thefriedcomputercollectorblr:alatismeni-theitsa:cimness:alatismeni-theitsa:cimness:doctorscienceknow
thefriedcomputercollectorblr:alatismeni-theitsa:cimness:alatismeni-theitsa:cimness:doctorscienceknowsfandom:cimness:doctorscienceknowsfandom:alatismeni-theitsa:Από αριστερά στα δεξιά, μια Εβραία, μια χριστιανή και μια μουσουλμάνα από τη Θεσσαλονίκη το 1873.From left to right: A Jewish woman, a Christian womanand a Muslim woman from Thessaloniki, Greece, 1873.I’m fascinated by the hair of the Christian woman. I think perhaps she’s unmarried, to be wearing her hair (so VERY) long & loose. Is it in many braids? Or is it just curling into locks on its own?Also, what’s that on the Jewish woman’s head? Is it crocheted?I did a reverse image search and found this article: “The Ultimate History Project | The City of Salonica: A True Crossroad, by Victoria M. Lord”, according to which the woman pictured is a Bulgarian Orthodox. Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Turkey are all very close to Thessaloniki and there’s a great deal of ethnic intermingling between them (particularly in this era, which was before Greece and Turkey attempted to exchange their populations of Christians and Muslims respectively their folk costumes are also quite similar, as I discovered from this amazing and fascinating blog called Folk Costume & Embroidery.There are a lot of pictures of Macedonian and Bulgarian folk costumes there; I think the one in the picture is probably from the area around Sofia. I couldn’t find any with the hair worn exactly like this, but then none of the pictures are quite this old either. I did find several with women wearing their hair loose under the headscarves, including one indicating the woman illustrated was engaged to be married, which might explain why her hair isn’t in braids like some of these: I do think her hair is loose and not corded, going by the texture near the ends, but I could be wrong with this image quality.As for the Jewish woman, the first article above indicates that the Jewish population of Thessaloniki likely immigrated when they were expelled from Castile and Aragon by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, but her costume doesn’t look Spanish, which makes sense after 3-4 centuries. She would likely be Sephardic, and a google search for “Jewish Ottoman dress” shows several likely images. From the images at Wikipedia’s “History of the Jews in Thessaloniki” I would guess that the ornamentation is metal, perhaps coins or medallions attached to a little cap or a net holding the cap on. Here are some more images:Wow, thanks for all the research! I did a reverse image search via Google & got only pinterest links–what did you use? That Folk Costume & Embroidery site could trap me for *days*.Despite what movies & the SCA show, I don’t think married women in Europe or the Middle East ever wore their hair loose before the 16th C, and rarely thereafter. Long, loose hair signified either virginity or prostitution–I think a lot of people nowadays are confused because there are pictures of the Madonna & Child where the BVM has long, loose hair–but that’s supposed to be a teeny bit shocking, reminding the viewer than this nursing mother is still a virgin.Most of the Bulgarian and Macedonian folk dress seemed to have their hair completely covered in wraps and scarves and/or worn in a bun, a central braid made out of smaller braids or a horizontal row of skinny braids or twists like those pictured above (and a bit like Padme’s hair in the pilot disguise in AOTC), and this was the case both for young girls and for married women. The few pictures of loose hair were unlabeled except for the one that said it depicted a fiancé, but that one was an illustration and it wasn’t completely clear that the hair was loose. Few of the images were as old as these though and a majority of the photographs use folk dancers for reference, and there has obviously been some slight adjustments in customs as well as the costumes for those.I’ve also got the impression that most women at least in Europe wore their hair both bound up and mostly or entirely covered until, as you say, the 1500s or thereabouts, with few exceptions. This would be practical as well as cultural of course, because of how different bathing, washing, and hair arrangement had to be then, without electric lighting, running water, or modern haircare products. There were styles, of course, that were only about half-covered depicting… as far as I can remember mostly high-status women. But there’s often an issue in figuring out the details of what exactly poorer and more ordinary people wore that long ago as there’s usually less surviving art of them. You are right, the hairstyle of the Christian woman doesn’t look Greek or Slavic. Maybe she is a Christian of another ethnicity. It occurs to me that there were Roma in the Ottoman empire, both muslim ones and Christian ones, and there were multiple populations of Bulgarian Roma. Unfortunately, I can’t really find any good pictorial references, although if you google you can find some images of them from the later years of the empire without more specific geographic information for the most part. However, they’re mostly evidently nomadic and very poor Roma in the pictures, but there were settled Roma in the empire as well. The Roma who live in Finland are a very traditional and comparatively well-off branch who were already settled at this time, but the traditional dress that they still wear most likely dates from that period at the latest, going by the volume of petticoats; and in their community, young unmarried women wear their hair loose, at least; so perhaps that might have been true in the 19th century Ottoman empire Roma populations as well. Anyone who speaks Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, or another language from that region who wants to look for more images, please feel free.However, I also found more images of traditional Bulgarian hairstyles. Most notably this image, where it looks like the woman on the left is wearing her hair long and loose: But also I now think it’s quite possible the woman is wearing a slightly different historical version of the style with the long tiny braids. Here’s some more pictures I found via Pinterest - there were a few older ones like this top one, but they’re all lower quality and black and white, so the modern color pictures are included because it gives a better view:To my knowledge, traditionally Roma women in Greece had their head covered as soon as they were married. Plus, before marriage they usually had their hair in one braid.Today some older Roma women still cover their hair. One interesting note about the Jews of Salonika: they were actually one of the few Jewish populations in Europe with significant political power. To quote Misha Glenny’s The Balkans (also chock full of the history of Greeks in both Anatolia and modern-day Greece, BTW): “Sitting on the north-eastern edge of the Aegean’s largest natural harbor, the bay of Thermaikos, the city was more than just a haven for this Jewish community- it practically belonged to them. In the other major cities and ports of European Turkey, the Greeks or the Armenians were the primi inter pares of non-Muslim society. But Salonika was a different world, where the Sephardim dominated most aspects of economic, social and cultural life and where, because of their economic clout, they often held decisive political sway over the Turkish governors.” (p. 179).Sadly, they wouldn’t survive the Holocaust, but for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries the community would be perhaps the leading light among Sephardic and other Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire. -- source link
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