The Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography, public cultural institution operating under the authority of the Cluj County Council, celebrates the Hungarian Culture Day with a photo album, representing embroidered textiles. The textile pieces presented in this album, dating from the second half of the 19th century, are part of the museum’s textile collection and were made and used by the Hungarian communities from the Transylvanian Plain.
The rich textile art from the Transylvanian Plain aroused the interest of specialists even since the first half of the 20th century. Researchers Palotay Gertrúd and Szabó T. Attila (some pieces come from his personal collection) published in 1943 an extensive study on Hungarian embroidery from the Transylvanian Plain, and many of the artifacts analyzed within this study are now part of the collections of the Transylvania Museum of Ethnography.
The embroidery kept on the different ceremony interior textiles are of two types: the first one has as decoration principle the counting of threads (with cross, embroidery over thread, cuts), and the second one the decoration made after drawing (chain, contour point, crossed stitch).
From the two basic techniques, specific to the ethnographic area, we present in this album pieces embroidered according to the drawing. Researchers point out that the decoration of this type of embroidery is inspired by the embroidery specific to the high social strata, of Renaissance inspiration, of Western European origin and Turkish influence, specific to the 17th–18th centuries. The contact with this type of embroidery was facilitated by the ritual textiles of Protestant churches. This type of influence is observed in the case of several Transylvanian areas, the specificity of the pieces from the Transylvanian Plain consisting in the accentuated communitarian and even individual model-processing. Worked by the hands of the Hungarian peasant women from the Transylvanian Plain, the borrowed vegetal and floral motifs become stylized, insufficiently processed proportions between random motifs. The decor organization is decomposed and recomposed in a specific manner.
Made on homemade cloth woven from hemp, cotton threads or on industrial cloth, usually embroidered in a single color (red, black) or outlined with a different color, in wool or cotton threads, the interior textiles embroidered according to the drawing from the Transylvanian Plain represent a charming, unitary stylistic segment of the Transylvanian textile culture.
This album is the preview of an exhibition of embroidered textiles from the Transylvanian Plain, planned by the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography for August this year.