Bless Me, Mother, That I May Apply the Dye: Henna Traditions in the Balkans

Hi henna blog readers! I know it’s been a while — the beginning of my PhD program has meant that I’ve been even more busy than usual… I’m super excited to be teaching about henna at HennaCon this coming weekend! I’ll be giving three lectures: the history of henna, the use of henna in ritual, and a special “Mythbusters: Henna Edition.”

But in the meantime I got a great question on my tumblr recently about henna in the Balkans, and you know what that means — new blogpost!

So let’s start with defining where we’re talking about: a large peninsula in southeast Europe, from the Black Sea on the east to the Adriatic on the west, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and even parts of Slovenia and Romania.

Etruscan funerary casket, 2nd century BCE.

Some of the earliest records of henna in the ancient world suggest that it was known in this area, at least to the Greeks: descriptions of henna appear in the writings of Greek scholars and botanists including Theophrastus (ca. 371—287 BCE) and Dioscorides (ca. 40—90 CE). 

While the best henna was grown in Egypt and the Levant, the Roman historian Pliny (ca. 23—79 CE) notes that it was also grown in Cyprus, the island with which it shares its name in Greek (kupros)… Artistic depictions of women with red hair support the theory that it was known as a hair dye on the mainland of southeastern Europe.

But after the classical age, it seems that henna fell out of use... As far as I can tell, henna was not used in the region during the Byzantine empire, which would mean that the use of henna in the Balkans was reintroduced with the Ottomans, who began expanding their empire from Turkey into southeastern Europe in the 14th century. The Ottomans, of course, had already developed some of the finest henna traditions of the Islamic world. Depicted in miniature manuscripts, and mentioned in Ottoman poetry, henna (known as kina in Turkish) was not only an important cosmetic for the hammam, and a part of pre-wedding ceremonies, but also a major economic export for various communities around the Mediterranean basin.

Karaim, Kena, and Kopecks: Henna Among Crimean Karaites

I got a wonderful question on my Tumblr a few days ago and I thought I’d feature the answer here too.

 “Hi!! Do you have any record of Crimean Karaite henna traditions? All I have to go on is your post about henna customs in Turkey/the Balkans, and also in an article about modern Crimean Karaites it said the woman being interviewed had hennaed hair.”

A great question! Before I jump into the answer, some background for people unfamiliar with Crimean Karaites:

The Karaites are a sect of Judaism which attempts to live only according to the TaNaKh [Hebrew Bible], and does not recognize the halakhic [legal] authority of the Talmud or later Rabbinic thought; non-Karaite Jews are referred to as Rabbanites. Today, most Karaites live now live in Israel or the United States; in the past, there were large Karaite communities in Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq, as well as many Karaite Jews in the Crimean peninsula (as well as pockets in Lithuania and mainland Ukraine).

Henna traditions among Egyptian Karaites were previously featured here; now we’ll investigate henna among Crimean Karaites, known as Karaim or Krymkaraylar (there was also a Rabbanite Jewish community in Crimea, known as Krymchaks). How the Jews (Karaite or Rabbanite) got to the Crimean Peninsula is a blogpost for another time... Suffice it to say that according to the 1897 Russian Imperial Census there were 12,894 Karaites in the Russian Empire, of which 5,400 lived in the Crimean Peninsula, 800 in Lithuania, 200 in Volhynia, and the remainder elsewhere. Today there are perhaps four thousand European Karaites, with about a thousand living in Europe and the remainder living in Israel or North America.

A Karaite kenesa [synagogue], Vilnius, built in 1921.

It might be surprising that we would look for henna traditions among Crimean Karaites. After all, Crimea sits in the Black Sea between Russia and the Ukraine, not places traditionally associated with henna. But it’s important to remember that the Crimean peninsula was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire under the Crimean Tatars until 1783, and even after it became part of Russia, there was still a heavy cultural influence from Turkey. And of course, no matter how much I learn about henna, I am always surprised by how far it has travelled and how diverse its traditions are!

O Drom [The Road]: Henna Among European Roma

A friend of mine asked me the other day if there were henna traditions in Europe... Of course! In this post I thought I'd feature one such group (and I welcome your suggestions for others!): henna traditions among the Romani communities of the Balkans and southern/eastern Europe.

