The Slavs were by far more picturesque in their attire. The men wore tight-fitting, blue trousers, braided and embroidered from the knee up to the abbreviated, gorgeous waistcoat, which was always unbuttoned, to allow the still more splendid shirt—the show garment of the Slav—room to display itself. Whether the hat was broad or narrow, chenille braid richly ornamented it to the top, from which hung defiantly, graceful, varicoloured feathers.
The women’s clothing outshone the men’s, and to even catalogue their elaborately trimmed garments would require a sartorial vocabulary which, unfortunately, I do not possess.
On the whole it was a pageant worth seeing, and I watch it with the same interest from the same doorway whenever I have the good fortune to be at home again.
Besides the riot of colour which attracted me, I very early began my ethnographic studies; for there were variations in dress, which denoted the mountaineer, the man from the valley, the peasant and the mechanic. Each locality had some style of its own, each race, occupation and faith was marked.
Those who went to the church of the weather-vane were the most soberly attired. Theological divisions were accentuated by the presence or absence of colour, braid and buttons; for there were Puritans among those worshippers. Their forefathers swore fealty to the faith of Calvin rather than that of Luther, and while all of them worshipped in the same church, the historic division was manifested in clothes, if often in nothing else.
Had not clothes marked the churchgoers, I could easily have detected the difference between faiths by facial expression, posture and gait.
The Catholics walked to church rather more reverently than the others. Rosaries hung from the folded hands of the women, who looked neither to the right nor the left, reserving all abandonment to the passions of youth and life until after the services were over.
The Protestants marched like soldiers, their heavy psalm-books clasped to their breasts. Thus fortified, as if by gun or bayonet, they went to the house of God, erect and defiant. Although the generation that I knew never fought for its right to worship according to the dictates of its conscience, its forefathers fought, killed and were killed; while the weather-vane turned on its rusty hinges to face the storms that raged.
The Reformation came with its good and ill to the Carpathians as it came to the Alps, and it seems strange that the Teutonic Tyrolese submitted to being forcibly rebaptized into the Mother Church, while the more sluggish Slavs fought and retained their faith.
Church historians have taken scant if any notice of these Slavic Protestants, who were as brave as the Huguenots and suffered as much.