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The Circuitous Journey of the Greek Knitting Sheath

Flavia Nessi-Yazitzoglou

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Greece found itself at the crossroads of numerous influences and traditions regarding knitting techniques, coming from both the East and the West. A close look at the history of sock knitting using a set of four or five needles brings to attention the fact that in northern Greece pastoral women still knitted in the Eastern way, an archaic method descending from the Arab world used for making heavy handspun woollen socks, whereas on the islands women were knitting with the yarn wrapped around the neck or pinned to the bodice, which were still old-fashioned knitting postures, in order to produce more refined cotton or handspun monochrome silk stockings. In Europe already by the 18th century cottage-industry knitters were knitting in a more professional way using knitting sheaths, small every-day tools that consist of a wooden or metal staff usually between 25 – 35 cm long that serves to immobilize one of the knitting needles during the sock knitting work.

Yet, the arrival of these tools in Greece came much later on, in the 19th century at a time when their use was declining in Europe. The industrialization of yarn processing and the arrival of novel women’s magazines designed to explain all the available stitches with practical instructions announced the emergence of new ways of knitting in Greece. Rapidity and precision of execution in a more scientific type of knitting suddenly became new features that prompted Greek knitters to adopt European knitting sheaths that they christened kaltsovelona [καλτσοβελόνα, sock needle] or kaltsoxylo [καλτσόξυλο, sock stick], clearly referencing their use in producing socks.

On the Ionian Islands, to the contrary, the knitting sheath went by the name rokoxylo [ροκόξυλο] or kaltsounoroka [καλτσουνόροκα] designating a type of wooden distaff used for making socks, which adds yet another dimension to the tool. A parallel can be drawn between the Ionian knitting sheaths in the shape of standing women and small hand distaffs from Calabria, which bear a striking resemblance to one another even though the two tools are different in nature. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1. Hand distaff in the shape of a standing woman, three pieces, Calabria, early 20th century, carved-in-the-round coloured fruitwood, h. 29.7 cm, Mucem Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, Marseille

The oldest knitting sheaths found in Greece date back to about 1830-1850 and appear to be extremely valuable silver-plated objects, that flaunt the craftsmanship of professional silversmiths. They were found mainly on the Ionian Islands, although we cannot validate they correspond to what was a local production, or if they were imported from Epirus instead, a region which was famed for the excellence of its silversmithing. Perhaps the Vlach tradesmen with their very efficient commercial network contributed to the introduction of these precious objects from Central Europe to Greece through the Balkan roads as seems to confirm some Slavic inscriptions found on certain tools. (Fig. 2) But the silver-plated neoclassical Ionian sheaths were from the very start intended as elegant embroidery tools designed for the needlework of upper-class ladies.

Fig. 2. Extension sheaths (details), Left: inscribed and dated AΣΣ 1839 [ASS 1839], Right: Serbian, inscribed with three names.Silver-plated slender tube type, h. 29 cm B, h. 39.5 cm (private collections).

However, the majority of Greek knitting sheaths are wood-carved tools probably introduced in Greece at the end of 19th century by sailors who were famous for their prowess in woodworking. Due to the absence of any satisfactory written sources, researchers can merely speculate on its beginnings, yet it is quite certain that the emergence of these tools in insular Greece issued from commercial trade along the Italian and British shipping routes as suggested by the similarities between the fish models on certain British knitting sheaths, mainly produced in Wales and Scotland, and their Greek counterparts. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3. Knitting sheath in the shape of a fish, Greek, inscribed and dated Εριφὐλη Λ. Κομνηνού 1909 [Erifyli L. Komninou 1909], chip-carved wood, h. 29.5 cm (private collection).

