The Weight of Wool
Ana Sekulić
Colorful motifs on a flat-woven bag.
It was already after dark when we met her at the doorstep, her heavy silhouette outlined against the yellow light pouring from inside. This was meant to be a celebration, a homecoming; my grandparents had just returned to Dalmatia after a seven-year Serbian exile. But I only remember the urge to step back into the fragrant May night. My body stiffened as the pair of rough hands reached for me. Even hunched and burdened with age and tragedies, she was taller than me, with an air of sweat and sour milk around her. She pressed wet, fluttery kisses all over my face. She called me her little lamb. “Say hello to Baba,” said my father, as I found myself in a stranger’s embrace.
This is how I met my grandmother in the early 2000s. We were again in the same country. For most of my life, my father’s family had remained behind war barricades and borders while also mostly banished from our conversations. Now, though, we started visiting frequently, replacing the vacationing on the Adriatic pebbled beaches with catching up with the lost family time in my father’s ancestral village along the tufa-riddled banks of Zrmanja River. But I never really caught up with my grandparents, least of all my grandmother. She spent her last years in retreat in a purple plastic chair whose color matched her lips after several glasses of wine, which we pretended not to notice. She barely spoke, and I have no memory of her voice. I’d just observe her from the opposite end of the courtyard as if she were some kind of specimen. Sometimes she looked back with a piercing gaze, and I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to say something important or just looking through me. She died in 2006 to what I always suspected was everyone’s relief. “She saved herself!” they said. It was a stroke that did her in, one of many apparently, although I never understood her ailments. Was her silence a result of some bodily malfunction, or was it resignation, a symptom of war breaking up not only terrains but ancestral ties? This past summer, my father offered his own diagnosis: “She was fucked over by the 90s.”
Before my grandparents returned home, my father was fixing the house. Like all abandoned Serb houses in Dalmatia, it was plundered repeatedly in the years following the war, but it had never been particularly comfortable to begin with. My father installed new doors and windows, pruned the trees for summer shade, and kept the roof from collapsing. I followed him around as he spackled the walls, and he’d tell me that the most detrimental thing for the integrity of a house was emptiness. He was, ostensibly, giving me a lesson in architecture.
With the new water pump running and the fresh layer of paint just about dry, there was one last thing left to do: getting hold of vuštan. Vuštan is a type of gown, or sometimes a skirt, made of canvas or serge that can be black or white. (This is what I now gather from ethnographic dictionaries and folklore Facebook pages.) It’s one of those traveling Mediterranean words—a version of the Arabic fustan, Turkish fistan, or the more famous Greek fustanella—that take local roots around its shores. It’s a dress that “women used to wear,” is how my father described it to the perplexed clerks in textile shops. For him, vuštan was a somber woolen skirt, a black ensemble that he associated with older women from his youth. It’s as if in addition to outfitting the house, he wished to clothe his mother in black, which would mark her return and mold her into a proper woman of old. Except, by then, vuštan joined a whole set of older garments that had become irrelevant, unfamiliar, out of place. Like ječermas, dolamas, koporans… Like Baba.
Thinking back, Baba was an enigma to both of us. To him, she was unrecognizable; to me, a complete mystery. In some ways, she’s been at the center of our attempts to haphazardly recover a sense of our past. Like a museum worker perhaps, my father was making difficult choices about reconstructing a home, a family, that had been irreversibly altered. But at least he had memories and vocabularies to help him to recreate his mother anew. I was just a spectator who watched my grandmother trailing long black skirts that reminded me of tents, the effect of my parents approximating vuštans out of a thin cheap cotton.
Only recently have I gotten something to work with, a scattered body of historical references from which to weave an archive of sorts to map onto family stories or, more often, silences. How do we make sense of our ancestors—a grandmother—by employing a historical method, a substitute for stories that should have been passed down during dinners or afternoons in the shade of a tree but never were?
It turns out that Baba’s clothes have a history of their own. My father couldn’t find vuštan, but other forgotten fabrics survived the war. It was mostly wool that made it through: zobnice (flatwoven bags), biljci (blankets several inches thick that my parents used year-round), and aprons. The aprons are particularly impressive, even though to call them that (a translation of pregača) is misleading. Aprons are now associated with practicality and cleanliness. My grandmother’s aprons feature none of the smooth waterproof surfaces (although wool is—it must be said—water repellent). They were not meant for the seclusion of the kitchen; they were the star of any outfit. Flatwoven and kilim-like, the aprons feature the most eye-catching red and fuchsia colors interspersed with blues, greens, and yellows, and patterns that have names and logic that I seem unable to fully grasp. They have an almost psychedelic effect on my untrained eyes: the more I focus on the design, the more it moves and becomes alive. They were the stark opposites of vuštans.
