Upcycling, Re-ordering and Downsizing Older Turkoman Jewelry

Upcycling, Re-ordering and Downsizing Older Turkoman Jewelry

The old traditional jewelry has often been re-purposed or has had parts removed from it, or in other cases, the original order of the beads or pendants has been changed.  This piece was originally a belt buckle.

Read the account of how it has been changed:
This Turkoman silver brooch was originally a belt buckle. It is made of a thick silver plaque with overall floral patterns. The raised center is inscribed with Arabic calligraphy. The inset jewels are red glass, highly prized in Turkoman jewelry. The crafter of this piece was inventive in that when this piece was no longer being used by a male to fasten his belt, the maker cut the silver belt loops from the back of the piece, filed and sanded the stumps smooth and attached a clasp to the back top of the piece. It makes a rustic but very charming and novel brooch for a casual jacket. 

My husband picked up this piece on a trip to Moscow in 1999. The bazaars in Moscow have a lot of Turkoman pieces that come in from the tribes in the various countries around Russia that were once satellites of Soviet Russia. There are many: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghizstan and Dagestan. Then there are the countries that were not part of USSR: Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The traditional cultures of these countries are influenced greatly by the Turkoman peoples who make up part of the population. Ethnic jewelry and textiles are derived from the traditional adornment of person and home by the Turkoman tribes. 

Like all other pieces on this web site, this piece is returnable with full refund if not satisfied with your purchase. 

Measurements: 3 inches (7.5 cm) x 2.4 inches (6.2 cm) 62 gm (2.2 ozs.)

Turkoman Attire Worn by Author of Blog

Turkoman Teke Tribal Woman's Attire in Merv, Turkmenistan

Click link to see more such jewelry.  

First the tall gilded silver and carnelian jeweled head covering is usually worn as a support for the veil, hidden except for the high front part.   This shawl or veil is made of finely woven silk, embroidered with traditional tribal symbols.  The spinning of the silkworm's web and the weaving, sewing and embroidery are all done by hand.  

The plain and gilded silver jewelry are made by the male silversmiths of the tribe.  You can see this giant cuff bracelet at the studio that houses my collection.

These Teke tribal silver cuff bracelets with layered gold and table cut agate cabochons. Matched pair of bracelets dated to 1850-1900 by Dieter and Reinhold Schlecter in Old Silver Jewellery of the Turkoman. Heavily decorated in tribal symbols and with the superior craftsmanship of the Teke silversmith. Because of their age, each of the bracelets shows marks of repair, revealed in attached photos.

These are typical of the Turkoman silversmith's techniques. They worked mainly in silver that had been imported from surrounding countries in the form of silver ingots. This the silversmiths melted down and formed their own almost pure heavy silver plates. No rolled sheets used in the master silversmith's hands.

The traditional tribal designs were laid out in a layer of thin gold, not a wash but a very durable amount of gold on the silver.

This process is made much more difficult in the case of large bracelets. The bracelets are hollow. so two sheets had to be put together smoothly. Only the face of the bracelet was gilded. The edge of the bracelet is either signed or decorated with something that looks like calligraphy.

The gemstones used are nearly always carnelian, sometimes turquoise or glass. Edges of Turkoman jewelry usually have ancestor symbols attached in the form of stylized rams' heads or just the horns. The gilded cut-out patterns usually suggest plants or water.

The jewelry worn by a Turkoman female reveals her status in the tribe, whether a wife or an unmarried woman, and something of her standing in the wider community.  This is true of all the clothing worn by the Turkoman woman, from the jeweled collar necklace to huge breastplates that reach from the top of the chest to the waist line, a dressy robe of silk and embroidery, a head covering resembling the one above and rings and bracelets all are meant to show the status of the wearer. 

The Champion Wears the Bazuband

In Mongolia, the nation's hundredth anniversary was celebrated on horseback.  The buzkashi games were played in many venues.  Buzkashi is still a popular sport in many parts of Greater Turkmenia, that is in all the places where the Turkic peoples influence the culture.  Northern Afghanistan is such a place.  