I am increasingly concerned about the growing worldwide discrimination against Roma, in Europe in particular (here are some links). Having marked International Holocaust Memorial Day just a few weeks ago, I am reminded of the ways in which Roma, like Jews, have persevered throughout history against racism, xenophobia, stereotypes, and of course, the incomprehensible terror of the Holocaust, sometimes referred to as the Porrajmos (to learn more, I recommend the powerful movie A People Uncounted).

Identity card of Maria Miezi Bihari, a Romani girl from Germany, 
photographed by Nazi officials of the Racial Hygiene Unit, ca. 1940.

In that light, I thought I'd share some of the sources I've collected describing henna use among various Roma communities (and readers are welcome to add more!). I think that it's super important not only to shed some light on a beautiful and often-stereotyped community, but also for people who use and work with henna to remember that henna is very much a part of the story of Europe (like I wrote about in this post), not just India or Morocco. Showcasing the diversity of global henna history is one of the main objectives of this blog, and I feel that there is a special kinship between Jewish and Romani tradition in particular. In many places, in fact, henna was used by both Jews and Roma, but not by the other majority groups of the population.

A Serbian Roma family arriving in Ellis Island, ca. 1905.
Photo by Augustus Sherman, NYPL.

A note about terminology: I'm using the term "Roma" (sometimes also spelt Rroma) to refer to the diverse ethnic group of historically semi-nomadic people found throughout Europe, who were speakers of various dialects of the Romani language. Various subgroups include Sinti in Central Europe, Manouche in France, Kalderash in Russia, and many others. There are also other groups of semi-nomadic people related to the Roma, including the Domari people in the Middle East (with whom I worked when I was living in Jerusalem; see below).

The term "Gypsy," which may be familiar to my readers, has been largely rejected by the community as a derogatory slur, and while some Roma may reclaim the term as an identity label for themselves, it is inappropriate for non-Roma to use the term. Accepted convention is to refer to the overall ethnicity as "Roma," with the adjective "Romani" to refer to the language, culture, etc.

The origins of the Roma, as many know, are subject to vociferous debate, but it seems likely that they originated in India, migrating westward through Persia in the early Middle Ages. By the 1600s they had spread throughout Europe, although they frequently faced persecution and expulsion.

Could they have brought henna with them from India? It's possible, but unlikely, since (as I explore in this post and this one) henna did not become commonly used in India until the very late Middle Ages, centuries after we believe the Roma left. Could they have picked up henna in Persia? It's certainly possible, although we lack any historical documentation. It's more likely, in my opinion, that the use of henna was a practice that developed in the Ottoman Empire; my reasons will become clear below.

By Any Other Name: Words for Henna Across the World

There was a recent post on one of the henna forums online about the etymology of the word ‘henna’ and it occurred to me that exploring the different names for henna and their etymologies might make an interesting subject for a blogpost! I’ve tried to group them by age and area, and of course I’ve stuck mostly to languages that I’m (at least somewhat) familiar with. If you know more names for henna, or more about what I’ve written here, please add them in the comments!!

Ancient Languages: Egypt

Let’s start with the oldest word for henna that we know… It’s actually difficult to say what that might be. In general, identifying plant and animal names in ancient languages is one of the most hotly contested fields of linguistics — it’s hard enough to know exactly what plant or animal a word refers to in any language, and it’s especially difficult when there are no speakers to ask, “Can you point to the plant you mean when you say X?”

The oldest records of henna use come from Egypt, but the textual evidence is very unclear. The most promising candidate for a plant name that might refer to henna is ‘nḥ-imi, or ankh-imy, which might be translated as the ‘Life-is-in-it’-plant (Germer 2008, pg. 42). In hieroglyphs it’s written like this:

You might be able to recognize the word/symbol ankh, for ‘life’. This plant was used during the embalming process, and it was described as protecting the bed of the Pharaoh (Charpentier 1981, pp. 158-159, Germer 2008, pp. 42-43); its scent was thought to bring the dead back to life (Germer 1992, pg. 124). 

Now it is very tempting to connect this to archaeological records of hennaed mummified bodies and starting imagining some postmortem henna ritual in ancient Egypt… BUT we must be very cautious. There is no indication in any Egyptian text that the ‘nḥ-imi plant had any dyeing properties, and other scholars argue that the ‘nḥ-imi plant is not henna, but a type of lotus (Aufrère 1987, pp. 34-35). So the bottom line is we can’t be sure.

Kina-What? Jewish Henna Traditions in Turkey

 A henna-friend recently asked (on Facebook) whether I could offer some sources on Turkish Jewish henna traditions. Always happy to oblige! The truth is, there aren’t a lot of records of Jewish henna traditions in Turkey. I’ll present here what we do have, with reference to other communities where necessary.