I hold on to the aprons thanks to the fact that these garments became worthless enough to survive the post-war plunder. That and to the wool itself, which, unlike thinner, imported fabrics that infiltrated Dalmatian villages already in the 1930s, was durable enough to survive exposure to the elements. That’s around the time when my grandmother, Đurđija, known as Đuka for the rest of her life, was born.
But it wasn’t always like that. At the turn of the twentieth century, Dalmatian peasant clothing, like that of all the “South Slavs,” was something of a sensation, often exhibited and memorialized on women who wore them. Connoisseurs, tourists, and enthusiasts from Vienna to America motored and “kodaked” throughout the region in search of fabrics and related objects for newly founded museums and private collections. Among them were “rich English and Viennese ladies,” as a Zadar author Giuseppe Sabalich noticed in 1925, chief among them Archduchess Maria Josepha, the mother of the last Habsburg Emperor, and Natalie Bruck-Auffenberg, a journalist and ethnography afficionado who wrote a book about Dalmatian folk art, Dalmatien und Seine Volkskunst. The massive volume published in 1912—delivered to me from Scottland after it’d been decommissioned from the Edinburg Public Library—features objects ranging from lacework and exquisite embroideries to engraved guns, all of it in private collections of people whose last names start with “von.” At some point, peasant and local entrepreneurs, various middlemen, and merchants alike realized the market potential of the exotic apparel and started producing even more folk-looking clothing and tried to sell it as far as Chicago and St. Louis.
The roots of the fascination with the Dalmatian peasants and their clothes go back to the eighteenth-century obsession with the Morlacchi, which is how Baba and her ancestors would have been known to the Venetian and later Habsburg administrators who ruled Dalmatia until WWI. The Italian Alberto Fortis published his Travels Into Dalmatia in 1774, launching the animal-herding and gun-wielding population of the Venetian-Ottoman borderland into European fame. They became Europe’s noble savages, so frequently compared to the Native Americans that it was perhaps inevitable that Karl May’s western fantasy, the infamous Winnetou, was filmed in the Zrmanja canyon in 1963. My grandfather was an extra.
Nowadays, few remember the Morlacchi, partially because they didn’t really exist outside of the Venetian political imagination and Enlightenment literary canon, and partially because they have since become the Croats and the Serbs. As we were driving to the village this past summer along the coast that used to be known as the Canale della Morlacca, we saw a billboard advertising a summer rental called Morlacco. “Morlako?” my father said, “What is that?”
Morlachi mania that began in stories soon took a visual turn in drawings and then in photography. Balthasar Hacquet’s Illyria and Dalmatia boasted thirty-two illustrations of people from the region, while Francesco Carrara’s natural history, La Dalmazia Descritta, took that number to forty-eight. The images and albums kept proliferating beyond the mid nineteenth century and soon became a domain of ethnologists, folklorists, and politicians. Peasant clothing became embroiled into taxonomies of national belonging. They sort people into ethnic and religious groups according to colors and type of stitches of their clothing, much like sorting birds by their feathers.
Thousands of photographs of Dalmatian peasants exist in circulation. Some were taken in photo studios while others were snapped by tourists. Many are available in online auction houses and amateur Instagram pages. They routinely feature women in clothes whose color you somehow perceive, even though the photos are often black and white. I collect them voraciously, much to the concern of my husband, who worries that our house will turn into an ethnographic museum. My favorite one is an undated image of a group of women in linen shirts and woolen aprons gathered on the church staircase in Knin. In the yellow tinge of a black and white image, women’s faces merge with densely patterned fabrics into an exquisite filigree. It urges you to touch it. There is a similar photo of Baba, one of only a handful. She poses with four other women wearing white linens against which their aprons must have shone particularly bright. The picture might have been snapped at some public gathering, a fair, perhaps by an enthusiast without whom we wouldn’t know that young Baba looked exactly like my father.
Undated postcard of women in national costumes gathered on a church staircase in Knin.
In the images, women are often adorned with đerdans—a cascade of coins layering their necks and breasts, necklaces both extravagant and rudimentary. Ottoman and Habsburg coins turned into jewelry; the remnants of successive empires worn on the women’s chests. In some cases, the đerdans are so elaborate that they almost entirely occlude their wearer, turning them into knights in shining armor.
