Round their necks hangs an array of what politeness would have me call coral necklaces. Occasionally they wear silver ear-rings, silver pendants on their breast, and rings on their fingers; but of gold and silver jewelry they possess less than their neighbours beyond the Save; the reason of this being the general absence of specie in the country, which prevents them from studding their hair and tunic with glittering coins—a habit which in Serbia alone withdraws some three-quarters of a million from the currency. Many of them, especially the girls, divide their hair into two long plaits, the ends of which they tie up with brilliant ribbons; for the twin pigtails of maidenhood are far more characteristically Sclave than German, and may be traced among the Russians far away to the White Sea—indeed, this may well be one of the tokens which betray the Sclavonic origin of so many soi-disant Germans. For boots the Croat ladies either wear a curious kind of sandal called Opanka, common to the men as well throughout the whole Illyrian triangle, and not unlike the ancient Egyptian, made of gay leather, red and yellow; or, must it be confessed?—they sometimes buskin themselves in high-heeled Wellingtons! and though their aprons—one cannot conscientiously speak of skirts—do not reach much below the knees, these martial casings can hardly be looked on as a concession to prudery, for after all they generally prefer to go about with feet and ankles in the most graceful costume of all—that of Eden!
CROATIAN TYPES.
ST. IVAN. VLACH WOMAN FROM SLUIN. WOMAN AND CHILD FROM DRAGANIĆ. ZAGORJA. VLACH MAN FROM SLUIN. SISZEK. MAN FROM NEAR AGRAM. LITTLE GIRL FROM DOROPOLJA.
To mention such very gorgeous gentlemen after the ladies really seems to require some apology. Imagine some exotic insect—how else can the subject be approached?—with forewings of dazzling gauzy white and underwings of scarlet. The white tunic expands like wings about the arms, and flutters from them in folds of gossamer; the bright scarlet vest—the Laibek—studded like some butterfly with silver stars, is lightly closed over the abdomen. These bright metallic knobs are generally arranged crozier-wise in front, and on one side of the vest is a small pocket just big enough to catch the corner of a rosy handkerchief—the same with which the women are coifed—which on highdays hangs down and floats like a sash about the flanks. A belt of varied leather-mosaic, called the Remen, quaintly patterned like the Wallack belts, but not so broad, grasps the tunic round the waist; and below this the tunic opens out again in flowing petticoats, which often reach below the knees, but hardly to the ankles, as those of some Syrmian peasants. A similar but narrower strip of leather round the shoulder serves to suspend a woollen wallet of the brightest scarlet tufted over with tassels; this supplies the want of pockets, and is the inseparable companion of the Croat, insomuch that every little boy is provided with a miniature Torba, as it is called. Below the tunic expand loose trousers of the same homespun muslin, flowing as those of the Phrygians of old or the Dacians of Trajan’s Column, and sometimes terminating in a handsome fringe. The feet are either shod with Opankas or with Wellingtons, as the women’s, but are more rarely bare.
