Women’s costume. Gagauz. Early 20th century. Bessarabia Province, Bendery District, villages of Kiryutnya and Chadyr-Lunga

Gagauz

Costume, women's

The Gagauz are one of the most mysterious peoples, because the question of their origin is still pending. One theory is that the Gagauz are descended from the Turkic-speaking Bulgars who migrated to the Balkans from the Volga in the 7th century and adopted Christianity three centuries later. The first evidences on the Gagauz settlement in the Balkan Peninsula mention the historic region Dobruja where the Gagauz lived side by side with the Bulgarians. The Gagauz people’s history is tragic and inseparable from other ethnoses subjected to Ottoman oppression that lasted for five centuries. In the late 18th – early 19th centuries the Gagauz jointly with the Bulgarians, fleeing from Turkish persecutions, were resettling from Bulgaria to Russia, where Taurida and Bessarabia Provinces became their basic place of residence. In the summer of 1905, Nikolai Mogilyansky, a remarkable Russian ethnographer and anthropologist of the early 20th century, head of the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum, gathered the first Bulgarian-Gagauz collection when working in Bessarabia. The researcher believed clothing to be an important marker of everyday culture, paying great attention to collecting men’s and women’s costumes. The garments purchased in the villages of Kiryutnya and Chadyr-Lunga enabled presenting the costume set of Gagauz women immigrating from the Balkans; it had much in common with Bulgarian clothing, in particular in the use of woolen, cotton, and silk fabrics, and the dark color gamut and similar elements of the clothing ensemble. Its components were gelmek, a yoke chemise of homespun fabric with cross stitch; chukman, a sleeveless dress of checkered fabric whose hem was trimmed with black velveteen border; fyta, a woolen apron; and chember, a black kerchief decorated with hand-braided silk fringe.