Cămașa ciumei

Cămașa ciumei

Cămașa ciumei (Romanian: cămașa ciumei, lit. 'the plague's shirt'; dialectal cămașa ciumii) is the Romanian name for an apotropaic textile made in a single day or night to avert epidemic disease and other dangers. The rite was recorded across Oltenia, Muntenia, Transylvania, Dobruja, Maramureș, Bukovina and the Banat, as well as among Romanian-speaking communities in the Timok Valley and other parts of eastern Serbia. Its central operation compressed the preparation of fibre, spinning, warping, weaving, cutting and sewing into one uninterrupted period, usually carried out by a specially constituted group of women. Recorded objects included wearable shirts, miniature garments small enough for a baby or doll, and late twentieth-century examples from eastern Serbia made from an opened hemp sack through which a person crawled. Depending on the locality, the finished textile was offered at the village boundary, hung in a tree, buried, burned, cast into the wind, placed on an anthropomorphic effigy, worn by a sick person, or held open while inhabitants passed through it. Ethnographic records assign it protection against plague and cholera, illness in newborn children, infertility, nervous illness, threats to crops and livestock, and bullets or death in war. The earliest known written notice from the Romanian lands appears in Anton-Maria del Chiaro's 1718 history of Wallachia, which records women producing a hemp shirt within twenty-four hours and then burning it. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century research documented both remembered performances and surviving garments, including wartime uses in eastern Serbia in 1991 and 1999. In the Oltenian villages studied by Natalia Golant, manufacture had ceased while commemorative feasts remained in use, and in the Timok villages she studied, some families retained shirts although no new ones were being made.

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Ancient Rome.

Cămașa ciumei

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