According to the account offered by Gerassimos Papatrechas, one of the last woodcarvers of Xiromero, we know that the sheaths were also called filakissia (φυλακίσσια), “prison-made,” which in turn informs as to the origin of their production. Thousands of identical models of tools have been  carved by inmates in Greek prisons over a 50 to 60-year period (c. 1890/1900-1950). It is most likely in prison that Greek craftsmen came into contact with European sailors and shared their common knowledge in order to develop the prototypes of these new tools gradually advancing towards the implementation of their own innovations. For example, the Corfu prison fashioned its own kind of engraved stamp bearing the name of the establishment, ΚΕΡΚΥΡΑ [Corfu], a sort of registered trademark that testified to the authenticity and origin of its entire output. It undoubtedly answered to a pragmatic necessity to supply homemakers from all over Greece with practical implements. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4. The Greek Convict Prison at Nauplia by R. Hardie, Surgeon, R.N., sketches, from The Illustrated London News (18 October 1890).

In Corfu we found another category of wood-carved knitting sheaths, different from the more elaborate models produced at the same time for the islanders, which corresponded to the first local attempt to create a tourist souvenir industry for travellers on the Grand Tour. They were distinguished by the classic ΚΕΡΚΥΡΑ prison stamp with multilingual inscriptions. (Fig. 5)

Fig. 5. Knitting sheath in the shape of a blade, mid-20th century, relief-carved and carved-in-the-round wood, Front and reverse sides depicting a woman in traditional costume, the Tree of Life and the emblem of Corfu, inscribed Ricordo / Souvenir DU CORFU / ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΕΡΩΣ ΕΛΠΙΣ [Faith love hope;  ΑΙΚΑΤΕΡΙΝΗ ΠΑΔΟΒΑ [Aikaterini Padova], h. 32 cm (private collection)

Greek carved wooden knitting sheaths, through their beauty and diversity of sculptural decoration, reveal the complexity of their usage. If in Europe the variations in form of those tools reflected mainly regional specificities, in Greece the spectrum of morphological differences corresponded to another logic, that is to morph into clever “multitasking” tools used to measure, draw and calibrate, not to mention their role in various small-scale weaving techniques such as braiding, finger looping and card weaving which were instrumental in carrying out the domestic handiwork that clothed the family. (Fig. 6)

Fig. 6. Drawings of a woman table-braiding and finger-loop braiding by Nikos Angelidis, 2019, black pencil on paper (private collection).

According to their morphology acquired through the carving process the Greek sheaths could be employed in a variety of ways, depending on whether women were using the upper or lower part of the tool. In general, the upper part of the tool was carved in the round and pierced to accommodate a needle for knitting, and the lower half of the tool was immobilized, either under the armpit or in the waistband of the apron. But the upper part of the instrument could also be used as a handle and its lower section could be used as a weaving sword or beater. Yet there are other case scenarios in which the sheath served as an autonomous tool, free of a grip, thus allowing it to be propelled by its own weight under the effect of the rotation of twisting thread in plaiting, braiding and knotting techniques, or else it could slide along the surface of a fabric to trace or mark sewing measurements.

The Greek knitting sheaths were more innovative in their conception than their fellow European models. By combining several distinct functions in one instrument, they allied tradition with modernity by bringing technological advances to ancestral know-how.

References

Angeliki Hatzimichali, La sculpture sur bois, Collection de l’Hellénisme contemporain, Athens, 1950.

Kitsos A. Makris, Λαϊκά και μεταβυζαντινά ξυλόγλυπτα [Popular and Post-Byzantine Greek woodcarving], Athens: National Organization of Greek Handicrafts, 1962.

James Norbury, Traditional Knitting Patterns: From Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, Italy and Other European Countries, New York: Dover, 1973.

Irena Turnau, “La bonneterie en Europe, du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle,”  Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 26, no. 5, 1971, p. 1118-1132.

Irena Turnau, “History of Folk Knitting in Europe: A Framework for Research,” Textile History 17, no. 2, 1986, p. 167-180.    

