Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
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Mme Reinhard, who endured the deprivations of Balkan life with undisguised
ill humour, this gesture must have been a comforting reminder of the polished,
familiar world back home, to which she longed to return.
One can only speculate about the meanings that women themselves might
have attached to their adoption of western fashions in early nineteenth-century
Romania. The absence of personal written testimonies such as intimate letters
and diaries by women from this period means that we do not know whether they
were aware of the moral or political connotations of the changes which they
had initiated almost single-handedly. Was it mere status anxiety and derivative
fashion awareness based on western models that prompted the shifting patterns of
elite consumption? Or was it an agenda deliberately adopted by women in order
to symbolically challenge an Oriental, patriarchal order of society in which they
could have no other significant contribution to public life? There is no evidence
that their menfolk resisted their demands and their new sartorial preferences. On
the contrary, available written evidence points to the largesse with which these
boyar s opened their purses to please their womenfolk, while continuing to drag
their heavy kaftan s and kalpak s to court, where their functions took them.
Europeanization and the Voices of Tradition
Opposition to the new Europeanizing trends became perceptible after the 1840s,
when male attire itself started to be drawn into the processes of change so promptly
and unreservedly embraced by women. The French-educated Moldavian writer
Alecu Russo (1819–59) did not hesitate to point to the link between changes
in fashion and political subversion. In his view, the frock-coat and waistcoat—
the “clothes of equality” as he called them—led to the emancipation of a whole
generation of Romanians: “[N]ew ideas took our country by storm at the same
time as the trousers,” he wrote in an unfinished essay published in 1851–52,42
“and the invasion was worse than the attacks of the Tartars; it took a single spark
to set on fire everything from the çaksır s and the şlik s [Turkish: başlık] to the mest, the cübbe, and the whole content of our ancestors’ wardrobes. … The change
in costume signalled the new spirit of awakening. The new ideas and progress
emerged from the tails of the frock coat and the pocket of the waistcoat.” There
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215
Figure 7.4. Mihail Töpler, Portrait of a woman. Oil on canvas, unsigned, undated.
The National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, 3439.
The sitter is dressed in a rich and hybrid mix of West-European “Empire” dress and
Oriental accessories (e.g. the small, flat bonnet adorned with jewels), and with the eyebrows
joined at the middle, in accordance with the cosmetic conventions of the day.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
was considerable ambiguity in Russo’s attitude to these cultural changes and to
the disappearance of the Phanariot habits of calculated obsequiousness. While
Russo the liberal welcomed the emergence of a new, more democratic civic ethos
at court and in towns, Russo the romantic traditionalist regretted the passing of
a highly idealized vision of social harmony between boyar s, serfs, and Gypsy
slaves on the landed estates.
For more radically conservative observers of the events as they unfolded in the
early nineteenth century, the changes in the lifestyle of the élites were a sign of
the collapse of moral order and the loss of traditional values, promptly chastized
by God’s wrath in the shape of natural disasters. Ioan Dobrescu (1777–1830), a
humble baker and artisan from a suburb of Bucharest with a strong moral sense
and an intense Orthodox faith who kept a daily chronicle of events between
1802 and 1830, reacted with apocalyptic rage (and abysmal grammar) to the
cosmopolitanism, the new fashions, and consumerist hedonism of the Phanariot
élites:
The females with heads uncovered and hair cut short, naked down to their
waist. The men had discarded their own dress and assumed foreign garments,
like unbelievers, some German, others Sfrench [ sic], and in other ways,
some with close-cropped hair, others with curls like the women. And some
of us, the more gifted, would mix with them and read their books, some in
Sfrench, others in German, still others Talian [ sic]. And thus entered the
teachings of that God-forsaken Volter [ sic], whom the pagans hold in such
esteem, like a God. And we would no longer observe the days of Lent.