When the weather is chilly, or when they are particularly desirous of showing themselves off, a superb mantle—the Surina—is cast over the shoulders, of a light yellowish ground-colour, decked with red, green, or orange embroidery, sometimes of the most artistic devices. Sometimes they are brown relieved with brilliant scarlet; but the real red mantles, ground and all, occur only in the western regiments or divisions of the Military Frontier, models of which are to be seen in the interesting collection of national costumes in the Agram Museum, so that the old German name for the Croats, Rothmäntel—‘Red-mantles’—is hardly applicable to the whole race. There is another word to which Croatian costume is said to have given birth with still less apparent foundation. You may search the market-places in vain for anything approaching a ‘cravat,’ which is usually derived from Krabaten or Kravaten, a broad-Dutch word for Croats. But the high collars of these Croat mantles may well have originated the word, though the signification from the first seems rather to have been a bandage round the collar, or in place of the collar, than the collar itself. For the fact that the word really was taken from the Croats we have the evidence of Ménage, who lived at the time of their first introduction into France. He says: ‘On appelle cravate ce linge blanc qu’on entortille à l’entour du cou, dont les deux bouts pendent par devant; lequel linge tient lieu de collet. Et on l’appelle de la sorte à cause que nous avions emprunté cette sorte d’ornement des Croates, qu’on appelle ordinairement Cravates. Et ce fut en 1636 que nous prismes cette sorte de collet des Cravates par le commerce que nous eusmes en ce tans-là en Allemagne au sujet de la guerre que nous avions avec l’Empereur.’ They are first mentioned in England by Skinner, who died in 1667, who speaks of them as a fashion lately introduced by travellers and soldiers. In Hudibras they are made to serve as halters.[146]
Certainly the most European part of the present Croatian costume is the black felt-hat, which oscillates between our broad-brim and what is vulgarly known as a ‘pork-pie;’ but then the brim is used as a receptacle for vasefuls of flowers, and is often surmounted by waving plumes, so any such work-a-day resemblances are soon forgotten. Then there is another variety of hat made of straw, with a conical peak, which recalls a more distant parallel. When a Croat wears one of these, and perchance, as he often does,[147] having doffed his belt, goes about in his long flowing tunic and broad petticoat-like breeks, an uncomfortable feeling comes over you that you have seen him before; and when you have searched the remotest crannies of Europe in vain for his like, it suddenly flashes upon you that it is no other than John Chinaman who stands before you! Yes; there are the very peaks to his boots; there is the beardless face, the long pendulous moustache, and in old days, when—as you may see by a picture in the Museum—the Croat wore a pigtail, as his Dalmatian brothers do still, a Celestial meeting him might have mistaken him for his double!
The patterns on these various articles of attire are striking in character; they are hieroglyphics, hard to decipher, but long household annals are written in them. I take it that pure ornament, as opposed to imitation of natural forms, has gone through two stages of development, which may be called the ‘Angular’ and the ‘Curved,’ of which the angular precedes the curved, and stands to it in much the same relation as Roman letters stand to current writing. During the Stone Age in Europe this angular ornamentation seems universally to have prevailed. It continued during the earlier Bronze Age, but towards its close the second phase of ornamentation began to develope itself in some countries, and we of the Iron Age have seen the old angular ornamentation almost supplanted by its offspring. At the present day, one European people—the Lapps of the extreme north—may still be said to remain almost in the first stage of ornament; the hardness of their materials, the bone and wood on which they mostly work, their little employment of metals and pottery, their seclusion from the current of European civilization, have conspired to keep them back. But it is more remarkable that a people of a more central European area, and a more prolific land, should still linger on in the transitionary stage between the old and new styles of decoration. Yet, as far as my observation goes, this is the case with the Croats, and generally with the Sclavonians of the south. They seem to be acquainted with the beauty of the new style, but to cling with a peculiar fondness to the angular ornamentation of their ruder forefathers. Thus, in the women’s clothes, at least, nearly the whole of the embroidery is of this prehistoric kind. The high collars of the Croat mantles, which resemble those of the Lapps in form, resemble them also in pattern. Many of the Croat women’s girdles are almost identical in pattern with those I have seen among the Lapps of Lake Enare. In the Museum is to be seen a large and curious collection of Croatian needlework, all of this angular pattern—crosses, and lines, and zigzags. Here are also to be seen carpets of rude character wrought by the homely looms of Slavonia, which are curious illustrations of the perfection of the old style—complex as the patterns are, they are all square or angled, and might any of them be models for a mosaic pavement; their colours are green, red, yellow, and white, less usually purple, and dark blue. But what is strange, is to find side by side with these rude shapes the secondary form of decoration in a highly developed state. The curved style of embroidery, as it appears on some of the men’s mantles—and it is noteworthy that it is confined almost exclusively to the men’s attire—is often a real work of art, and the elaborate pear-shaped forms which it frequently takes suggest the rich tendrillings of a Cashmere shawl. So abrupt is the leap from the ruder kind of ornament generally used, that these chefs-d’œuvre of curvature seem to be rather importations from without, than flowers of home growth. Nor does it seem difficult to trace their origin, for they are very often reproductions of the decorations which appear on the costly vests and jackets of the Turks. They are seedlings from Stamboul—less directly, from Byzantium.
