THE EMBROIDERED JACKET

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 THE EMBROIDERED JACKET

Meanings of our lives originate elsewhere, not here, not in everyday world
or present time.
- Jorge Luis Borges

Once in a while when I feel homesick I go through some of my

possessions that were handed down to me by my older relatives in Turkey. I had
no choice but to accept them because they were given to me, almost forced on me,
with great love as special treats. I have carried these possessions over here, to
New York where I live and where I am writing this. Right now the subject of my
attention is a faded-blue-green, gold-embroidered silk jacket, hanging by a wire
hanger on the door of a closet. This jacket has become an object of special
admiration and wonderment for me; I keep looking and looking at it to understand
its meaning beyond the surface aesthetic design and patterns that are very pleasing
to the eye. In a sense this faded silk taffeta Turkish jacket is a part of my history. I
see it as a continuation of a set of meanings -- I want to hand this knowledge
down, if only as information and interpretation, to my own two daughters. There
is no choice but to write about it. Of course, one can go to the museums and find
articles belonging to such and such periods in history in a particular country. The
Metropolitan Museum's Costume Show of 1977, from 19th century Turkey, had
many items from Macedonia where this jacket came from. But there is something
unauthentic about such displays: the red, loose trousers looked fake somehow, the
jackets worn over the naked arms of the mannequins should have had long-
sleeved blouses under them. Despite their colorful and attractive display these
costumes seemed as out of place as the Egyptian Dendur Temple of the Museum
in its glass enclosure standing against the beautiful fall foliage of Central Park and
the posh Fifth Avenue apartment houses.

I keep looking at the blue taffeta, gold-embroidered jacket; if one can

describe this old jacket one can describe almost anything. It was my maternal
grandmother's jacket. She was a slim woman and the jacket is small. Obviously
this jacket was meant to be given to a young bride and it was a part of my
grandmother's trousseau. It is quite possible that it originally belonged to her
mother and was given to her as a special gift. This conjecture takes us roughly to
the third quarter of the 19th century, to Ottoman Macedonia, to a city called
Koprülü (now Veles).

I put the jacket on; it fits me well. I stare at it hard. How can one describe
the designs and patterns of the lost art of gold embroidery? I can see that the blue
color of the jacket is faded (it looks green now), the material is frayed and torn in
some places, especially under the armpits, but the gold-embroidery is undamaged

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almost as good as it must have been the day it was made. The style of the jacket is
very simple, like the old Ottoman kaftans; it was cut from one piece of folded
cloth, with a round neck, a slightly tapered waist, wider at the hem, open in front
without buttons, with the folded part forming the shoulders and lengths of cloth
added to make the sleeves longer. The jacket was sewn by hand; it has a dark blue
somewhat faded cotton lining sewn with regular but cruder than machine-made
stitches. The most impressive thing about the jacket is its elaborate gold
embroidery which covers a good portion of its surface. There is an unmistakable
gaiety and buoyancy about the design. Could this be late 19th century Balkan-
Ottoman rococo? I find this rather ironic because it is hard to imagine this period
of history as particularly cheerful. The design of the embroidery is floral;
arabesques of stems and leaves end up in stylized tulip-like flowers. There are
also tiny rosette-like delicate flowers; there are little sequins here and there to
emphasize a point, like the center of a flower or the ending of a stem. There is
such a rhythm underlying the whole pattern that it makes me think of songs and
dances. Everything is so symmetrical, so expertly embroidered to the last sequin
leaf, stem, and flower that I could not find one irregularity or mistake to spoil the
perfect balance and absolutely professional execution of the design.

One can look at an embroidered article forever -- but beyond its pleasant
eye-appeal there is also a personal and historical meaning that I felt I had to delve
into and extract as much information as I could from the written sources and
memory. First let's see what the dictionaries are saying:

embroidery n.; pl. embroideries, (ME. embrouderie,

from OFr. embroder)

1. the art of work of ornamenting fabric with needle work; embroidering.

2. embroidered work or fabric; ornamental needlework.

3. embellishment, as of a story.

Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (unabridged), Second

Edition, 1975, p.592

embroidery, ornamental needlework in thread, fiber, or leather thongs,

applied to fabric or leather. As an art it is probably older than weaving:
primitive peoples used to embroider skins. From ancient times, the East has
produced rich embroideries; the art came to Europe through Byzantine
influence. From 12th to 14th cent., church embroidery (e.g. altar cloths,
vestments) flourished; later, secular embroidery, such as that on the rich
costumes of Elizabethan England, reached its height. Advent of machinery
caused decline of embroidery, but eyelet, cut work, and other light forms
are still done.

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 Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia, 1953, p.560

BRODER (de) v.t. (origine celtique et germanique).

