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Wedding costume of a bride. Bulgarians. Late 19th – early 20th century. Feodosia District, Stary Krym, Koktebel village. Bulgarians

Title:

Wedding costume of a bride. Bulgarians. Late 19th – early 20th century. Feodosia District, Stary Krym, Koktebel village

Ethnic groups:

Bulgarians

Rubrics:

Costume, women's

Annotation:

The Bulgarians are a South Slavic people that emerged in the early Middle Ages as a result of fusion of Turkic-speaking groups of Proto-Bulgarians (Bulgars) and Slavic tribes with the remnants of local population, primarily the Thracians. In the late 14th century, Bulgaria was conquered by the Turks, becoming vassals, and in the 15th-19th centuries forming part of the Ottoman Empire. In the late 18th and early 19th century the Bulgarians living in their core territory struggled for liberation from the Ottoman oppression, but were defeated; some of them found shelter from persecution of Turkish authorities in the sparsely populated steppe expanses of the North Black Sea region and South Bessarabia, where settlements of some groups of Bulgarians appeared in the territory of Taurida, Kherson, and Yekaterinoslav Provinces. It should be noted that the Bulgarian immigrants severed from the bulk of their ethnos dwelt among other ethnic groups, retaining the language and many features of the general Bulgarian culture. In 1905 Konstantin Inostrantsev, curator of the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum, made an expedition to Taurida Province, where he studied the traditional culture of Bulgarian immigrants who lived in the village of Koktebel. The researcher managed to acquire a bride’s wedding attire representing the best festive clothing of a Bulgarian woman, which included such traditional elements of the clothing ensemble as a homespun chemise, or riza, a roklya dress and khabichka outer jacket of black wool cloth, a prestilka (farta) striped apron, a split headgear, and wool sneakers called terlik. Unlike everyday clothing, these garments were made of high quality fabrics, although the raw materials for their making were traditional – hemp, flax, wool, silk, and leather. Woolen fabrics played a special role in the costume, which was related both to the ethnic tradition brought from Bulgaria and to the local main occupation of the Bulgarians in the new settlement area, i.e. sheep farming. A distinguishing, semiotic sign of the bride, which distinguished her costume from the clothing of her girlfriends attending the wedding, was an outer headscarf of white lace, or mrezhi, trimmed with red silk thread. Attached to its three corners were tassels of multicolor beads, and the traditional ear decorations were red and white textile flowers decorated with three leaves with a little azure feather.