Always meats at table. At church we went as to a promenade, to show off
our best clothes, the females their devilish ornaments, instead of entering
the church with fear of God and pray for our sins. In brief, vanity had her
throne in Bucharest. We no longer believed in God, but only in fine houses,
and clothes, in cheating, and rich meals, in drunkenness, and especially in
open whoring.43
Earthquakes, fires, famine, and the “infidels’ invasions” were all, in Dobrescu’s
view, just rewards for the widespread decline of morality. One may assume that
this violent reaction was not an isolated case, especially among the moral and
God-fearing middling and lower classes—as well as, one may presume, among
the traditionally conservative Orthodox clergy. Far from the extravagant opulence
of the court and the boyar s’ households, Dobrescu saw the other side of Phanariot
society—the slums, poverty, famines, and the natural disasters such as the famous
plague that still bears the name of the Phanariot ruler Ion Caragea (Greek: Karatzas)
(1813)—and could not help but vituperate not only against the luxury, but also
against what he thought was the superfluous quest for cultural sophistication at
the court of Caragea. He gloated when the first theatre built in Bucharest by the
prince’s daughter, the well-educated Ralu, burnt down: the “pagan temple of the
Greek gods” was gone, he announced with undisguised joy.44
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217
The fact that Ralu played the piano was considered a “scandal” even by some of
the native boyar s. Her instrument, probably one of the first of its kind in Romania,
was, they said, the first step to moral decay.45 The Romanian writer Ion Ghica tells
the suitably romanticized real-life story, set around the same time (the 1815s), of a
young Viennese-educated lady who had brought a piano to Bucharest and played
to the delight of passers-by. Her enraged husband smashed the instrument to pieces
and the young woman died of chagrin, but not before asking for her coffin to be
made out of the piano’s wood. Her deathbed wish was not carried out, however,
as the Orthodox priest objected, saying that the klavier, as the instrument was
then known under its German name, was the “devil’s instrument” (Romanian:
instrumentul necuratului). Other piano-haters of the time were simply content to
store their fruit conserves in theirs.46
It is impossible at this stage to assess the relative weight in the public arena of
conservative vs. modernizing opinions for periods prior to 1850. But “awakeni
ng”
and “progress,” the words used by Alecu Russo to describe the new ethos, were
no random turns of the pen. They were major key words in the evolving political
vocabulary of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as studied by the
Romanian historian Vlad Georgescu in his aforementioned Mémoires et projets
de réforme dans les Principautés roumaines (1970–72) and Istoria ideilor politice
româneşti [A History of Romanian Political Ideas] (1987). The word “Europe”
itself became, in this era of transition, a key cultural term whereby speakers
included or dissociated themselves from the “civilized” areas of the continent. As
Pompiliu Eliade pointed out, when in the early nineteenth century the Romanian
boyar s started to send their sons off to West European schools and universities,
the phrase used was that they had been sent “in” or “inside”—a self-deprecating
way of referring to the “Orient” and the Ottoman-controlled Balkans as being
“outside” the pale of European civilization.47 Far from being the exclusive
creation of Enlightenment thinkers and western travellers, the negative view of
a backward East Europe resulted to a great extent from the natives’ own sense
of inferiority.48 A cultural Iron Curtain was already operating on the collective
imagination in lands where a ban on foreign travel had been in force more or less
efficiently until at least the 1820s.
Whether “imitation” of the West was welcomed or deplored, the leading role
of modernizing élites in shaping taste and transforming urban culture in Ottoman-
controlled Wallachia and Moldavia is now well-established. The surviving written
evidence shows that élite initiatives in the emergent culture of consumerism
were embedded within an inbuilt sense of an absolute historical imperative for
the Romanian Principalities to exit the orbit of the “Orient” and occupy their
“rightful” place among the European nations.
Trade, Consumerism, and Europeanization
The pomp and circumstance of the Phanariot court with the rich ceremonial
costumes and the ever-present example of Greek and Turkish opulence could
only encourage a taste for luxury that the native Romanian boyar s appear to have
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already possessed in abundance. As early as the sixteenth century, fabulous sums
were spent on the acquisition of jewellery and ceremonial accessories. A crown
made of diamond plates belonging to the Moldavian princely family Movilă cost
12,000 florins in the early seventeenth century, the equivalent price of 40 villages,
or 120 pure-bred horses, or 800 Persian rugs.49 Foreign observers often remarked
on the love of luxury among Greek and Romanian nobles alike at the Phanariot
courts. “The Moldavians go bankrupt to pay for their fabrics and furs, and when
they appear in all their finery, they look magnificent and in very good taste,” said
Count D’Hauterive in his study La Moldavie en 1785.50
The new Western influences that started to penetrate the Principalities only
changed the patterns rather than the scale of élite consumption, as the new
political and economic circumstances created by the Russo-Turkish treaties of the
late eighteenth century led to the incipient de-marginalization of the Romanian
markets and the gradual encouragement of trade relations with Europe. Starting
with the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), Russo-Turkish negotiations led to a
gradual weakening of the Ottoman monopoly over Romanian trade. The Austro-
Turkish commercial treaty of 1784 intensified trade relations between Austria and
the Romanian Principalities, and the economic “thaw” continued, culminating
in the Akkerman Convention of 1826 and the treaty of Adrianople of 1829,
both of which dealt a considerable blow to the Ottoman economic control of
the Principalities—stipulating the latter’s freedom to trade with other European
countries and to navigate their own commercial vessels along the Danube.51
The new conditions favoured the growth of imports from western Europe in
parallel with continuing exchanges with the Orient. Transylvania was the transit
area for the penetration of luxury western goods into both Wallachia and Moldova.