Faire des dessins en relief sur une étoffe, soit a l'aiguille, soit au
métier. Fig. Amplifier, embellir: broder n'est pas mentir, mais farder la
verité.

Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, 1958, p.135

Definitions - in English, both as a noun and as encyclopedic information,

and in French as a verb - give me a good start. I am a bit surprised to learn that
embroidery could probably be older than weaving, that it may have eastern
origins. Yet knowing all this is not sufficient to enable me to read the patterns of
my Turkish jacket. I have to run to the library to learn more about embroidery.

I don't know why I have not thought about embroidery before. Every
Turkish girl of my generation knew something about it. When I was in the sixth
grade (this was in the mid-1930s) girls had a sewing class and we were taught
different stitches of embroidery and each girl had to work on a 12x6 inch piece of
cloth showing different stitches. However when I study the books on embroidery I
discover that there are many more names than I knew. Only a partial listing of the
names of the stitches would run like this: chain, heavy chain, wheat ear, cross,
twisted chain, split, fly, feather, stem, zig-zag, Cretan, Florentine, Hungarian,
Roumanian, etc., stitches. Gold embroidery was not done by threading a needle
with gold thread and passing through the cloth. It was couched, i. e., gold or silver
threads were laid on silk material and sewn to it with silk thread in regular
patterns. I learned this in a book about Byzantine church embroideries.1 The
whole idea was to teach Christianity by pictorial means and create a magnificent
spectacle. Both men and women worked in embroidery workshops; some
embroideries were produced in monasteries for the donors who presented them to
churches. There are small Coptic embroideries going back to seventh century
A.D. that were made with colored silk thread. As I turn the pages of my book I
learn that in the 17th century gold-embroidered Turkish dress was very popular in
all the countries under the Ottoman rule. At that time embroidery on velvet was
introduced for the first time. In the embroideries of that period padding made
from paper or felt was used under the gold threads to give a raised effect. My
nineteenth century Turkish jacket too had this type of gold embroidery with the
raised effect. Now that I know something about the technique of embroidery I
have to move into the meaning of the floral forms. What do these forms
represent? Well, I go back to the books again. I read about the early central Asian
flower, or geometric forms used by the nomadic Turks in Altai region.2 I read

1
Pauline Johnstone, The Byzantine Tradition in Church Embroidery,
Argonaut Inc. Publishers, Chicago, 1967

2
Mary Gostelow, A World of Embroidery, Scribners, 1975

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about the Scythian art and learn about the origins of the early stylized animal
motifs, and their subsequent transformations into plant and flower designs
because of the Islamic rules against graven images. Is it too farfetched to think
that the forms in my 19th century jacket are remotely related to these early
designs? Are there traces of Hellenistic, Mesopotamian, Persian forms? Are there
baroque and Venetian influences in those curled designs? Is there a fusion of
Turkish, Byzantine and Slavic influences combined in this gold-embroidered
jacket that was in my grandmother's trousseau - a well-traveled jacket going from
Kőprülü of Macedonia to Salonica, then to Istanbul and after moving into at least
half a dozen houses in Istanbul, ending up in Manhattan? I imagine my
grandmother, still a bashful teenager, sitting on a divan and wearing this jacket as
the female wedding guests and relatives kept looking at her. In another part of this
farm house in Kőprülü by the river Vardar, men had gathered to celebrate the
wedding. I don't know how, but they had chosen an Ottoman army officer as the
husband of my grandmother whose family originated in Vidin near the shores of
the Danube. Ottoman defeats had forced them to move south. After the wedding
my grandparents settled down in Salonica, which was still a part of the Ottoman
Empire, and my grandfather had his army post there. While living in Salonica my
grandmother gave birth to three daughters and a son. In 1912 the Balkan war
started and the Greek Army entered Salonica on November 8, 1912. My mother,
who was then about nine years old, had a very vivid memory of the Greek soldiers
with huge dogs searching their house. My grandmother was hiding her Ottoman
army officer brother in a closet behind a pile of mattresses. Fortunately the
soldiers left the house without finding him. But this incident created a deep-seated
fear in the family which they could not forget.

My grandfather was with the army in another part of Macedonia.

Eventually my grandmother and her four children were evacuated and sent to
Istanbul with the other Turks of Salonica in a ship that belonged to the
Compagnie Messageries. The Ottoman Empire had lost all of its possessions in
the Balkans after almost five hundred years of domination there.

