Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 39
Pastel on parchment, c. 1750. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, 1930–2.
Photography: Bettina Jacot-Descombes.
and male figures looked very much alike in their long, ample vestments. The
colours of these various layered garments were usually vivid yellows, greens,
blues, reds, and spotless whites, or, especially in women’s light summer frocks—
as pictured by Liotard—they were muted, delicate pastel-coloured prints with
highly sophisticated patterns. The above is simply the basic outline of the Turco-
Phanariot costume, but there were numerous variations in combinations of cut,
color, and textures according to region, period and taste, as Jennifer Scarce has
shown in her detailed study of female dress in the Near and Middle East.23
Although tucked comfortably away in Yorkshire, far from the metropolitan
extravagances of London, John Morritt’s sister must have been aware of the vogue
for Turqueries that had reached its peak in England and in other parts of Western
Europe around the 1770s—that is, about two decades before Morritt’s travels.
Jianu, Women, Fashion, and europeanization
209
Kick-started, among others, by traveller-writers such as Lady Mary herself and by
earlier Orientalist painters such as Antoine de Favray, Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, and
Liotard (both of whom, incidentally, made portraits of Lady Mary),24 the craze for
Oriental clothes probably did not extend far beyond the narrow world of European
royalty, very rich upper-class circles, and a few cognoscenti enamoured of things
eastern. It is doubtful, moreover, that full Turkish dress was ever worn in the West
outside balls, masquerades, or portrait-painting sessions, as exemplified in the
presumed portrait of Mary Gunning, dressed in a costume which had probably
been chosen from among Liotard’s own studio props acquired in Constantinople.
One can speculate that for West European upper-class women, being
represented in Turkish dress had connotations of Asian opulence, exoticism, and
romance (as in the “torn letter” detail of the Countess of Coventry’s portrait,
for instance, with its suggestions of romantic intrigue). The device must have
been—for both painters and sitters—a way of distancing the subjects from the
sartorial norms and conventions of their own eighteenth-century daily world, in
order to exoticize them into Arabian Nights figures of indolent luxuriousness or
relaxed, demure sensuousness. For other categories of sitters, such as the foreign
diplomats in Constantinople, Lady Mary Montagu, or the Earl of Sandwich,
Liotard’s travelling companion, a “Turkish” portrait was intended to establish
status and authority in the eighteenth-century public arena, where interest in
the Eastern Question and the Middle East was growing apace with the political
developments in southeastern and central Europe.
A “Greek land” straight out of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment was how
John Morritt described Wallachia in a letter to his mother.25 The phrase aptly
conveys the meanings that a geographically remote “Orient” not always clearly
conceptualized in terms of ethnicity or location could evoke to generations of
(West) European readers of Antoine Galland’s popular translation, Les mille
et une nuits (1704–17): story-telling, mystery, confused and confusing, real or
imagined, identities of “the other,” glimpsed in transit by an easily charmed, non-
analytical viewer.
Clothes, Hygiene, and National Character
Other travellers to Romania, especially those who spent a longer time there than
John Morritt, were sometimes less enthusiastic about the charms of Asian dress,
and attached to it meanings that were related to the supposed impact of Ottoman
mores and lifestyles on the national Romanian character. Alexandre-Maurice
Blanc de Lanautte, Comte D’Hauterive (1754–1830), the French secretary of
the Prince of Moldova, Alexandru Mavrocordat Phiraris during 1785–86, had
an altogether negative view of Turkish attire, but his concern was less for its
aesthetics than for its damaging effect on health and morality. As an admirer—as
most French observers were—of the Moldavians’ “Latin” strength of character,
and as an Enlightener who believed that the Principalities should follow in the
footsteps of “civilized” Europe, he considered Turkish dress ill-suited both to the
national character and to what he envisaged as the country’s future. Turkish dress
210
Women in the ottoman Balkans
“favours indolence,” he believed, and is only “proper for the luxurious lifestyle of
a much more opulent nation and for the mildness of a different climate.” Oriental
attire renders a robust, well-built body useless, D’Hauterive adds, and makes
it impossible for the Moldavians—and by extension all Romanians—“to keep
up their active lifestyle.” Eventually, he explains, the luxury and vanity of this
adopted lifestyle will utterly corrupt “the moral qualities” of the natives, as well
as their health and physical well-being.26 As far as the women were concerned,
D’Hauterive believed,
The costume is generally speaking barely decent and only to the advantage
of women under eighteen years of age. All the inconveniences attending on
aging and pregnancies are revealed to the full. The dress does not cover,
as it were, anything other than the body’s colour, displaying its shape in
