The art of embroidery is an ancient craft. With needle and threads, women revealed their sensitivity, nurtured their imagination, and wove their dreams. Endless embroidered fields travel from East to West, becoming links in a chain of art and communication.

Linen and silk fabrics were produced by the skilled hands of women and transformed into garments and dowries that adorned people and homes during festivities and celebrations. Customs and traditions, joys and sorrows have traveled for centuries on linen and silk with colorful threads. Trees and flowers, carnations, tulips, and Easter lilies, patterns that contain stories and fairy tales, pass from generation to generation and seal both old and new cultures so that they are not forgotten.

Richly embroidered covers adorn beds, mirrors, chests, pillows, and headboards. Adjacent embroideries, difficult yet enjoyable to execute, hark back to Byzantine times. Silver, pure gold, and golden threads, combined with various colors of dyed silk threads, sparkle like jewels.

The stitches, magical words that upon hearing them, become poems, become embroideries: rice stitch, perforated, chain, loose, poured, and stretched, cut, mat, threaded, chevrov stitch, and zigzag stitch. Their magic permeates the women’s work, composing surfaces of precious art, poetry, and musicality, hymns to an entire civilization.

Pergamon and Constantinople, Constantinople and Pergamon, the two places represented in the collection. Both places of origin for two people, Aristodemos and Myrsini, who united in their lives and bequeathed this vibrant treasure of memory to later generations.

Constantinople, as a metropolis of Byzantine minor arts, with a history of imperial protection of the sibling weavings and embroideries, became a source of the trend to decorate even humble homes according to imperial standards. However, since the eighteenth century, Constantinople was a vibrant multinational city where the East, with its customs and culture, met and interacted with the West. Diplomats, scholars, and men of letters hosted and attended European-style receptions, and the appearances of women were striking. The demand for dresses, hats, and jewelry was continuous, and various workshops received orders daily.

Alongside the garments, dowries were prepared. Apprentices and experienced seamstresses, as well as male embroiderers, in their own workshops in Constantinople, took on the most challenging embroideries. For the serious needs of the dowry, which had to be completed when the time was right, the nuns in the monasteries and the embroiderers at home contributed. And from the seventeenth century onward, Western patterns and styles influenced their designs and application on fabrics, with the gradual predominance of white embroideries on linen and silk for nearly all types of dowries.

Pergamon, with its tradition in silk and linen, a place with a strong Greek presence and atmosphere, kept the ancient tradition alive, almost untouched. Ancient stitches and natural dyes dominate its works. Yet, new Western trends also developed easily there, and this is well explained when we remember that these European developments actually derive from the Hellenistic pattern.

All this vibrancy is vividly captured in the Collection. Lotuses, palms, mythical birds, pomegranates, carnations, lilies from Constantinople and the old Sofia family converse with delicate tulip stems, anemones, Easter lilies, pink gazania, colorful flowers, as well as calligraphic monograms, corsets, and small baskets from the young Sofia-Hatzipanagiotou family of Pergamon.
Three centuries of history in one dowry.