I again imagine my grandmother dressed in her black charshaf crossing

the Aegean sea in a rocky boat with her three daughters aged thirteen, nine and six
and her six-month old son. My mother was the nine-year-old daughter and was
striking looking with green eyes; my grandmother wanted to protect her older
daughters by making them wear charshafs too. She had never traveled farther
than her parents' place in Kőprülü. (There was a railroad between Salonica and
Kőprülü.) And now a young woman in her early thirties was going to an unknown
future with her children. Ottoman authorities, perhaps with the help of some
“neutral” powers, must have arranged the evacuation of the Balkan Turks.
Istanbul was a city of tragedies: tens of thousands of refugees and wounded
soldiers were everywhere. My grandmother had salvaged some of her belongings
in a couple of trunks that were traveling with her. A wealthy older sister had
already settled in Istanbul. My grandmother and her children were going to stay
with her until they found a place to live. This was luckier than the fate of most

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people. The courtyards of the mosques, hospitals, school buildings and even the
streets were overflowing with wounded and dying soldiers and refugees.

My youngest aunt told me the most chilling story about how she saw her
father, from whom they had no news for some time, when she was playing in a
green field in Kadikőy, Istanbul. A company of soldiers were passing by,
exhausted and dirty in worn-out uniforms. My aunt, a little girl of seven,
recognized her father and screamed: Daddy! Daddy!

Turkey joined the first World War in October 1914, soon after the Balkan
War had come to an end. The family was reunited and found a place to live. My
grandfather must have passed the age of conscription for that war and had a very
modest pension from the Ottoman army, barely enough to get by for a family of
six.

In spite of all the hardships and deprivations of the war years the two
younger girls were provided with free education and attended a girls' boarding
school specializing in training teachers. The Ottoman Empire,
allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lost the war. This was the
last stroke in its demise. Both my mother and my aunt, after finishing the
intermediary part of the school, started working in offices in an Istanbul occupied
by the Entente powers (England, France, Italy). It was a period of humiliation,
food shortages and poverty. Trolley cars did not run. The two young girls had to
walk long distances to reach their destination in constant fear of the soldiers of
occupation.

My older aunt married her paternal cousin, a young army lieutenant, in

1918. In 1915, as an eighteen-year-old cadet at the military school, he had been
drafted into the army to fight the Russian invaders on the eastern front. There he
caught typhus and was nearly frozen. Tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died
of cold on the eastern front. Later my uncle participated in the War of
Independence (1919-22) that made him eligible for a medal of Independence. My
mother married my father in 1921. He was an educated Istanbul young man who
had to leave the School of Engineering to serve on the Syrian front in World War
I and had a hard time earning a living in Istanbul under occupation.

Have I strayed too far from the story of the embroidered jacket? I am sure
my grandmother was saving it for the trousseau of my youngest aunt.
Unfortunately my youngest aunt never got married and became a breadwinner,
working as a typist in various offices. Also after the decades of wars, the male
population in Turkey had diminished and there were almost half a million more
women than men.

When we were children the opening of the trunks was almost a ceremony.
In the late twenties and early thirties we children of Turkey did not have many
toys. Even middle class children would only have a doll, a ball and a couple of

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books. Our eyes were not constantly stimulated like the eyes of today's children
who watch TV, own many toys, games, books, bicycles, even in poor countries.
The opening of the trunks was like a ritual that gave us glimpses of another world,
another time. We were the modern city children of Turkey. We wore short
dresses, our hair was short, we did not even have pierced-ears. In school we wore
uniforms and boys and girls had the same school caps. None of these novelties,
this complete lack of adornment (a reaction to the excessive decorations of
Seraglio women?) bothered us. On the contrary it was like a passage to
modernity, to equality of the sexes and, to a certain extent, class differences.
However, to have a glimpse of another world was fascinating. We begged my
grandmother to open the trunks so we could see something old and beautiful.
Perhaps, my youngest aunt who was about twenty-five years old in 1930, didn't
even think that she would not get married. She used to love to show us her
trousseau. But when she approached middle age she knew that it would not be
easy for her to get married. Since my grandfather's army pension was not
sufficient to support the family she had to work and help with the education of her
younger brother. The first typing courses were offered in 1929 after the Turkish
alphabet was changed from Arabic to Latin letters. My aunt was among the first
women who learned how to type and spent her adult life working in offices. Every
day she traveled by trolley cars to reach her office in another part of Istanbul. My
grandmother sat by the window and anxiously awaited her return from work, with
a quiet prayer barely moving her lips. Her concern was well founded. In 1930 my
aunt was hit by a trolley car as she tried to help an elderly woman to cross the
street and spent many months in a hospital before she could start working again.
After my grandfather died in 1938 the mother-daughter bond became even
stronger. Although unmarried my aunt had a satisfactory personal life. She was
deeply attached to her family and treated her sisters' and brother's children as her
own. She had many friends from her school years; most of them had become
teachers. Many among her friends were also Balkan immigrants - Roumelians as
they were called in Turkish.