A few background notes: first of all, the modern country of Turkey is not quite the same as what was historically known as “Turkey.” Even in the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire included much of what is today Greece and the Balkans, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq. Thus, colonial travelers would describe their observations about (Muslim) Turks living in places like Salonica [Thessaloniki], Damascus, Jerusalem, or Mosul.

The other note is that there is no one “Turkish Jewish” community, but several different layers: most of Turkey’s Jews were Sephardi Jews, descended from the Iberian exiles who arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. These Jews generally spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) and settled in Constantinople (today Istanbul), as well as other parts of the empire: places like Salonica, Cairo, Damascus, Safed, and Sarajevo. However, here are (or were) also other communities: Must‘arabi Jews (Judeo-Arabic speakers), mostly in the south-east, near the Syrian border; Ashkenazi Jews (Yiddish speakers), some of whom had migrated to Turkey in the Middle Ages but also more recent arrivals; Kurdish Jews (Neo-Aramaic speakers) living in Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey; and Romaniote Jews (Judeo-Greek speakers), living mostly in Greek areas (Corfu, Crete, Salonica, Ioannina) but also in Turkey proper.

Jews from Bursa (the woman on the left is wearing her 'indoor' clothes,
the woman on the left is in a yashmak for walking around the city).
From Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie, 1873

Resistance is Futile: Henna in Reverse, Part II

This is part two of the series that we began last week investigating sap and wax resists. Those techniques use a liquid mixture that is drawn on the skin and dries, while the techniques we’re looking at in this post use malleable materials like fabric and dough to shape the designs that will block the henna.

One basic type of this resist uses a simple dough (flour and water) that can be rolled out into thin strands and arranged on the skin. One example of this technique comes from the descriptions of Bahraini wedding ceremonies in the 1970s recorded in Holes’ work on Bahraini Arabic dialects (2005, pg. 164):

Over the following two days [before the wedding] a specialist woman artist (xaḍḍaba [lit. painter]) applied henna to her palms, fingers and feet. This process was called ḥannat ‘ağin [dough henna]. A thin dough would be rolled, twisted and applied to the bride's skin in geometric patterns, leaving some of the skin bare. The red henna dye was then applied to the dough and skin and allowed to dry overnight. In the morning the dough was removed, leaving the henna pattern on the skin. The process was repeated on the third night, known as lēlat il-ḥanna, in order to make the henna tattoos [sic] stand out even more clearly. During these two days, special ditties accompanied the laborious process of decorating the bride.

This technique is apparently still practiced in the Arabian peninsula today; Penni AlZayer described it as she saw it being done in the 1990s in a rural village in al-Sharqiyya, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. She writes that the hennaya [henna artist] worked by “rolling bits of dough from the bowl beside her into very long thin strings,” and then she “arranged and pressed simple spirals and geometric patterns first onto the palms of the bride’s hands and then the soles of her feet” (AlZayer, 2005, pg. 4). After the patterns were finished, the hennaya covered the bride’s hands and feet with henna paste and let it dry.

Kurdish Jewish woman shaping bread dough,
Israel, mid-20th century

Interestingly, a similar technique was practiced by the Jewish community in Sandor (or Sundur), a small village in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. An elderly immigrant from Sandor described the patterns, including celestial imagery in the palm and spirals around the fingers, that she remembered from her wedding in the 1920s (Sienna, 2011, pg. 88):

They would draw here [in the palm], like a moon, a beautiful drawing. [Noam: how would they do it?] They would make a dough, take dough, and put it on a little bit at a time. They would do it here [on the hands], whatever designs they wanted, and then they would put henna on over it... And then they would do the fingers, one by one, a little dough here [in a spiral], so that it would look nice. [The woman doing the henna] would bring the dough, take a little bit, roll it out thinly, thinly, and then put it on the hands, and then henna [on top]. And then [when it was dry] she would wrap [the bride's hands] up in cloth, so that she wouldn't move [and smudge the henna]. It would come out so beautiful, bright red, a strong colour.

While Henny Harald Hansen describes a Kurdish bride with palms “painted with a sun, a crescent moon and a star” (1961, pg. 130), it is not clear whether that was done with a resist or whether it was simply drawn on the skin. No other description of henna from this region includes reference to a dough resist, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the technique was known and used by women in Turkey and Pakistan as well.