Zmijanje Embroidery

There is a kind of embroidery that is never drawn. There is no template, no book of patterns, nobody to tell you, "the circle goes here, the star goes there." The women of Zmijanje, the region between Mrkonjić Grad and Banja Luka, carried those patterns in their heads. From mother to daughter, from finger to finger, for generations. Black on white, geometry that looks as though it fell from the sky, although it really came down from an attic, from grandmother Anđa's head, a hundred or two hundred years ago.

In 2014, Zmijanje embroidery was placed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. That is good news because it means the world can see it. The bad news is that "seeing" and "living" are not the same thing. How many women still know the embroidery by heart, without a template, in the way it was passed down? Fewer and fewer. That troubled me for a long time.

I am not an ethnographer or a folklorist, nor anyone entitled to lecture on this. I am someone for whom this embroidery belongs to the landscape, something I saw on tablecloths and shirts while growing up without knowing that I was looking at something slowly disappearing. When I understood that, my first response was not sadness. It was: if it is vanishing from homes, at least let it not evaporate from memory.

Bosana is, in a way, that attempt. Not an attempt to appoint myself guardian of a heritage, because that is not my calling, but to take its geometric language, its black-and-white logic that resembles code from before code existed, and stitch it into something new. Into peoples, flags, and the ornaments visible on the clothes of characters throughout Bosana.

Several things distinguish Zmijanje embroidery from other Bosnian and Herzegovinian traditions:

- **Monochrome**: almost exclusively black embroidery on white cloth, without the varied colours seen in some other regional traditions

- **Geometric motifs**: diamonds, stars, stylised plants and animals, all reduced to lines and angles

- **Working from memory**: the embroiderer does not draw a guide on the fabric; she "sees" the pattern in her head and works it directly with the needle

There is something almost like programming in it, if one may say so. Rules, repetition, variations on a theme. When I first noticed that, I thought: this would be perfect as the texture of a Bosana people's costume. That is how it began.

If you travel through Bosana, especially through the clothes and symbols of its peoples and factions, you will recognise the same language. It is not a direct copy, because this is not a documentary but a satirical fantasy world, and drawing such beautiful, complex figures on every character every time would be difficult. But there is something. The spirit is there. Geometry that carries meaning, a pattern that tells others who you are and where you come from before you open your mouth.

I think that is the best way to honour something. Not to freeze it in a display case, but to let it live on, even through a world of invented peoples and rusted machines.

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Photographer unknown. / Source: Google.

Illustrations by Mile Mićić.