In the summer of 1960 I went to Italy with my husband and children.

From there we went on to Yugoslavia and stayed in Belgrade for a few days. We
took the Simplon-Orient Express from Belgrade to Istanbul. I was very anxious to
tell my grandmother that I finally had a glimpse of Macedonian lands from the
train's window. When we stopped in Salonica we were able to get out of the train
for a little while. I looked in vain to see the famous White Tower I had heard so
much about from my aunt. We bought some delicious yogurt at the station before
we got back on the train. When we arrived in Sirkeci station in Istanbul many
hours later we were met by my paternal aunt who looked a little sad. I was happy
to be home and bubbling with our adventures when my aunt broke the news that
my grandmother had died the previous day. The next day we had the funeral
ceremonies in a mosque near her house and she was buried in a nearby cemetery
with tall cypress trees that swayed in the wind.

Now my unmarried aunt was living in another part of Istanbul in the same

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apartment house with my oldest aunt's daughter. She had retired and was
managing her life with her small pension in her sparkling clean basement
apartment. She had frequent visits by relatives and friends. She was never alone.

Each time I went to visit her in Istanbul she would press something on me.
Thus I acquired the beautiful gold-embroidered jacket. She also gave me a dark
blue satin bed spread embroidered with silver thread with the "raised effect." My
other possessions: an exquisite square of wool cloth in dark red with white stripes
and black designs, a dusty pink satin skirt with an orchard-like embossed design,
a pink and raspberry silk square used as a wrapping cloth, an off white crinkled
cotton shirt still unfinished without collar or buttonholes, a tiny delicate filigree
silver cigarette case that held the tobacco and the paper - my grandmother, like
most Roumelian women, smoked because she came from the tobacco country and
she used to roll her own slender cigarettes. My aunt gave me most of these things
after my grandmother died. I think while she was living she might not have dared;
perhaps my grandmother was secretly hoping that she would still get married. My
aunt died in 1975 from breast cancer. Her two older sisters took very good care of
her in her last days, She was buried in the same cemetery of tall cypresses as her
mother.

Unfortunately human beings have shorter life spans than material objects.
A tattered silk jacket going back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century is
still here with its unspoiled gold embroidery. We are surrounded by all these
objects given to us by relatives and friends who are no more. Sometimes we don't
even know exactly the origins of these objects (who made them, under which
circumstances they were acquired), but we keep imagining their histories as
related to us, and we are grateful that they are there. There are also some
experiences and relationships taken for granted when we were children, which
acquire new meanings when we remember them as grownups.

In the thirties my aunt was very friendly with three Greek women, Anna,
Angelica and Marie, who lived in one of those tortuous cobblestone streets of
Istanbul. These three young women earned their living by embroidering slips,
night-gowns, blouses, tablecloths, etc., for the trousseaus of young brides. They
were very poor and unable to marry since they did not have the drachma, the
dowry, required by Greek custom. I think they finally managed to put enough
money together for the youngest one to get married. My aunt liked these women
very much and sometimes found new customers for them. They too did favors for
her and did some work for her for less money. My grandmother was a strict
Muslim yet she loved these Greek women who were also quite religious -- Greek
Orthodox. They used to call my grandmother "Anne" meaning mother. After all
those wars, miseries, emigrations these people were able to love each other.
Strange enough my aunt had a lot in common with these young women. They all
shared some of the Byzantine superstitions. They were experts in reading fortunes
from the grounds of Turkish coffee cups turned upside down. There was so much
to read in a coffee cup. So many stories of twisted roads, troubles left behind and

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bright days ahead, a man or a woman of high position bringing money -enemies
and friends were all lined up in a small demitasse. These Greek women also made
delicious sweets with mastic and bergamot citron flavor that they brought as
presents.

My grandmother did not talk much. She did not tell us stories. I don't
know if I am right in thinking that even feelings of nostalgia would have been a
luxury for her. Were there ever good times? If so, what were they? Her Turkish-
Roumelian culture was in her refined manners, her Roumelian accent, her
exclusion from an education that all her five brothers were entitled to. She did not
know how to read and write and she was confined to a world of domesticity,
managing a well-kept house with little money. Like most women of her
generation she was deeply religious and observed all the rituals of Islam without
being able to read the Koran.

My youngest aunt who was only six or seven years old when they had to
leave Salonica had more stories to tell. I now regret that I did not pay enough
attention to her stories - even if they were embroidered a little. They were full of
meaning that I will search for in vain for in all the books I read about that period
of Ottoman history that was lived by my grandparents and their parents.

September 1977-November 1978

New York