Baba had a đerdan, too, my father tells me. I’ve never seen it, because unlike wool, coins never lost their appeal. It was stolen. He says that she kept it in her kovčeg, a bridal chest that she likely brought with her when she moved from her hamlet on the hilltop to the house on top of a river canyon in the early 1950s. It is hard to resist the stereotype of a yoke when looking at đerdans. That’s kind of what they are, the word derived from the Persian word for a neck, or something suspended around it. It was associated with bridal adornment, an item that would, as Fortis put it, “affix the eye” of a prospective husband, only to lock the bride into a lifetime of childbirth, hard labor, and abuse.
“Dalmatian women are beasts of burden,” wrote a travel-writer Maude Holbach in Dalmatia: The Land Where East Meets West. Together with her husband Otto, the photographer, she specialized in the remote and the exotic. But by the time she wrote about Dalmatia in 1908, this was a well-established trope. “Nor does the father of the maid enquire much into the circumstances of the family that asks for her. Sometimes a daughter of the master is given in marriage to the servant, or tenant, as was usual in patriarchal times; so little are the women regarded in this country,” Fortis wrote more than a century earlier. Hard, brutal work is what my father, too, associates with his mother. It is also one of the most common associations of the Dinaric karst, a defining geology of much of Dalmatia. Karst was imagined as a landscape of inversion where the rugged rock ruled over people as a thirsty overlord, while the people—their faces, hands, and sometimes hearts, too—turned into stone.
Every day, Baba made her way down the canyon and ferried back over some forty or so liters of water. Or whatever else was needed. Last summer, my father pointed at a wall in the house and, referring to the stone within, said, “Baba brought all of it from the river on her back.” The idea of her recalls Krešo Golik’s 1955 film Djevojka i hrast (The Girl and the Oak), which opens with a classic karst scene: women burdened with water barrels like a procession of black ants dwarfed by the blinding expanse of white rock. This too required a sartorial accoutrement known as a sadak. It was a woolen vest embroidered at the edges. Internet folklore experts speak of sadak as part of a costume, but my father associates it with a sort of a women’s saddle. The only trace of Baba’s sadak—black with green and red edges—is caught, worn by my father, in a random photograph.
Leafing through the old issues of Hrvatski planinar (Croatian Mountaineer), I read a report of a small expedition that hiked up Biokovo Mountain in 1924. As they ascended, the men encountered a constant trickle of women and girls carrying “grass, hay, timber, and beech branches” on their back, effortlessly hopping down the precipitous stony trails. The guide remarked that “every year one of them misses a step and tumbles down the cliffs.” Once it happened to a horse, too, he added. “My mother worked like a horse,” my father said once.
My father also remembers the abuses. Every husband beat his wife, he recalls. For fun, or out of boredom. He hastens to add, though, that theirs was the only house in which women were not beaten, only children. I want to believe him.
Baba came to the Sekulić household from the Oluić family. According to my father, her childhood home had an enviable number of oxen, while her new house was brimming with children and elders, mostly hungry. People ate by passing around a single spoon, and she was the last one to receive it. Wayne Vucinich, a historian who spent his career at Stanford and whose family hailed from eastern Herzegovina wrote about part of his childhood spent in Orah in the 1920s, a village now at the bottom of the Bileća Lake. In his Memoirs of My Childhood in Yugoslavia, he remembers his big family sharing one spoon and one bowl carved out of oak brush and wondering why they didn’t just make more of these rudimentary utensils instead of passing it down from the eldest man to children and women. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to understand that this isn’t about technology as much as it is about preservation of hierarchy. The dynamics of scarcity and abundance are entrenched within the hierarchies of power in patriarchy and global capitalism alike.
My father, in turn, remembers his own grandmother taking special pride in having only one spoon and scoffing at every new utensil that entered the household. Back in her day, she fed twelve harvesters with a single spoon! My great-grandmother turned privation into pride, but for young Baba, this likely meant that she didn’t get to eat. During the first several years with her new family, her mother would cross the hill that separated them and bring her a piece of bread at nightfall. I wonder whether Baba complained or her mother, having undergone this rite of passage herself, understood it as part of her dowry.
