historic roots. Continue reading
Among Serbian folk songs, no river is more sung about than the Morava river. It is described as “moje selo ravno” – “my village in the plain”; “tiha reko” . “quiet river”; on the other side of the Morava (“s one strane Morave…”) one sees the prettiest girls; it floods its plains, it is cold, it is in places murky and in others clear. This river is the central line of Serbia proper, and gives its name to an ethnocultural zone that roughly stretches from the eastern banks of the Great Morava, to the Drina, the Southern Morava and the Danube. Within the zone, there are microregions, localities with specific variations on the general cultural hallmarks of the broader zone.
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Part of the intent of this blog is to help educate those people with an interest in folklore or some aspect of Balkan heritage and tradition. It’s interesting how enduring that idea of heritage can be. Continue reading
Serbian folk costume abounds with many types of embroidery and ornamentation, some with ancient Slavic roots, others influenced by Central Europe, and very many of Levantine or Ottoman origin. In fact much of the terminology for costume parts is a Serbianized Turkish word, or Turkism (turcizam). These include some garments that have changed little in form from the original, such as mintan, dolama, džube, misiraba; others, adapted to slavic sensibilities of design, ornamentation and structure, as happened with jelek, anterija, silav, marama, čarape.
These garments were made by skilled craftsmen, called terzije Continue reading
Свилен конац Silken Thread 