all its flabbiness and alteration. Never sitting, rarely standing, their half-
reclining body gets flabby, losing, by supporting itself among the cushions
from morning till night, the habit of standing upright. … Always curled
up, never wearing any shoes, they cannot put their feet down, and they all
slouch rather than walk.27
Such concerns for the health hazards of Ottoman-style garments were echoed
a few decades later, in full transition period, by the doctor who oversaw the
functioning of Romania’s earliest modern hospitals and the emergence of new
views on public health. In a monograph published in Bucharest in 1830 (but
referring to the earlier realities of 1800–1828), Constantin Caracaş, one of the
city of Bucharest’s chief doctors—and incidentally, one of the first men to adopt
trousers and the frock-coat in the Wallachian capital—was equally critical of what
he called the “Asian” dress of both men and women, which he found “damaging
both to the health and to the purse”:
The long, ample anteri s [ sic], the many superimposed furs, the long
shawls used as belts, all of these are a burden to the body, which warms
up exceedingly, especially in the heated rooms, so that they provoke much
sweating, difficulty and atonia in all of the body’s members. … Equally
damaging is the spherical kalpak of colossal dimensions … with which
they cover their heads; not only is it costly, being made of two or three
lambskins brought at great cost from inner Russia, … but it is too warm for
the head, just like the fez, worn underneath; this causes much sweating on
the top of the head and because of the habit of doffing one’s hat for frequent
salutations, in the winter and spring it causes flus, toothaches, as well as
p
ain in the ears and in the head.28
The Pleasures and Dangers of Westernization
We have seen above that by the time John Morritt was writing admiringly to his
sister of the Wallachian lady’s Turkish dress in 1794, the vogue for Turqueries
in England and in Western Europe in general had faded away, as Aileen Ribeiro
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211
has shown, to be replaced increasingly by an interest in garments of neo-classical
inspiration.29 At around the same time, the Romanian Principalities—where
Turkish dress was the order of the day rather than upper-class ballroom self-
indulgence—were rapidly becoming engaged in processes of change which first
affected the “form” and not much later the very “substance” of society.30 The new
trend was an increasing fascination with all things West-European. The Russian
general Langeron resided frequently in the Principalities in the years 1790–1810,
during their repeated occupation by the Russian army, and watched the emergence
of the new Zeitgeist with bemused condescension:
With a little time and even less effort, they [Moldavian ladies] submitted
themselves to a civilization desired by their amour propre and called forth
by their natural wit and their veiled charms, imprisoned as they were in their
sad and heavy Asiatic vestments. The only thing they were unwilling to
discard was the rouge and powder. Their faces are painted in all the colours
of the rainbow.31
Langeron was in no doubt that the Russian officers were the main channels for the
transmission of European fashions and trends into the Romanian Principalities—
lands which, in his eyes, seemed stuck in “Asiatic barbarity” compared to the
already Europeanized Russian society:32
In 1806, we [i.e. the Russian officers commanding the army of occupation
during the war of 1806–12] still found a lot of these ladies in their Oriental
costumes, their houses without furniture and their husbands as jealous as
ever. But a revolution swept quickly and comprehensively first over Iaşi,
then over Bucharest and the provinces. In less than a year, all the Moldavian
and Wallachian ladies adopted the European dress. From all over the world,
there came to the two capital cities fashion retailers, tailors, and couturières
… Our arrival changed the face of Moldavia more rapidly than Peter I altered
the face of his Empire. A few of the younger men also adopted the frock
coat, but the older ones as well as those with public functions kept their
long beards and their ample gowns. Dancing also underwent a revolutionary
change. National dances were banished or fell into disrepute. The fashion
was now for Polish, English, and French dances, as well as for waltzes, and
these ladies, naturally adept at everything they are keen to learn, became
proficient dancers in a single year. When we had first arrived in Moldavia,
they could hardly walk.33
Langeron’s reference to Peter the Great’s Westernizing program is both apt and
misleading. In a sense, the changes in fashion, household amenities, and the
patterns of consumerism, leisure, and the urban environment between roughly
1780 and 1850 could be said to be in effect a silent revolution that prepared the
ground for later political developments. However, rather than being initiated
by decree from above, as in Russia, sartorial changes in the Principalities were
effected through a more subtle process of transformation largely conducted by
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
Figure 7.3. Charles Doussault, “A Soirée in Iaşi.” Lithograph, from the
Album Moldo-Valaque ou guide politique à travers les Principautés du Danube
(Paris: l’Illustration, 1848).