Buzkashi is the oldest sport played on horseback.  It is the national sport of Afghanistan.  The horses are highly prized and are well-trained and well cared for. The champion, or Chapandaz, earns his award, the bazuband, to wear laced on his arm.  His chapan is also part of his award.  He wears the chapan, a handwoven silk robe, draped on his shoulders as you see in the photo below of President Hamid Karzai. 

   

And on his arm the champion laces his beautifully worked silver bracelet that looks like the photo to the right of Karzai's photo:  the bazuband, the champion's bracelet for                                               

the Afghan buzkashi winner, just as it was for the ancient Persian archer champion, from which the tradition is carried on.  

The bazuband was a carryover from the ancient Iranians, or Persians, who fought their wars on horseback.  Often the battles would end with many horseless riders fighting hand-to-hand combat, a kind of no holds barred wrestling.  The heroes from the winning side of the battle were awarded the prize of a bazuband not only for their skill in archery but for their skill in wrestling.  

A buzkashi field is laid out with a tall post at one end and a circle painted onto the ground at the other.  Inside the circle, the administrator of justice, the referee, has placed the carcass of a headless goat, gutted, but now filled with sand.  The members of each team parade onto the field in tribal regalia, wearing their padded chapans and beautifully embroidered padded helmets.  When I saw the game in Kabul in 1974, many of the team members wore their hair in the traditional Mongolian queue.  

                                                             This is a game in action

The game begins with a judge deciding which team will pick up the goat carcass, the equivalent of our pigskin football, but larger and heavier, but easier to grasp than a wet football.  The team has already chosen their man who will pick up the goat.  Now the rest of the team must fend off the opposing team members while the man holding the goat carries it round the post at the far end of the field from where he picked up the headless carcass that you see the man in the white horse carrying in the photo above.  

After he passes round that post, he heads pell mell down the field to the circle of justice, into which he hopes to toss the goat.  His journey is not easy, neither going up the field to go round the post, nor when it grows much more difficult as he starts back toward the circle of justice.  The opposing riders will use their horses and their whips against the team that is guarding their goat carrier.  The horses know the game very well.  They force their bodies against the horses of the opposite team so that the rider can reach and grab the goat carcass away from the man who is carrying it.  In this game, the goat may change hands many times, back and forth from one team to another, until the the goat is tossed into the circle, and then the struggle begins again.  

Finally, when all the tournaments have been played for that particular season, a champion emerges to received accolades and awards.  He is named chapandaz, a wearer of the chapan.  What is more, he is awarded the prize of the bazuband, worn since ancient times by heroes of the people in both war and sport.  

See this bazuband and more of the history here.

Happy Birthday Mongolia, 100 Years Old Today

The Khans from Mongolia ruled a great part of the earth from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.  But the same peoples had come out of the mountain home at least 400 years before the Empire was established in its farthest boundaries.  They settled much of the area where their rule became law in the fourteenth century.  Mongolia then had its turn as the ruled rather than the ruler until a hundred years ago when it gained its independence from China on December 29, 1911.

The Mongol tribes came out of the Altai mountains, which form a partition for China, Russia and Kazakhstan.  The descendants of these horseback riders from the mountains   are still spread far and wide throughout the Middle East and Central and South Asia.  From Central Europe and Turkey in the West to China in the East, from Russia and Kazakhstan in the North to the Northern part of India in the South.  The descendants of these people are still the major population in many of these countries.  They still add to the artisanal output of those nations from wonderful foods such as lamb and healthy dairy products to highly prized collectible carpets and jewelry.  Here is a photograph showing just one example

  The textile is home spun, hand dyed and hand loomed silk.  Then it is laboriously decorated almost over its complete surface with colorful silk threads in the old tribal patterns.  The asyk pendant is the symbol of the family, the two large heart shapes representing the father and mother and the small shape between them represent the child.  It is essentially a life symbol.  The ram's horn shapes on top of the asyk represent the tribal ancestors.  

The Turkic language separates into many different dialects; and they are written in different alphabets, in Chinese characters, in the Russian Cyrillic letters. It was at one time written in the Sanskrit-derived alphabet in India, which included parts of Pakistan and most of Afghanistan. By this time in Iran, they were writing Persian in the Arabic script;  in fact, in many parts of the Empire, the languages were written in Arabic script.  Finally the Turks of Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet in the 1920s, and Turkish became the first Ural-Altaic language to be written in the Latin letters that I am using to type this blog.  

