Tradition is like casting in bronze, for all eternity, 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 in its art and lore you may find the full spectrum of a nation's history amid the reality of lives lived. As an introduction to Croatian folk life traditions, this exhibition at the Riffe Gallery centers on folk dress and household textiles, complemented by historic illustrations, contemporary photographs, ceramic and stone models of village architecture, original naive art featuring village life and ritual artifacts. Much of it is the work of women's hands because women traditionally have been the nurturers and conservators of the 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 woven designs in its home-loomed fabrics, the seemingly endless diversity in embroidery techniques, drawn- and cut-work, lace work, the symbolic use of color and the creation of designs that reflect the geography and history of the Croatian nation and communal values that reach back to the ancient pre-Christian era.

Identity also is a marked characteristic of Croatian folk dress. Regional and social identity are expressed by style, design and color. Clothing of both men and women expresses regional identity, while social identity is more clearly shown in women’s folk dress. The topography and economy of a region dictate the fabrics found there: 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 also is revealed in folk dress. A region reflects its history of invasions by the addition of weapons as an integral part of men's folk dress, while women's folk dress includes the coins and jewels of their dowries to facilitate flight without financial ruin. To this day, the path of refugees fleeing 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, also are present in the folk dress of various regions: Venetian influence along the Adriatic coast, Byzantine influence in the southern coastal areas, among others. This is not geography and history in the abstract, it is learning that the past shapes the present, as the present shapes the future.

The lack of men's folk dress in this exhibition is a result of the 19th century exodus of many men to towns and cities to seek work to augment the income of their farms. Their village dress was ill-suited to urban labor and they soon came to realize that they were treated with more courtesy when they were not wearing traditional folk dress. Therefore, anyone hoping to study values and traditions must look to the folk dress and household textiles of village women.

Fundamental to village traditions and their intrinsic values is their relationship to the earth. The earth is not seen as a thing, it is considered a person—Mother Earth—goddess, creator, nurturer and sustainer of all life. She is identified with woman, who as mother is also creator, nurturer and sustainer of life. From that perception flow many embroidery patterns that are reminiscent of prehistoric earth goddesses; the most popular are the tree of life and the rhombus, representing the womb. Inherent in Mother Earth imagery is the life-death-life concept that views death not as an end, but as an inter-generational continuum of past, present and future, because the deity is a given.

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. Agricultural people 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 communities.

The prevalence of red in folk textiles also is connected to life imagery. There are specific names for two hues of red that resemble the color of blood, the life-sustaining element in the human body; they are svijetlocrvene and zivocrveni. The root of those words is life. Most often women wear those colors and decorate their homes with them. They are colors reserved for women of life-bearing age because symbolic color, along with design and headdress, denotes maiden, mother, widow and wise crone.

Another fundamental fact 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—often are shared. In village life, communal individuals take precedence over separate individuals. That solidarity is reflected in the pride of regional identity 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 often are the same. A reading of the information panels accompanying this exhibition may bring to mind a memory of another culture that translates to the same universal meaning even though it speaks a different language.

--By Frances Babic
Babic is a former curator of the Croatian Heritage Museum in Eastlake, Ohio. She organized this exhibition for the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery.

This exhibition was made possible through the generosity of:
Mr. and Mrs. Nick Babic
Mr. and Mrs. Zvonko Cirjak
Berislava Sanko Daugirdas
Vera Maletic
Goldie Malone
Maria Saric
Mr. and Mrs. Marko Saric
Kathy Shalaty
Sonja F. Unger
Stjepan E. Vlahovich

# # #

[top]