In the previous summer, I attended a Serbian ballet during the festival of Ariana. Since I am really fond of cultures and the way each culture preserves for itself a peculiarity, I was determined with my best friend, to go and see what is special about these Serbian people. To my surprise, I found a striking similarity between the Serbian folk costumes and our Tunisian ones. I was really stupefied and wondered how come this far country could resemble us in the way we dress. As I was passionate about finding any meeting point with our folklore and traditional clothing, I decided to collect some data that could possibly echo the shared bonds. This article thus is going to trace the possible similarities in terms of history, the assemblage of pieces, and the significance of red color between the East European folk costumes, the Serbian in particular, and our Tunisian traditional.
A shared history:
If we want to know how east Europe countries, particularly Serbia, and Tunisia come to enjoy almost similar folk costumes, we have to dig into their histories combined. The common denominator between these two cultures is the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, long ruled by the Ottoman Empire, the ways in which East Europeans were affected by the Turkish Empire by the sixteenth century are conspicuous through their folklore and traditional clothing. The impact of Turkish rule upon all sectors of Balkan and the North African societies was profound.
Similar components:
What struck me at a first glance, while watching this ballet, is the female vest. In Tunisia, we call it “sadria”; in Serbian, it is called a “jelek”. These hand-woven vests include playful designs and colorful patterns. This ‘jelek’ form resembles our traditional costume "Tarayoun" mainly in Kairouan, worn by brides in their “Henna” ceremony. Girls wear white shirts with red embroidered embellishments, black vests with red trim, and striped red-and-black skirts. In Serbia, women wear wrap skirts over an embroidered white petticoat with an embroidered blouse and a scarf on her head. Both vests are adorned with the same tassels.
These two juxtaposed pictures show for instance how much the Tunisian and the Serbian vests, respectively, are alike in terms of the embroidery and the color choice.
In addition to the vests, I discovered that our bags, called ‘Nakhla’ in the Tunisian south, resemble the hand-woven bags in Serbia, worn by shepherds and farmers during the harvest.
Moreover, the ‘Mharma’ or the red or white scarf worn by old ladies in Tunisia, is strikingly the same with the Serbian one. Actually, some people would call it the Russian scarf (le foulard russe) in Tunisia. Others would claim that it is typically a Turkish piece of clothing. However, some people would say that it inscribes within the Berber traditional clothing. As the intercultural and economic relations with the Ottoman Empire had grown tight, it was sold in Eastern Europe excessively. Nonetheless, no matter its origins, what matters most to me is that this scarf indicates a long history of cultural interaction, and it is suggestive of how cultures are built around a give-and-take relationship.
But why the red color particularly?
Strikingly, in the two cultures, the East European and the Tunisian, the most used color is “red”. So let us detect its significance in relation to its ethnographic significance. Since we reached the conclusion that both Tunisian and Serbian cultures were occupied by the Ottoman Empire, and the latter itself was influenced by the culture of the Balkan, we can deduce that the color-code run in the same channel of significance. In eastern cultures, red symbolizes deeper and important values like honor, sacrifice, and passion. Indeed, red is a prominent color in Russian culture, for instance. Even in the Balkan countries, red is a symbol of luck. The dominance of this color in the embroidery art is telling of its important value. In Serbian folklore, red is taken as the color of life, fertility, and health. Even in our Tunisian context, the color red is correlated with our Berber heritage. As “el Malya” or “el Fouta”, for example, are worn in cities whose agricultural production mainly focuses on paprika, like in Kairouan and the Sahel. Most importantly, the use of the red color finds its roots in how people used to color their cloth in primitive conditions, as they resorted to natural dyestuff, which came essentially from plants.
To conclude, from this one-night voyage into the Serbian folk costumes, I came to realize that both Tunisian and east European countries, at large, share salient similarities that can be traced in history and cultural interaction. Moreover, this idea makes me approve of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea about cultural “universalism”. Indeed, through this dressing code which inscribes in the “universal structures”, I found out that folk costumes function as ID cards of ethnographic culture. Indeed, they are a human token by which we define ourselves and through which we discover to what extent we are alike, but differently.
Ines Mokdadi
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