Again I say Happy Birthday, Mongolia!  

You can see more Turkoman antique silver jewelry at http://craftsofthepast.artfire.com

Turkoman Cloak and its Clasp, or Turkmen, Chapan and Capraz

The Turkoman or Turkmen, names of the same people in English, make lined, handwoven silk cloaks for the males, females and children.   There is a certain ceremonial flair in the traditional male dress up clothing, and the women's robes are long and loose and profusely decorated. The embroidery that they add to the handwoven silk or cotton, or even store-bought cotton cloth, makes the feminine clothing very attractive.  The feminine headcoverings are sometimes spectacular, usually including a large piece of intricately wrought gilded silver.  We will discuss the headdresses in a later post; today we will show the use of the capraz on the male's dress-up cloak or chapan,  and for the ladies we discuss the canne as on the chapan in the photo below, and the flower collar or guljaka in the second photo below.

First, you might want to see what a chapan, the Turkmen or Turkoman female's dressy cloak, looks like.

  

Another variation of the embroidered silk clothing for the Turkoman female is a traditional  garment called the chyrpy.  This piece of clothing looks like the chapan, but there is one big difference. The  sleeves are not meant to wear on the arms but to hang from the shoulder seams and be drawn to the back of the cloak and banded together at about what appears to be a waistline when looking at the pattern for the garment.   The long, narrow sleeves with no opening for the hands are bound together with a fancily embroidered strip of silk or a braided, tasseled cord.  The garment is then worn over the head, not around the shoulders or the body.  

The chapan for the male is just as beautifully put together from narrow hand loomed strips of silk.  This garment is worn in the conventional manner, wrapped around the body and held together in front with a sash, a belt or by a silver fastener such as the one in the photo above.  

The fastener so illustrated in the photo above is the canne, a linking together of beautiful silver panels, often gilded and with pendants hanging from the bottom of the panels.  

But if the chapan wearer has the option of being very ostentatious in his symbolic jewelry, he will choose to fasten his embroidered silk chapan with a pair of magnificent capraz, such as these:

The outside point would be sewn to the fabric of the cloak, while a braided cord would secure the inside edge of the two pieces at the front opening of the chapan.  Click here to see more information on this complete capraz. 

Now as to the ladies' dresses, we know that they will be long and loose, but did I tell you that they will also be long-sleeved and high necked?  You probably already knew that.  Let's see what a flower collar or guljaka is.  

  The Turkoman woman wears this impressive piece of gilded silver as a brooch clasped or laced to the top opening of her cloak or tunic, just at collar level.  For that reason the Turkic name of this piece translates into English as flower collar.   In this photo it is shown on a woman's shawl of handwoven silk with rich, fine silk embroidery in the ancestor symbol pattern.  The shawl is made from the same kind of silk as the male and female garments of the finest quality. 

We will continue the discussion of traditional Turkoman adornment for future posts.  

Contact me for further information on the availability of similar items, or browse through the online shop at Crafts of the Past at Artfire.  The shop includes Turkoman, Kazakh, Afghan and Uzbeki items and Yemen silver pieces.  Most of the Turkoman and the Yemen pieces are from around 1900 or before, while some of the Afghan, Kazakh and Uzbeki may date from the first half of the 1900s.  

Tribal Does Not Equal Rural

In the Western world we think of tribal jewelry as primitive, produced in the desert or mountains, far away from cities or larger towns.  But in Central Asia, tribes usually inhabit certain regions of the steppes or mountains or deltas.  Each region will have its urban center where civic matters are addressed and the bulk of the commerce is transacted.

Sometimes the center is the capital of the nation that contains the tribes or at least a part of several tribes.  Tribes do not fit neatly into boundaries.  Think of the native Americans in Alaska or Canada and the Pacific Northwest.  That is the picture in Central Asia.

However, the urban center usually has the greater advantage when the artisan wishes to produce a product with an organic unity, such as an important piece of jewelry.  I have posted several times on the symbols and their meanings expressed in silver and gilded silver jewelry among the Turkoman tribes.  Here is an expression of their reverence for a mountain symbol:

Probably produced from an urban tribal silversmith.