The Circulation of Pasta Machines Across the Early 20th Century Mediterranean

Abel Solans

On November 18, 1911, the Italian embassy in Cairo informed the Ministry of Interior that Giuseppe Serracchioli had arrived in Alexandria from Marseille with a machine for making pasta. Serracchioli, a sailor born near Bologna in 1872, had settled in Egypt in 1902. He was known and monitored for his anarchist and revolutionary ideas. The Egyptian police were interested in this pasta machine and alerted the Italian consulate because, according to their information, it concealed a machine gun. Serracchioli was likely aware that transporting such a machine would not arouse suspicion. Indeed, there was a significant Italian community in Egypt, which as evidenced by numerous advertisements in Italian-language newspapers (Fig. 1), consumed both imported from Italy and locally produced pasta.

Nachson Pasta in Cairo

Capecchi. pasta

 

 

 

 

Fig. 1 Advertisements for imported and local pasta in Egypt, L’Imparziale, July 18th 1892.

The circulation of pasta machines to the southern Mediterranean did not only concern Egypt; it was probably even more significant in Tunisia, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, more than 80,000 Italian nationals resided (Finzi 2003). In Tunis, pasta was among the most consumed products by the Italian community. In 1908, an average of 15,000 kilograms was produced daily. That same year, there were 44 pasta manufacturers in Tunis employing more than 80 workers. These establishments were equipped with various machines necessary for production, including kneaders, and, especially, presses that shaped spaghetti, macaroni, and other forms. In Tunisia, all the owners of these establishments, as well as the workers, were Italian men. These businesses operated as small, family-owned workshops, each employing only a few workers (Fig. 2). The lower-paid workers, earning 2.75 francs in 1908, carried out the most physically demanding tasks. They started work at 5pm and for 15 hours prepared and kneaded dough made from durum wheat semolina and water. More skilled workers then pressed the dough into various shapes, after which it was cut and dried.

Fig. 2 Usine de pâtes alimentaires, Tunis (Camera di Commercio italiana di Tunisi, Gli Italiani nella Tunisia, Tunis, 1906, p. 36).

Fig. 2. Usine de pâtes alimentaires, Tunis  (Camera di Commercio italiana di Tunisi, Gli Italiani nella Tunisia, Tunis, 1906, p. 36).

Pasta quickly became a symbol of Italian identity. As in most Italian migration centers, its production and consumption were closely associated with members of the Italian community, regardless of their regional and social origins. While in Italy, pasta consumption was mostly limited to urban populations, particularly in the South, in Tunisia, it became the staple food of the Italian working class. For some Italians, pasta consumption only became a habit after settling in Tunisia, where they also developed a stronger sense of national identity. The presence of pasta machines in the southern Mediterranean helped make this food a marker of national identity, thus fostering a form of “everyday nationhood” (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008).

Unlike in the United States, where pasta imports were more significant than local production until the end of World War I, this was not the case in the southern Mediterranean. The presence of workshops equipped with pasta-making machines and the volume of production in Tunisia suggest that imported pasta constituted only a minor portion of local consumption. While Italy exported food products to migrant communities as a source of foreign currency, this was probably not the case for pasta in Tunisia. Indeed, the trade in Italian-made food products played a key role in maintaining ties between migrants and their homeland, while reinforcing the Italian government’s influence over its emigrants. The significant Italian emigration and the expectation that migrants would defend Italian interests abroad formed the foundation of Italian particular colonialism in Tunisia and Egypt (Viscomi 2024). In Tunisia, the proximity and supervision of the Italian community likely reduced the need for commercial ties to sustain migrants’ attachment to their homeland (Montalbano 2023). Another reason pasta was not only imported from Italy is that, unlike the United States and France, which grew soft wheat for flour production, Tunisia had the necessary raw material for making dry pasta: durum wheat semolina, the same used for couscous.

