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SYMBOLIC BEAUTY: CROATIAN TEXTILE DESIGNS
CURATOR’S STATEMENT

"...tradition is like the casting in bronze, for all eternity, of the soul of a nation."

Antun Radic, 1897

To know the soul of a nation is to know the common people of a nation. To know the common people of a nation is to know its folk culture, for there, in its art and lore, is the full spectrum of a nation's history amid the reality of lives lived.

As an introduction to Croatian folk life traditions, this exhibit centers on folk dress and ceremonial towels. Much of the exhibited artifacts are the work of women's hands, traditionally the nurturers and conservators of a nation's culture.  All tell of the history and values of the Croatian nation.

The major characteristics of Croatian folk dress are the quality and diversity of the weaving designs of its home loomed fabrics; the seemingly endless diversity in embroidery techniques, drawn and cutwork, and lace work; the use of color as symbol, and the creation of designs that reflect not only the geography and history of the Croatian nation, but also its communal values that, at times, reach back into the ancient pre Christian era.  Identity is also a marked characteristic.  Regional and social identity are determined by style, design, and color.  While regional identity applies to both men and women, social identity is more closely associated with women.

The topography and economy of a region dictates the fabric: wool in the mountains, home loomed linen in less forbidding environments, and, in agriculturally rich regions, home loomed cotton, rayon, and silk embroidered with gold wrapped thread.  History is also present.  A region reflects its history of invasions by the addition of weapons as an integral part of men's folk dress, while the women's folk dress includes the coins and jewels of her dowry to facilitate flight without financial ruin.  To this day, the path of the refugee surge to the north of Croatia as a result of the Ottoman invasions can be traced through the study of embroidery designs on women's folk dress.  Telling signs of meeting and trading with other cultures, benign or not, are also present in the folk dress of various regions: the Venetian influence along the Adriatic coast, the Byzantine influence in the southern coastal areas, among others. This is not geography and history in the abstract; this is seeing that the past does, indeed, shape the present, and each present, the future.

The lack of men's folk dress is the direct result of the 19th century exodus of many men to the towns and cities to seek work to augment their farms' incomes.  Not only was their village dress ill-suited to urban labor, but also, they soon came to realize that they were treated with more courtesy when they were not wearing traditional folk dress.  It is, therefore, to the folk dress and  household textiles of village women that the study of values and traditions must look.

Fundamental to village traditions and their intrinsic values is that of  relationship to the earth.  Earth is not "thing"; earth is "person": Mother Earth Goddess, creatrix, nurturer, and sustainer of all life.  She is particularly identified with woman who, as mother, is also creatrix, nurturer and sustainer of life.  From this perception flow many of the embroidery patterns reminiscent of the pre history Earth Goddess, the most popular being that of the Tree of Life and the Rhomb as Womb.  Inherent in Mother Earth imagery is the Life-Death-Life concept which views death not as an end, but, because Deity is a given, as an intergenerational continuum of past, present and future.  There is no mystery here for an agricultural people who know that the seed of grain must die to produce the harvest to sustain life.  They celebrate the fertility of Mother Earth by using nature's fruits to decorate their fields, their homes and their brides, hoping to invoke fertility and prosperity for their community.

The prevalence of red in folk textiles is also connected to Life imagery.  There are specific names for two hues of red which resemble the color of blood, the life sustaining element in the human body: svijetlocrvene and zivocrveni.  The root of these words is "Life."  It is most often woman who wears these colors and decorates her home with them.  They are colors reserved for women of life bearing age, for symbolic color, along with design and headdress, denotes maiden, mother, widow, and wise crone.

Another fundamental of village life is the "communal" individual concept held together by common traditions. Celebrations of the Life-Death-Life cycle--good fortune, disaster, joy, and sorrow--are often shared.  In village life, the "communal" individual takes precedence over the "individual" individual.  This solidarity is reflected in the pride of regional identity which is found in folk dress.  First and foremost, style, color, and design identify villages, not individuals.

The study of the folk life of any nation is a study of human community. The style,color, and design of life may vary, but the values underlying the traditions that hold societies together are often the same.  A reading of the information panels accompanying this exhibit may well bring to mind a memory of another culture which, although it speaks a different language, translates to the same universal meaning.

Frances BabicJ
January 2005

“The goals of this exhibit are to nurture the understanding of a shared human community with a common heritage, to come to appreciate the meaning and universality of some of the things we do and the designs we see, and to realize that folk art, as does all good art, comes from the realities of lives lived..”
 – Fran Babic, January 2005

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