More detailed information on this piece at http://www.artfire.com/ext/shop/product_view/craftsofthepast/4053403/Antique

The reason I would guess that the piece in the photo above came from an urban silversmith is that it puts to full use the specialties required to yield a unified expression in silver of the Turkoman mindset regarding the ancestral mountain, the source of the Turkoman people.  First, let me say that this is only half of what the silversmith created as the full expression.  This is one of the hair pieces that a woman wears pinned into her braid or her veil at a point just above each ear.  Such pieces are created in pairs.  I have the piece that matches this one.  

The Turkoman people like replication.  Not only of the symbolic jewelry pieces themselves, so often produced in pairs, but of the motifs carried out inside the exterior expression.  See all the smaller mountain shapes made of silver grains dropped patiently and uniformly again and again expressing the ancestral pyramid shape.  What would you guess the opposite side of this piece looks like?  Surprise!  it looks just like this side.  They are two identical pieces except for the stones in the small rosette, joined to make a hollow silver hair or veil ornament that respects the source of the tribe.  

The pendant in the photo below is a rural piece from Afghanistan (one of the nations that contains a part of a few of the Turkoman tribes).  This pendant reveals its rural craftsmanship in its lack of a specialist to inscribe the water and floral symbols in the center of the plaque.  That part of the piece is amateurish, while the rest of the piece is made at a higher skill level.  

It is nevertheless a charming piece, made of good silver and all the parts are crafted skillfully, except for the inscriptions on the inside plaque.  They appear to be indications of where granulated rosettes and filigree should be placed in order to symbolize water and plants, i. e., life symbols.  It stands in an honored position as folk art.

You can see more detailed information on this piece at http://www.artfire.com/ext/shop/product_view/craftsofthepast/4056415/

The Great Khan's Coinage in the Gandhara Region

Look on a map and find Mongolia, which is shared between Russia and China, and consider that in what the West calls the Middle Ages, the Mongols ruled the largest empire the world has ever known.  It reached from all of Mongolia, all of China, Russia, all the 'stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India - Hindustan), also Armenia, parts of the Balkans and Central Europe, the Holy Land, Turkey, North Africa and the Arabian Gulf.  Under the nominal rule of the Great Khan whose seat was closer to home, there were Khanates (kingdoms) established throughout the empire.

The Shahi Gandhara culture in south Afghanistan-Pakistan became a part of one of the Han, (Khan) Khanates.  The ruler, like other rulers, needed coins; after all, most kings and parliaments do not want to collect tribute (taxes) in the form of eggs or cheese.  The local Khan wanted a proper image for his coinage.  Since every Mongol (Han) conquest had been won from the back of a horse, a horse and a ruler riding it became the natural choice for a symbol of the new ruler in Gandhara.

A coin with a kneeling horse on one side and a rider with a staff mounted on the back of the horse on the opposite side is how the coinage was cast in Gandhara.  Quoting from Wikipedia:

... The Gupta (The Gupta Empire was an ancient Indian empire which existed approximately from 320 to 550 CE and covered much of the Indian Subcontinent.) emperors continued to issue coinage until the 6th century, until waves of invasions from the Huns (Hans, Khans) brought their reign to an end. These Huns themselves issued coinage which was imitated from the earlier prototypes.

Allan & Stern (2008) report on Indian coinage of the Middle Ages:

A notable adaptation of a Hun design was the neat silver coinage of the Shahis of Ghandara, the "bull and horseman" type in the 9th and 10th centuries, (later) extensively imitated by the Muslim conquerors of India and the contemporary minor Hindu dynasties. 

For example, here are the two sides of one of such coins I have in my collection:

The image on the left shows the ruler with a long staff and banner, wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat (in the Gandhara region in the southern part of Afghanistan, that is a very good idea).  

The horse is prancing proudly showing his left leg raised, with a decorated mane and his tail     

 and head carried high.  The image on the right shows the horse kneeling with script above him in an ancient Hindi style.  The horse is already saddled, so it is probably kneeling for the ruler to mount him.  Since in that part of the sub-continent, both camels and elephants knelt to allow the rider to mount, perhaps horses were also trained to kneel?  

To see more particulars on the collection of this coinage that I have, go to 

http://www.artfire.com/ext/shop/product_view/craftsofthepast/3997035