Figure 1.--This Ottoman Constantinople cabinet card shows an unidentified boy wearinga tunic outfit. The cap and book suggests it is a school oufit. What we are not sure about is his ethnicity. Constantinople had a cosmopolitan populatuiion of not only Turks, but of Armenians, Greeks Jews, and others. The portrait is undated, but the dealer suggested the 1890s. We suspect the 1900s is also possible. The studio was Th. Servanis which was located in Cadi-Keuy. We are not sure where that was, but notice a sports club founded by Englishmen with that name.

We do not yet know much about skirted garments in Turkey. We do see some boys wearing tunics in the late Ottoman Empire. It seems to have been a kind of schoolwear. We are not sure if it was a school uniform or simply a choice of schoolwear by the parents. Turkish as other Middle-Eastern school children commonly wore school smocks. I think the smocks were almost always associated with school wear. I do not have many details on the styles involved or the extent to which individual schools dictated specific styles. Some images show that the smocks might be worn with large Peter Pan collars. Turkish boys almost always wore their smocks with long trousers. The Turkish smocks also seem rather short. Our Turkish archive is too limited to make any assessments at this time.

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Created: 6:37 AM 5/22/2018
Last updated: 6:37 AM 5/22/2018