While the precise quantification of the balance of trade during this period remains
elusive, the demand for such goods from the wealthy élite of both principalities
suggests shifts in taste and a determined turn towards central and western Europe.
It also led to a radical alteration in the status of the merchants, the more industrious
of whom accumulated vast wealth and began to be considered on par with the
boyar class. Merchant houses such as Hagi Moscu of Bucharest and Hagi Pop
(or Popp) of Sibiu (Hermannstadt in Transylvania) are the best known of the new
brand of traders-cum-bankers-cum-entrepreneurs who created the new culture of
industry and capital in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romania.52
Hagi Constantin Pop from Sibiu, married to Păuna, a woman from the lesser
gentry of Oltenia (southern Wallachia), became the favored supplier, banker,
confidant, and friend of some of the oldest and wealthiest nobles in Wallachia,
such as the Ştirbei, Bengescu, Dudescu, and Jianu families. Founded by Hagi
Pop’s father and an Oltenian associate during Oltenia’s occupation by Austria
(1718–39), the firm—which engaged in import-export as well as banking
activities—soon created branches in that province and established links with
foreign trading firms in Buda, Belgrade, Zagreb, Fiume, Trieste, and Venice, as
well as creating its own branch in Vienna in the late eighteenth century. The fact
that Hagi Constantin Pop was trusted by the Austrian authorities in Oltenia and
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219
had friendly links with the Austrian imperial agent in Bucharest helped create
the security needed for a prosperous business and for establishing unhindered
links with a host of hard-to-satisfy customers.53 The well-preserved commercial
correspondence, invoices, and price and shopping lists of the Hagi Pop house are
an invaluable source of information on the lifestyle, changing tastes, consumption,
and mores of the Romanian nobility around 1800. They also offer a rare glimpse
into the beginning of modern entrepreneurship in what was otherwise at the time
a backward and mainly agrarian economy.54
One of Hagi Constantin Pop’s more demanding customers was the formidable
widow Dumitrana Ştirbei, whose correspondence with Hagi Pop charts the
evolving “European” lifestyles of the Wallachian nobility.55 Her earliest known
order (dated January 1778) was a mix of the homely and the flamboyantly exotic:
cutlery, crystals of sugar, gun pellets for sparrows and rabbits, a man’s shirt and
long-johns, but also Brussels sprouts and lettuce seeds, and, incongruously, a
Musk (or Musco, possibly from “Muscovy”) fox fur collar. In June she asked
for a carriage ( carătă). On 21 January 1781 she requested that a gardener be
sent to her family estate at Cepturoaia. A seemingly loving mother-in-law to her
son’s 22-year-old wife Catinca, she ordered two satin-trimmed scarves and sma
ll
leather gloves for her in April 1782. In a letter dated 5 April 1784, she mentioned
“Miliort” (“Mylord”), the little dog Hagi Pop had sent, and who, alas, had only
lived one year; in subsequent letters she described in detail the lapdog she wanted
as a replacement. The noble, pious, but also avidly consumerist lady must have
started quite a trend in remote Oltenia at the time, as evidenced by numerous
orders from Oltenian boyar s for “a small, fluffy dog, the smallest in the whole of
Europe,” or “a very small, fluffy dog, fit for great ladies” meant as a present for a
“Mamuzel [i.e. mademoiselle] Zinca Văcăresco.”
Other posh pets sent to Oltenia as accessories for fashion-conscious boyar s
were canaries, the detailed specifications for which make sublime reading. On
9 July 1796, the boyar Constantin Socoteanu, signing in Greek, ordered a canary,
but “not one which sings on a single note”: “it should know several notes if it is to
be worthy of the exalted person for whom it is destined as a peşkeş”—a Turkish
word meaning a gift or a reward for a service rendered. The rest of Hagi Pop’s
correspondence with other boyar families is replete with orders for an increasing
number of luxury fashion goods such as shtrimph s (Austrian stockings), carriages
made in Vienna according to customers’ minute instructions, leather and gloves,
expensive fabrics, feathers, umbrellas, watches, “apă de obraz” (literally “face
water,” i.e. eau-de-cologne), fine soap, fine silver tableware, furniture, and even
wallpaper. One learns also that good quality tobacco was used as moth-killer,
and that the use of irons for smoothing clothes was not unknown. Orders for
luxury foods such as charcuterie, pineapple (requested in 1798 on doctor’s orders
for a young lying-in mother), lemons, and oranges, Frontignac wine, as well as
for foreign newspapers and foreign domestic staff (gardeners, chambermaids,
cooks) betray not only the increasingly sophisticated tastes, but also the spending
power—or, as disapproving others would see it, the extravagance—of the élites.
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Most of these people, especially the men, were still wearing Oriental-style clothes,