The link between pasta production and Italian identity became clear in 1911 during the Italian invasion of Tripolitania. A campaign to boycott Italian products led to a 30% drop in pasta sales highlighting the extent to which Arabic-speaking populations regularly consumed this food. Indeed, newspapers like Al-Mouchīr expressed concern over the fact that pasta was the only sector in which native Tunisians could not replace Italian labor.

Pasta machines also played a role in the early struggles of the trade union movement in Tunisia. In 1908, pasta workers in Tunis went on strike, demanding either a wage increase or a reduction in the price of a kilogram of pasta, which had risen from 0.45 to 0.50 francs. Machines, likely presses such as the one shown in the photo (Fig. 2), proved to be an important element in negotiations between workers and employers. The cost of rental of these machines was one of the main arguments put forward by employers to justify the price increase. Giuseppe Natoli, an anarchist leader of the Italian labor movement in Tunisia, encouraged workers to form a cooperative that would allow them to resume work and sell pasta at 0.45 francs per kilogram. This cooperative was created a few days later as soon as workers managed to rent the necessary equipment.

Pasta machines most likely originated from Italy, though the example of Serracchioli shows that they could also be bought in France (Fig. 3). As in the United States, pasta producers in France sought to expand their market beyond the Italian community. To do so, they emphasized more mechanized and hygienic production, distancing themselves from the image of Italian producers who dried their pasta outdoors, with little regard for sanitary concerns (Cinotto 2013). It is unclear whether this trend extended to the southern Mediterranean. However, if it did, the fact that the machine Serracchioli brought came from France may have served as a selling point.

Advertisement for the pasta manufacturer Scapini, 1900.

Fig. 3. Advertisement for the pasta manufacturer Scapini, 1900. (Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de l’immigration).

However, did Giuseppe Serracchioli really intend to produce pasta? Probably not. Despite carrying a weapon, he was not arrested in Egypt, as he immediately left for Muhammarah, an emirate at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. According to informants from the Italian consulate, Sheikh Khaz’al, the Emir of Muhammarah, had tasked Serracchioli with bringing machines from Europe for making explosives and bombs. Yet, no mention of such machines is made in the surveillance reports. Could the pasta machine have been repurposed for producing explosives?

One could speculate that a kneader might have been used to mix explosive dough or that a press could have shaped them into cartridges. But it is also possible that the device was not a pasta machine at all, and the Egyptian surveillance authorities inferred its function from the nationality of the person transporting it. In any case, the arms smuggling was successful. By 1915, French intelligence reported that, Serracchioli continued trafficking arms in the Bassora region and the Persian Gulf. His connection to typically Italian machinery did not end there: in the 1920s, he was in Paris and became the general representative of the “Percolateur Express” coffee machine brand. Through this business and his employees, he gathered information on the anti-fascist movement, which he passed on to the Italian authorities.

Following Tunisia’s independence, many Italians emigrated, leading to the disappearance of several pasta workshops. Those that remained became associated, in the memory of Tunisians, with artisanal pasta production (Fig. 4).

Gandolfo pasta in Tunisia

Fig. 4. Poster from the 1960s. Gandolfo pasta was produced in Tunisia until the late 1990s. There have been two Italian pasta manufacturers named Gandolfo since 1886.

Industrial production, meanwhile, was carried out by Tunisian companies. To our knowledge, the first workshop founded by a Tunisian, Habib Mellouli, in partnership with an Italian, was in 1943 in Sousse. The Mellouli Pasta Company, which later became Épi d’Or, mechanized its operations and, by 1990, produced 100 tons of pasta per day. Traditional machines, therefore, remain strongly linked in the collective imagination to Italian craftsmanship, symbolizing both Italian colonization and a broader cultural exchange.

References

Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Champaign, United States : University of Illinois Press. 2013.

Silvia Finzi, Mestieri e professioni degli Italiani di Tunisia. Tunis : Ambasciata Italiana di Tunisi. 2003.