élite women. Rapid though these changes were, they did not happen overnight, as
Langeron seems to suggest, and in the beginning they arguably only affected the
surface, rather than the substance, of the social fabric.34
The results, in this period of transition, could be involuntarily hilarious. Arriving
in Bucharest in 1818, the English medical doctor and Radcliffe Travelling Fellow
William MacMichael (1784–1839) saw the Wallachian boyar s “in loosely-flowing
robes” ride “à la Turc” [ sic] or “indolently lolling, and looking very forlorn, in
shabby calèches built at Vienna.” “The combination of Oriental and European
manners and costume is irresistibly ludicrous,” MacMichael thought. “The boyar
looks like a grave Mahometan; but speak to him, and instead of the pompous and
magnificent sounds of the Turkish idiom, he will address you in tolerable French,
and talk of novels, faro, and the whist.”35
By 1818, when the country had returned to Ottoman domination after the
Russian occupation of 1806–1812, MacMichael witnessed the recently established
“Club” in Bucharest where the male spectators
were uniformly dressed in huge kalpak s, with long flowing robes, and
many were smoking Turkish pipes; in short, every thing was Eastern in
the appearances of the men, though in the costume of the ladies, who were
sitting cross-legged on sofas, there was an evident admixture of French
and Oriental attire; their coiffures were richly ornamented with jewels, and
Jianu, Women, Fashion, and europeanization
213
they wore French silk dresses, probably made at Vienna, together with the
Greek zone and Turkish slippers. Under the jealous eye of the suspicious
government of Turkey, the article of dress is a matter of no small importance;
and the use of the costume of civilized Europe would be considered as
dangerous an innovation, as the adoption of the most enlightened views of
modern policy.36
Even thirty years later, in 1848, this gendered division of French and Oriental
clothes was still evident in social gatherings (Figure 7.3).
I have found no documentary evidence to support the notion that the Ottoman
Porte intervened in the sartorial regulations of the Principalities by imposing a
ban on European fashions. Robert F. Forrest quotes the Moniteur universel of
20 July 1806, according to which a Turkish ferman (edict) of that year required
non-Muslim subjects of the Porte to wear Turkish dress or risk a penalty tax of
between 75 and 100 piastres.37 This very economic reference, however, lacks
the necessary detail that would make it convincing and useful for the present
argument. Which region of the Ottoman dominions and which social groups
was this ferman supposed to affect? In fact, it is now well documented that most
Ottoman regimes were keen to dictate clear sumptuary labelling distinguishing
between Muslims and non-Muslims, generally considered inferior.
The Ottoman Porte embarked on a radical programme of dress transformation
during the reign of Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), especially from 1829 onwards.38
However, these reforms only concerned male official and military attire:
the shalvars were replaced by close-fitting trousers, and turbans by the less
cumbersome fez. Women were not affected. In fact, as Suraiya Faroqhi and
Madeline Zilfi have shown, “rulings that attempted to make women virtually
‘invisible’ in public
places were reiterated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries with a stridency unknown in earlier periods,” and Mahmud II proved at
least as conservative in this area as any of his predecessors.39
Processes of sartorial change in the Ottoman world of the early decades of
the nineteenth-century were not only gendered, but also region-specific. In many
areas of the empire, the Romanian Principalities included, native officials did not
as a rule wear the new streamlined fez-and-tunic uniform decreed by Mahmud
II. In fact, an inverse process developed in the Ottoman-dominated Romanian
Principalities, and presumably in most Balkan and southeastern European areas.
As everywhere in the Empire, the ceremonial dress of the Phanariot princes
and officials and the emblems of their authority had been subjected to a strict
codification as to color, type of fur used for the official kaftan s, size of the men’s
pear-shaped head-dress—the kalpak—and even the length of beards, and it can
be presumed that infringements of these codes were likely to be penalized by the
Turkish suzerain authorities. But even after Mahmud II’s reforms and during the
Tanzimat period, the dress codes of the Greek-Phanariot and Moldo-Wallachian
officials remained unchanged, while women were left apparently free to innovate
and modernize. The constraints of state office and court ceremonial would explain
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
why, as General Langeron and MacMichael observed and as historians of costume
such as Al. Alexianu have shown, the men remained more conservative than the
women in the area of dress at least until the 1840s. One can only presume that
this was due less to Ottoman impositions than to the inherent conservatism of the
Phanariot and post-Phanariot courts at Bucharest and Iaşi.
While Romanian elite women of the boyar class started to revolutionize their
wardrobes, in Phanariot court circles such changes were adopted more cautiously
even among the wives of the ruling princes for whom European fashions had
mainly a ceremonial use. Christine Reinhard, wife of the newly appointed French
consul in Iaşi, was pleased to be received in July 1806 by the hospodar’s wife,
Safta Ipsilanti (Greek: Ypsilantis), “in a dress of red crêpe à la française,” while
all her ladies-in-waiting were still in Oriental dress.40 (See Figure 7.4.41) For