As in ornament so in general character, the Croatian dress resembles that of all the Southern Sclaves, including the Roumans of Transylvania and Wallachia, who, for ethnological purposes, may be looked on as a Latinized branch of the family. In parts, indeed, it has been Orientalized by the Turks; and it is noteworthy that just as the men’s costume in Croatia shows the Oriental influence in ornament, so in Serbia, Dalmatia, and the lands beyond the Save and Danube, it is the men’s costume that makes the chief advances towards the Turkish. It is possibly a symptom of the almost Oriental seclusion of those who have to dread Oriental license. Often, when the husbands dress in completely Turkish fashion, the wives preserve almost unaltered the old national costumes; and it is owing to this, that throughout the whole South Sclavonic area, enough of the original dress has survived to show the common sisterhood of all. And of all, the Croat costume seems to be the best representative of the old Serb—of the Sclavonic costume as it existed in the days of the great Czar, Stephen Dūshan. Almost everywhere else the men’s costume, at least, has suffered from Turkish influences. Here, far better than in free Serbia, is the description applied to the Serb laity in the old laws—the ‘dressers in white,’ still applicable to the Croat men. At Belgrade it would be a meaningless epithet; at Agram it is still true. The Croats, too, with their fine mantles and flowing trouser and tunic, approach nearer to the primitive type of all—to the soldiers of Decebalus—to the sculptures on the Column of Trajan—if indeed we are to believe that the old Dacians were of Sarmatian stock.
The same South Sclavonic unity is apparent if we examine the pots and pans which these old-world peasants are selling in the market-place. There is hardly a form here which I do not remember in Wallachia, in Bulgaria, in Serbia. But it may reasonably be asked, whether the barbarous Serb races who settled in the Danubian basin in the fifth and succeeding centuries could have brought with them such an array of highly finished crockery as we see before us here? These narrow lofty necks and luxurious handles are surely not an inheritance from fifth-century savages. We do not find such among our Anglo-Saxon remains, nor even among the relics of the more polished Franks. We must search amongst Roman sepultures if we could find such in our own island, and indeed this gives the clue to their origin even here. They have come to the Sclaves of the South from a common source—the Eastern Roman Empire. Like the coinage, like the rich architecture of the old Serbian Empire, they betray Byzantine influences. The most conspicuous instance of this is the Stutza or Stutchka, as the Croats call it. This I have seen myself nationalized and adopted by Wallacks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosniacs, and Turks, over an area extending from the mouths of the Danube to the Adriatic, and from the mountains of Bosnia to the Carpathians, varying slightly at times in hue or form, but essentially the same. In parts, even the original Roman word seems to have been preserved. In the Bosnian mountains I found them still called Testja—doubtless the Roman Testa.[148] This survival of the Roman vessel is shared by the western part of the empire. The same shaped pot turns up in Spain and Portugal. It is common to South Italy, and to this day large quantities of these vessels are manufactured in Apulia and exported to the coast cities of Dalmatia. I have seen Roman pots of this type dug up near Bucharest, at Salona in Dalmatia, and at Siszek in Croatia, almost identical in shape with those sold every day in the market-places of the respective modern towns; and perhaps the best proof I can give of their likeness is, that on showing a picture of one from Roman Siscia to a Croatian countryman, he recognized it at once, and exclaimed ‘Stutza! Stutza!’ a name confined here to this peculiar kind of vessel. A kind of earthenware drinking-cup, which occurs in still ruder forms in Wallachia, is known here as Scafa, which is almost identical with the Greek word for a bowl, σκάφη. To call a scaphé a scaphé, was the Greek equivalent for calling a spade a spade; so the Croats at any rate can hardly be accused of not doing that. Scaphé is allied to another Greek word, Scyphos, signifying a cup, and common to the Latins, insomuch that one felt inclined to quote Horace’s lines to too bibulous Croats:—