J. E. Fox & C. Miller-Idriss, “Everyday nationhood,” Ethnicities 8, no. 4, 2008, p. 536–563.

Gabriele Montalbano, Les Italiens de Tunisie : La construction d’une communauté entre migrations, colonisations et colonialismes (1896-1918). Rome : Publications de l’École française de Rome. 2023.

Joseph John Viscomi, Migration at the End of Empire: Time and the Politics of Departure between Italy and Egypt. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 2024.

 

 

 

The Many Lives of ‘Oriental Textiles’ in the Byzantine Museum of Athens

Nikolaos Vryzidis

This post will briefly expose the many lives of the Ottoman fabrics in the collection of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. This group will act as a case study for the decontextualization and recontextualization that takes place when objects travel from one environment to another. While the Ottoman fabrics of the Benaki Museum’s Islamic art collection were mostly private purchases or donations, the Byzantine and Christian Museum’s so-called ‘oriental textiles’ (ανατολικά υφάσματα) present a completely different history, one that could also be studied through the lens of object biography (Fig. 1).

Une vitrine de tissus orientaux au Musée byzantin et chrétien d'Athènes

Fig. 1. Case of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine Museum, Athens, in the year 1983. (Archive of Elena Papastavrou, former curator of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).

This methodological approach marshals information on the life of objects, aiming at the recreation of their previous whereabouts before entering a museum rather than assessing just their physical characteristics. The study of an object’s manufacture, ownership, use and reuse, can reveal otherwise hidden cultural dynamics or even new perspectives on established narratives, thus, problematising and nuancing them. But above all, the object biography approach allows us to follow the complex lives of transcultural objects, in this case woven fabrics, that travel through different contexts and acquire novel meanings.

The core of the museum’s general holdings consists of the collection of the Christian Archaeological Society (ChAE). It is thanks to the scholarly missions undertaken by the passionate Byzantinist Georgios Lampakis (1854-1914) that a relatively large number of objects was amassed from ecclesial sacristies located within the borders of the Greek state. This important collection was later complemented by refugee heirlooms brought from Asia Minor/Anatolia, as well as some donations and purchases. Lampakis was not concerned with the art itself, as his criteria of gathering objects did not seem to be primarily aesthetic or perhaps even historical. On the contrary, his attraction was centred more on the objects’ status or function as sacred relics. In other words, objects used in the Orthodox liturgy with an association to prominent ecclesiastical figures. No doubt, this approach went along with what such society, which kept its name to this day, would regard as its main mission. But it fell out of line with the basic principles of contemporary to that period archaeological and art historical research, which was governed more by the logic of stylistic or chronological taxonomies than anthropological or religious criteria. Nonetheless, the picking of holy relics unintentionally produced an eclectic assemblage that was representative of different aspects of Greece’s heritage, perhaps even without the filter of the Modern Greek national narrative and its cultural priorities. In fact, one should conceive the museum’s holdings of Ottoman fabrics as a beneficial aspect of Lampakis’s approach (Fig. 2). Indeed, most of these fabrics come from vestments that, alongside other liturgical objects, were collected from monasteries and churches, with their documented provenance allowing us to trace the distribution of this consumption pattern in Greece under Ottoman rule. As a side note, the collection of refugee exchangeable property was governed by the same logic: they were heirlooms that Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor had brought with them when they were forcibly relocated to Greece. Many of these Anatolian Christian heirlooms included Persian fabrics.  An aspect of heritage one would not imagine to have been a priority for the Modern Greek national narrative thus came into being.

Fig. 2. Fragments of a vestment (possibly an epitrachelion), lampas weave, silk and metal thread, Constantinople or Bursa, sixteenth century, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens. (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, photographer: Nikos Mylonas; inv. no. BXM 1693).