As a mother, Baba seems to have carried more than she cared. Maybe my father mourns the lack of motherly affection. He remembers how, as a child, he was awoken in the middle of the night in order to take the sheep to the pastures before the day’s heat set in. “Mama and ćaća were more concerned about the lambs than me,” he said once. Baba wasn’t a weaver, but she sheared lambs and sheep for fleece. “She was an expert shearer,” my father stated. A sheep could give up to two kilograms of pure wool according to Rudolf Bićanić. In 1936, five years after Baba was born, he set out to record the destitution of Yugoslavia’s “passive regions”—the Bosnian and Dalmatian karst—and paid special attention to the “national costume.” The costume, he observed, “acquired a completely different meaning” when seen as a matter of labor and economy rather than “as an opportunity to parade around and play peasants.” Behind these “picturesque” garments was endless labor, from shearing the fleece and washing it in cold running water (where, according to Bićanić, half of wool’s mass was lost along with the fat) to combing and spinning. Before all that, daily tending to lambs and children alike, labor and love were woven into clothes and the grand cycle of life. I think of my father’s ambivalence when I read an article on the Morlacchi art by Sabalich in an Italian literary review from 1925: “A child of a Morlacco is hardly appreciated more than a pack animal.” But then again, a pack animal was appreciated a lot.
I struggle with what I read about womanhood in Dalmatia and how easily the tropes map on my father’s memories. When my mother died, my father went through an intense reading phase, fighting grief with the contents of my bookshelves. That’s how he read Balkan i rod (Gender and the Balkans), a volume exploring how gendered travel experiences codified the region as a place of failed modernity. I was eager to hear his thoughts, ready to plunge into critiques of modern travel writings. Instead, we ended up in a fight. He loved the book, not its theory – because he happened to agree with the travelers. What I and the authors read as othering and morally self-serving observations he saw as the God’s honest truth. “We really did live like savages,” he insisted. I tried to tell him, my heart beating faster and voice rising higher, about the power imbalances and alienation at the core of such narratives. He called me out for assuming that I knew better than he did. I was suddenly a reenactor of western narratives, denying his own memories and experiences. Of course, his memories are those of a man. Nowadays when we know that progress didn’t so much enhance as it delegitimized and eventually erased entire worlds of human existence, we tend to look for redemption in the vanished ways of life. We seek wisdom in former hardships and discomfort. I just don’t know if Baba would have thought there was any.
The clothes such as we salvaged, the colorful aprons and woven bags, eventually became marks of ethnic belonging on folkloric maps of subsequent Yugoslavias, but they also evoked association with backwardness and barbarity. In the words of an American, Alice Moque, who toured Dalmatia just before WWI, the colors were so bright they would have put to shame Turner’s most famous work. Poetic—but not a compliment. For westerners, as David Batchelor notes in Chromophobia, “Colour was made out to be a property of a foreign body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological.” In Bruck-Auffenberg’s evaluation, it was the “southerners’ hunger for color” that earned Dalmatian textiles a bad reputation in Viennese circles. “Even when they were exhibiting,” she writes, “the Dalmatians always sent in what they considered to be the most beautiful, brand-new carpets with the most garish colors.”
Woven into the admiration of clothes were wide-ranging associations with antiquity and noble savagery. Again, Bruck-Auffenberg sums it up: “Here, the entirely oriental, over-embroidered cloth mosaics are common folk costume, the weavings with ancient Persian Karamania patterns and fiber arts, the wood carvings with Asian and Trojan motifs, hand embroidery, the predecessors of which were found in the Egyptian tombs.”
For a long time, I questioned my family’s place in Croatia, Dalmatia, and in my own life. The belonging of the Croatian Serbs (like an oxymoron) has been constantly undermined, and even though my grandparents are now buried in the family grave, and my father inherited the house, the communal fabric of the Adriatic hinterland has been ripped apart by war and displacement, and there’s no stitch that can bring it back together. It’s funny then to compare this rootless history to the time when my grandparents, and certainly their own parents, would have been perceived as specimens of a living past or, as many said in those days, “Homeric.”
Somewhere along the way, that unquestionable link to history was broken by progress, preponderance of synthetic fabrics, and violence.
There’s a pattern in which an exoticizing gaze maps onto the memory of the family. I worry that I won’t be able to tell a family story from a folkloric fantasy. After all, đerdans and aprons weren’t things anyone wore daily. There are a several photographs of our family dating to the 1950s and 60s in which women wear black skirts, and men appear in dress pants and jackets. In another photograph, Baba, just about my age, wears a crisp white shirt. And yet, “life began and ended with cloth,” writes late Croatian ethnologist Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin. “One of the key media for designating the transitional periods of life, childhood, youth, girlhood, maturity, was textile.” According to my father’s memory, even the ultimate symbol of modern life, the automobile, was ushered into their little village adorned with embroidered kerchiefs as if the machine were a long-awaited bride.
