In Search of Saukeles / В поисках саукеле
Why has so little ancient jewellery remained in Kazakhstan? I asked myself this question for the first time at the end of the 1990s when the first trade fairs for handicrafts in Central Asia were held in Almaty. There were ancient Uzbek earrings, Turkmen brooches from the beginning of the 20th century, and Tajik necklaces from the same period, all laid out on improvised counters. But where was the Kazakh jewellery? My answer came surprisingly quickly.
Love brings people together, and in this particular case it was love of ancient jewellery. I met a serious collector at one of the above-mentioned fairs. He was subjecting each piece of jewellery to a critical examination and asking the vendors detailed questions that I didn’t fully understand, and they too seemed puzzled by his questions. A group of people, all current and future admirers of Central Asian jewellery, soon gathered around him and he ended up giving us an informal lecture on the subject. He told us that it was his dream to find a saukele for his collection.
Generation to generation
A saukele is a Kazakh bride’s headdress, a tall, heavy cap decorated from top to bottom in silver.
Alkei Khakanovich Margulan, the famous Kazakh archeologist, historian, art critic and folklorist, describes a saukele in his illustrated book Kazakh Folk Applied Art. “A saukele is a tall, cone-shaped cap, up to 70 cm in height, often in the shape of a truncated cone. The base material was white felt edged with fabric, such as velvet, cloth and satin, etc. The colour of the fabric could be different shades of red as well as green and other colours. The base of the cap was edged with a strip of otter or other fur. At the front it was decorated with rows of coral, glass beads and silver plaques. The plaques for a saukele came in a variety of shapes, from simple stamped figures in square or petal shapes, to threedimensional gilded plates with complex configurations set with cornelian. Any free space on the plaques was finished with engraved ornamental patterns. Two rows of metal-figured plaques with a thread of coral beads between them were fixed to the bottom edge of the saukele. A mandatory addition to each saukele were the long pendants attached to either side of the headdress that reached the girls’ waists. They were made of threads of coral, turquoise, silver, and sometimes gilded plates, coins, and silk tassels, etc. The number and length of these pendants depended on the status of the girl’s parents.”*
This means that it was the most expensive component of initially a girl’s, and later a woman’s, clothing. Kazakh women would wear their saukele for important occasions from their wedding day until the birth of their first baby. A saukele was a family heirloom and handed down from generation to generation. You could not rent or borrow one.
This is why, very often, a saukele was kept at the bottom of a chest, waiting for a daughter and then a granddaughter, and so on, to grow up. If a woman died without children then, according to steppe law, the saukele would go back to her family so that one day a daughter of her kin could wear it.
This was the collector’s supposition: what if an ancient, beautiful Kazakh saukele was still being kept at the bottom of some chest in a remote village?
Turning millet into gold
We were all inspired with this idea. So we ‘went round the old ladies’ and started asking our relatives and neighbours, people we knew and people we didn’t. Sometimes, seeing an apashka
(a grandmother or elderly woman) on the bus, wearing a Kazakh bracelet on her wrist, we would ask her if she, by any chance, still had a saukele at home.
Alas, none of them, did. The apashkas pursed their lips and became angry, waving their hands at me and only one, the bravest, explained. “We had saukele. During the famine-genocide we exchanged them for food. These and all our jewels. Only this ring is left”, she told me, and stretched out her wrinkled hand with a very simple Kazakh ring.
Somehow, still, when I meet a woman with such a ring on her finger, I believe it has a story to tell. It might be of confiscation, escape from Soviet control, the famine-genocide, or war, all of these things that clan historians call ‘the cataclysms of the 20th century’.
By the way, I also have such a ring. It was given to me by my husband’s grandmother, and it does have a story. I thought of it recently, while watching the famous Russian journalist, Leonid Parfyonov, on his Youtube channel Parfenon. He was discussing a book written by the historian Yelena Osokina called Torgsin. The Alchemy of Soviet Industrialisation. The title of the book is an abbreviation of the name of a Soviet state department. Torgsin means trade with foreigners, and in these stores you could buy goods for hard currency, gold or silver. Today, this is part of our common history with Russia, Ukraine and other post-soviet republics. Its history is partially forgotten, but some time ago people were very familiar with the word, and certainly their Soviet bosses were. As Leonid Parfyonov said in his programme: “Torgsin really took off when the Government decided to use it to sell flour, cereals, and sugar (the basic goods) to Soviet citizens for gold, silver, and jewellery. Torgsin’s most profitable phase was during the faminegenocide of 1933, when the population sold 45 tons of gold and 1,400 tons of silver. It’s alchemy, isn’t it? Their economic management brought people to the point of death because of collectivisation, they exterminated the kulaks as a class, then with these and other activities they turned millet into gold”.
How much Kazakh silver was in those tons, including the silver taken off the most important item of a woman’s clothing, her saukele, nobody can tell.
That collector I met never found his saukele. There were too many cataclysms in twentieth-century Kazakhstan.
A legacy and beauty
Fortunately, our saukele story did not finish there. A few years after we started looking, an ancient and genuine one was found. It was exactly as the collector had imagined, hidden at the bottom of a chest belonging to an old woman who had, despite everything, managed to keep her family heirloom. The famous Kazakhstani artist, jeweller and sculptor, Serzhan Bashirov, showed this saukele at an exhibition in the capital of Kazakhstan as it belonged to a relative.
“He allowed me to exhibit it”, explained Serzhan, “it was impossible not to, as this saukele was probably the only one discovered within the last 20 to 30 years. It was found in Eastern Kazakhstan, in the Markakolsky district. An old lady had kept it in a chest and managed to keep it safe and sound: the fabric, corals and silver elements, everything was still there. It had begun to darken a little due to moisture, but almost all the silver items were in good condition. This saukele is typical for Eastern Kazakhstan”.
We want to believe that this saukele is not the only one, but the first one. That somewhere in other regions, other old ladies are keeping these beautiful Kazakh bridal headdresses in their chests. While we look for them, modern Kazakh zergers (jewellers) are making new saukeles for their daughters. And their daughters, modern Kazakh brides, remain faithful to the ancient steppe law: a saukele stays in the family and can only be inherited. This is the same as strength of character, beauty, and talent, everything that a mother could wish to bestow on a beloved daughter.
*A.k.margulan. Kazakh Folk Applied Art, Volume 3. Almaty, ‘Oner’, 1994.