EPIRUS, OTTOMAN GREECE, 18TH CENTURY

The city of Epirus was the largest textile centre in the Ottoman Balkans, and provided many parts of the Ottoman Empire with elaborately embroidered textiles, court dress and uniforms. The present textile belongs to the Yanina sub-group whose patterns comprise largely of flowers and leaf-shapes drawn freely onto the ground fabric (Taylor, 1998, p.131). The Yanina textiles were most commonly created as bedspreads and wedding sheets and would have had a plain centre within richly embroidered borders. Like many examples of Yanina embroidery, our textile follows the tradition of preserving the borders of the original textile by removing and refashioning them into a new cover to be used for another wedding.

The Epirus weavers adopted typically Turkish motifs and arrangements, drawing inspiration from the fine silks and velvets produced in Istanbul. A cover of a similar design arranged from border panels is in the Art Institute of Chicago (inv.no. 1950.1114), published in Gentles, 1964, no.43.