In holding onto aprons, I also I hold onto Tiya Miles’s observation that, when it comes to textiles, “Stories about women’s lives seem to adhere with special tenacity” despite commonly being “among the last kinds of materials that historians look to in order to understand what has occurred, how and why.” But it’s hard to find a person, Baba, underneath all those layers. Antun Radić, one of many ethnographers for whom peasant masses represented the heart of a nation, called attention to peasant clothing as indicators of “traces of their soul.”
Perusing layered yet lopsided historical sources helps me to resurrect the contours of her world, but the threads that lead to her are few and far between. I’m reminded of Bruck-Auffenberg’s frustrations when collecting embroideries during her Dalmatian adventures. She saw women’s work as an expression of real art while also being troubled by the fact that these pieces were products of anonymous women and entire households. In a memorable anecdote, while passing through a village deep in the hinterland around Kistanje, she spotted a girl with embroidery so exquisite that she thought she had finally found an artist. She noted her name—Todora Macura—but “then it turned out that all the workers were called Macura, every person in the village, the village itself.” An individual soul just kept eluding her.
I carry these aprons with me around the world. I exhibit them on the walls and call them tapestry. I also feel uniquely unqualified to understand them. How textiles come together, the warp and the weft—their infinite combinations and possibilities are a foreign script to me. Hooks and rhombuses, I type into Google hoping to see something familiar. What I describe in uncertain terms of high school geometry, generations of women in Dalmatia called “beloved’s eye, beloved’s mustache, a golden apple, heart, two hearts, grandmother’s fingers, letter seals, doves, hawks, eagle’s heart, golden heart, black eyes, blue eyes, honey eyes.” Pure poetry! And not something you can learn from computer screens or books.
In 1905, Jelica Belović, a tireless advocate of the South Slavic folk needlework declared that “it takes a hand—not merely an eye—to claim expertise in the art of needlework.” One had, she cautioned, “to handle that needle from a young age.” This was a dig at her male colleagues who were looking to catalogue, collect, and otherwise capitalize on work that had always been women’s domain. But it might as well be criticism directed at me.
Once, after I had it propped up on the wall and displayed on Zoom background for a year, I noticed that moths had eaten through it. Densely woven fabric turned to dust. Taking care of them is challenging, and I seem to lack the knowledge and skills to take care of heritage I wish to claim. They survived a war, at least one, but seem unsafe in my custody.
I also wonder whether any of this would make sense to Baba. These were meant to be tied around a waist, not hung on a wall. Her clothes were her most intimate and only possessions. She locked them away in a kovčeg, rather than propping them up for everyone to see. Am I breaking a sacred pact here, turning family possessions into ethnographic or, worse, exotic material?
Am I any different from all the tourists and collectors who roamed looking for treasures to satisfy some undefined longing? How do we claim heritage? In his memoir, Edmund du Waal writes: “How objects are handed on is all about story-telling.” That’s just it; the things that came down to me didn’t come with a story. They weren’t even passed down exactly. They came from silence and were picked up from the decay of a ruined home. Baba didn’t pass down stories, at least not in the language that I am fluent in.
There is one photograph I keep returning to. It features three “Morlacchi women” in the Zadar marketplace around 1908. It’s remarkable in that it’s ordinary; no girdles or elaborate headgear in sight. Holbach describes them as sitting in “the fashion of the East,” as if to compensate for the lack of folkloric flair. The three are there to sell. Maybe walnuts, almonds, eggs? Whatever it is, they carried it on their backs from far away villages, just like my father told me his grandmother did. She walked twenty miles in one direction to exchange corn grown by the narrow fertile belt of the Zrmanja for salt. Only one of the women looks at the camera with a piercing yet disinterested gaze, her face tanned and taut like leather, even though the barren trees in the background suggest winter. They’re dressed like anyone in the region would be at the time—dark skirts, dark overcoats, white headscarves. Vuštans, at last! To Holbach, the women appeared “more like North American Indians than any European race.” To me, they look like someone mine, an ancestor, a grandmother.
Image of three women sitting on the ground with their goods for sale displayed in bags before them. Source: Maude Holbach, Dalmatia: The Land Where East Meets West.
