to: Craft > #21 - Flax Seed to Sheet

Flax Seed to Sheet: The Lost History of Yugoslavian Textiles at the Global Seed Vault

Melissa Potter

In the Global Seed Vault, in Svalbard, Norway, more than 1,000 Bosnian seed samples from the Institute for Genetic Resources of the University of Banja Luka are stored as a backup of one of the world’s most diverse biomes. In the Vault, the date of deposit, country of collection, and botanical information are all recorded in a searchable database (found at https://seedvault.nordgen.org/Search). Many experts know the endemic importance of each seed, and the plant’s medicinal qualities. But the craft heritage of the seeds is an obscure history.

The seeds of Linum usitatissimum L., commonly known as flax, are stored in this Bosnian collection. Used in culinary and textile production, this species was used in Bosnia for oil as well as linen fabric. Archaeologists trace this history back to the 6,500-year-old (or older) Neolithic Vinca settlements in Serbia. At various dig sites, they found flax seed samples alongside clay female figurines wearing woven loincloths depicted in warp and weft crosshatching scored into the clay. Together these findings led experts to believe flax spinning and weaving were ancient practices dating back long before anyone imagined. For thousands of years, this Balkan women’s craft of preparing, spinning, and weaving flax fiber for cloth survived Turkish occupation, wars, and, most recently, communist industrialization. In the past three decades, globalization has slowly extinguished the tradition.

I have a long-standing engagement with the former Yugoslavia, which began in 1995, when my feminist grandmother and I sponsored a refugee from the Bosnian War. Inspired by this experience and pursuing my artistic practice in fibers, a decade later I traveled to dozens of villages throughout the region (not including Bosnia and Hercegovina, which was difficult to enter from Serbia after the war) with the help of my friends, Milenka Ristić and Biljana Vuković, in search of flax or bast fiber production. I found potters, rug weavers, glass artists, and fresco painters, but no one producing hemp or flax.

On these trips, elderly village women routinely invited us as impromptu guests and offered coffee, homemade honey, cheese, and rakija (brandy). They were proud to show us their hand-embroidered linens. I didn’t realize at the time that these villages—which seemed in many cases inhabited only by women—were also becoming extinct. With the rise of global competition and cheaper prices leveraged by larger and more powerful countries, the communist industrial textile industry failed. Hundreds of thousands of women, the industry’s primary workers, lost their livelihoods as the factories located in smaller cities throughout the country closed en masse. Many of these women left for larger cities both home and abroad in the hopes of finding other employment. This, combined with the Bosnian war, resulted in massive depopulation of villages. These older women I met on my travels, whose children left and whose husbands died long ago, were probably the last generation to know the craft of flax production.

I continued my search for flax or bast fiber production over many years. In 2003, I was introduced to Branka and Vlada Stevanović, Serbian ethno-botanists who helped me locate flax at Deliblatska Pešcara, a large nature reserve in Serbia with remarkable biodiversity. It was the first and last time I tracked down flax of any kind growing in the Balkans—in this case wild, not cultivated. I processed it for handmade paper, my primary medium, during my first Fulbright in 2006 at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade, where I built a papermaking studio. In this studio, we studied a methodology parallel to the flax textile tradition in which plants must be harvested, hackled, scutched, scraped, and retted. For textiles, the fiber is then spun and woven for cloth. For papermakers, it is beaten to pulp and pulled into sheets. Many of our studio materials and basic equipment were bought in the city open-air farmer’s markets (pijacas), where artisans from the communist era sold their family crafts in stalls. In 2015, on another Fulbright, I set up another papermaking studio, in Bosnia this time, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. I didn’t come any closer to traditional flax production there.

Through the hard work of my colleague and collaborator at Belgrade’s Ethnographic Museum, Saša Srečković, I searched for the region’s craft and ethnographic traditions while engaged in a variety of projects. The museum’s curator of textiles, Marina Cvetković, and conservator Danieljka Radovanović offered a private tour of the museum’s textile holdings, which contain a spectacular array of household linens representing all parts of the former Yugoslavia. Handspun, dyed, and woven specimens made from locally grown crops of flax and hemp exhibited a wide range of cultural and artistic influences, from the most basic to the highly ornate. My collaborations with Srečković continued in the town of Vlasotince, where we inventoried craft practices and tried to develop advocacy efforts. (Srečković is now a licensed trainer for the UNESCO intangible heritage movement, which offers protection for potentially endangered international craft practices.)

I once traveled to the town of Vranje, in southern Serbia, where the director of the local museum lamented that textile crafts were vanishing quickly, with no one trained or even interested in continuing the work. Besides the usual consequences of globalization, economic devastation, and the young population moving into the cities from the country, a tragic blow to artisans came when the city issued strict tax regulations and confusing application procedures that forced thousands to abandon their handicraft businesses. Curator Ranko Barasić of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade drafted an appeal for the Serbian government to exempt the country’s artisans from these procedures. While his recommendations were not accepted, the city later revoked the ruling. It was too late for many artisans, and today many of my women weaver and fiber friends struggle to make enough to buy their materials.

Now, as even more time has passed, it is possible all the traditional flax producers from this region are gone—some have died, indeed, some left the country during the wars. I think of the Bosnian flax seeds, stored in a permafrost threatened by climate change at the Global Seed Vault, as an invitation to ponder this history. Within these seeds is not only the biological material to grow the fiber, but also an invisible story of its use. Each seed, the silent progeny of plants tended by traditional farmers—some surely the women flax spinners and weavers of the Balkans—quietly reminds us of what we have lost, where we went wrong, and how we might start over.