The vestments that Lampakis collected are a remnant of a very specific consumption practice that characterized ecclesiastical material culture: the use of sumptuous cloth by the Greek Orthodox Church. The first episode in their life took place in the weaving workshops of Ottoman Bursa and Constantinople, where Muslim, Christian and Jewish artisans produced fabrics with generically secular patterns for a religiously diverse clientele. The Christian elite consumed artifacts that conveyed prestige and visually spoke of its position to the wider society. Besides the textile market, pious oblations and the custom of the robe of honour were alternative channels through which the Church gained access to this kind of cultural capital. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to assume that the material of these vestments already could have had a previous life as secular furnishing or vesting items. At the same time, the further recycling of fabrics within the context of the sacristy is another dynamic worth considering when looking at them. Thus, these fabrics already enjoyed a remarkable intracultural and intercultural mobility, with the end-product of this process being their sacralization. As already stated before, it is this complex life that paved their way for a new context, that of the museum.

Nonetheless, while it is remarkable that an aspect of Ottoman heritage was saved by Lampakis as a Christian relic, the integrity of its identity had to wrestle with the dynamic of the Byzantine Museum’s museological approach at that time. First of all, it seems that the keepers of the collection reserved a special case for those vestments tailored of “anatolika (ανατολικά)”, meaning oriental, fabrics. This categorization effectively separated them from the religious embroidery produced at Christian workshops (Fig. 1). In this case, fragments extracted from the vestments were put together for the creation of panels with a focus on the overall integrity of the woven pattern (Fig. 3). The treatment reserved for these objects does not only imply that their sacred status was put aside, but also that this new taxonomy led to a moderate distancing from this type of Ottoman heritage. Nonetheless, the exact same practice points out that despite their ‘orientalisation’ the fabrics were appreciated for their aesthetic value and materiality. Otherwise, why would they have been included in the permanent display of one of the three major national museums in Athens (the two others being the National Archaeological and the Museum of Folk Art (now Museum of Modern Greek Culture))?

Fig. 3. Panel of the fragments in Fig. 2, rearranged in a new display (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).

In an attempt to contextualize, it could be argued that Greece’s shift from being an Ottoman province to a European nation-state, more or less under the political and cultural influence of the collective West, was to a certain extent responsible for this approach. After all, the then director of the Byzantine Museum, George Sotiriou (1880-1956), had spent time in a Germanic environment during a period when Islamic art was gaining more attention, as the 1910 Munich exhibition Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst also hints. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the only major change in the second edition of the museum’s catalogue, that Sotiriou authored, was the appearance of the new taxonomy of “oriental fabrics”. This state of affairs continued for pretty much the whole of the twentieth century and until the museum’s refurbishment in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps the recent openness and acceptance of Ottoman heritage by Greek archaeologists and art historians calls for a new understanding of these remnants, following the complexity of the many lives they led before and after arriving at the museum.

 

Further readings

Olga Gratziou and Anastasia Lazaridou (eds.), Από τη Χριστιανική Συλλογή στο Βυζαντινό Μουσείο (1884-1930) [From the Christian Collection to the Byzantine Museum (1884-1930)], Athens, 2006.

Elias Kolovos, Georgios Pallis and Panagiotis K. Poulos (eds.), Οθωμανικά μνημεία στην Ελλάδα: Κληρονομιές υπό διαπραγμάτευση [Ottoman Monuments in Greece: Heritages under Negotiation], Athens, 2023.

Elena Papastavrou and Nikolaos Vryzidis, “Sacred Patchwork: Patterns of Textile Reuse in Greek Vestments and Ecclesiastical Veils of the Ottoman Era”, in Ivana Jevtić and Suzan Yalman (eds.), Spolia Reincarnated: Afterlives of Objects, Materials, and Spaces in Anatolia from Antiquity to the Ottoman Era, Istanbul, 2019, p. 259-286.

George Sotiriou, Guide du Musée byzantin d’Athènes, Athens, 1932.

Nikolaos Vryzidis and Elena Papastavrou, “The double life of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens: interpreting storage and displayability of Ottoman silks in 20th-century Greece,” in Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh (eds.), Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, Abingdon – New York, 2018, p. 218-228.