Chromatica · Simion Florea Marian, 12 March 1882
Red after yellow
In his reception speech at the Romanian Academy, Marian describes village dyeing as a run of liquors. Wool turns red only after it has been yellowed. The last shade follows the bath before it.
The liquor has a name
Simion Florea Marian was a priest in Siret when the Academy took him in. On 12 March 1882 he read, as his reception speech, a paper on the art of colouring. Hasdeu answered in the same sitting: until then, he said, the ethnographer had been missing. The text went out as a 55-page offprint from the Academy press and stands, in the Analele, between page 107 and page 161.
Marian does not set out a palette. He sets out pots, borscht, alum, broom dried in the shade. The liquor from dyer’s broom is called gălbinele. Wool-suet with blue stone is albăstrele. Oregano with crab-apple is flori, flowers. Alder liquor is negrelă. The name sits on the liquid. Colour is what stays on the skein after the bath.
The work, he writes, belongs to village women, taken from their grandmothers. Each village has one woman, or several, who dye for the rest. The young no longer keep the kettle. Shop dye is handsome, washes off fast, and some of it is poisonous. Plant colour holds until the cloth tears.
Red wool was yellow first
On wool, red is not laid on white. It is laid on yellow. The woman inherits the shade of the previous bath.
Yarn that is to be made red must first have been yellowed. If it has not been made yellow, it can never be made properly red, or beautiful.
The last shade follows the shade in the gălbinele. Open yellow gives open red. Fired yellow gives fired red. Orange gives sour-cherry. The woman does not mix an abstract red. She flowers a yellow the wool already carries.
If the oregano is missing, the mix is no longer called flori. It is called roșele. The verb is no longer a înflori, to flower, but a roși, to redden. The name moved with the plant.
Sweet flowers come out open and weak. Old, sour flowers sit until the leaf starts to rot: darker, faster. Wool from them, Marian writes, loses its face more slowly than it tears.
Hemp yarn has another gate. Its red is made from white, in alder-and-plum roșele, with no yellow beforehand. The sequence is law on wool. On hemp the recipe changes, and the name changes with it.
Dip the skein
Choose the fibre, then the bath. White wool put straight into flori does not come out properly red. The same wool, first through gălbinele, then through flori, takes its red from the yellow it already wears.
dyer’s broom, borscht, alum
The skein has not been dipped. Choose a liquor.
Choose the fibre, then dip the skein in a liquor.
Green after blue, black from a nest
The same law of inheritance holds for green. Black has, besides, a starter that is lent.
Green is made, most often, on wool that was blue first. Open blue gives open green. Dark blue gives dark green. A white skein left in the spent liquor comes out insipid green. Easter eggs take the other road: yellow first, then pasqueflower or mallow, and the green hangs on the yellow.
Negrelă is made from alder bark, flowered as the red flowers are. The starter is called cuib, a nest. The skilled women keep it and lend it. A visitor says: I have come to borrow the nest. Tired liquor, its power gone, is called lungă, long. Dark wool blackens more readily than white. Many skeins first take a violet face in the leftover red, and only then go to black.
White does not come from a plant. It comes from boiling out and washing in running water.
The name moves with the matter
In the note at the end of the speech, Marian lists the Latin-origin names he has heard. Many of them are not hues. They are things: milk, snowdrop, wax, blood, the flame of the fire, raven, mulberry, oak, wine, soot, wood, copper.
Swallow-blue is the colour of a feather. Ceriul is yellow as wax. Curechiu is cabbage green. Viniu is wine. Funinginiu is soot. Flame-red is why oregano is gathered on Foca day. The name does not sit above the matter. It carries it.
Marian closes with the Latin origin of the craft. His argument is the word-list. One word troubles him: coloarea, colour. He did not find it in the folk mouth. The Academy dictionary noted the form curare. Even if the word were lost, he writes, the chromatics remain an inheritance. That is his case to the Academy. The measure of the book is in the kettle, not in that etymology.
- alb-ca-laptele
- alb-ca-ghiocelul
- alb-ca-ghiocul
- alb-ca-păretele
- alb-ca-ometul
- alb-ca-spuma-laptelui
- aluniu
- arămiu
- auriu
- brândușiu
- cânepiu
- căpriu
- cărbuniu
- cărniu
- castaniu
- cenușiu
- ceriu
- cireșiu
- colbiu
- curechiu
- funinginiu
- gălbioriu
- gălbănușiu
- galbăn-ca-cera
- lemniu
- marmurariu
- muced
- muriu
- negru-ca-corbul
- negru-ca-murea
- negru-ca-cărbunele
- negru-ca-tăciunele
- plămâiu
- plumbiu
- porumbiu
- porumbriu
- rădăciniu
- roșu-în-para-focului
- roșu-ca-jăraticul
- roșu-ca-sângele
- rînduniu
- ruginu
- sângeriu
- scorțișoriu
- scorțiu
- untdelemniu
- verde-ca-stejarul
- verde-ca-buraticul
- viniu
- vânăt-ca-porumbrica
Fifty names from Marian’s glossary that point to a matter, not to a bare hue.
Broom at Midsummer, oregano at Foca
Gathering has days. Drying has shade. The red flowers take the evil eye.
Dyer’s broom is gathered at Sânziene, 24 June, when it is in flower. Oregano is gathered on Foca day, the third after St Elijah, 22 July, so the liquor comes out red as the flame of the fire. Willow, at St Peter. Spurge is good until Whitsun; after that it loses its juice. Plants dry in the shade, spread thin, in the loft. Wind and sun stain them.
At Easter, almost every village woman in Bukovina, Marian writes, yellows eggs in crab-apple gălbinele. A împetri means to strengthen the liquor with alum. On eggs, the same verb means to yellow.
The red flowers take the evil eye. No one speaks of the dead while they are being flowered. They are not flowered if there is a death in the village, until after the burial. Praise without spitting spoils them. A copper ring, a scrap of iron or a found horseshoe keeps the eye off. Too much iron rusts, and rust spoils the flowers. The material is from Bukovina. Marian does not map the country.
What holds, and what stays in Bukovina
The text is the reception speech of 12 March 1882, printed in the Academy Analele, series II, volume IV, pages 107-161. The figures on this page are counted there: 36 plants in the chapter III list; four materials Marian sets above the rest; the sequence wool, gălbinele, flori, stated as a rule for wool.
The geography is Bukovina, seen by a priest in Siret. Pamfile and Lupescu took the title up again in 1914, with material from other counties. Their collection is not mixed into the counts here. The Latin etymologies in chapter XV are Marian’s case to the Academy. The claim that survives the glossary is from the kettle: red wool was yellow first.
The Analele OCR is stained, like a skein left too long in the pot. Names were read from the scan and set in present-day spelling. Where the page cannot be read, the name did not enter the list.
Sources
- Analele Academiei Române, series II, vol. IV, 1881-1882. Chromatica poporului român, pp. 107-161; Hasdeu's reply, pp. 162-164. Internet Archive.
- Ordinary sitting of 12 March 1882, administrative part of the same Analele: Marian reads the memoir, Hasdeu answers.
- Tudor Pamfile and Mihai Lupescu, Cromatica poporului român, Romanian Academy, 1914. A later collection, not mixed into the counts.
Marius Comper read the Analele scan and counted the lists. The Chromatica is Marian’s. The count, the bath sequence and the page are this edition’s.