Inherited Patterns

An expensive silk scarf in an elegant gift box. On the scarf and box lid, the name of the creator: the trademark of esteemed Milanese stylist Jozef Martini, who donated the object to the museum himself. One hundred percent silk, costly digital printing technology, two-hundred-twenty-euro price tag. A brand-new product that did not—as most ethnographic artefacts do—come from everyday use, though the lifestyle of the wearer of such a thing would not likely fall within the scope of the museum’s collections or interests anyway. Still, what does an artefact like this have to tell us?

The scarf is a contemporary creation, inspired by a family relationship, crafted in honour of a collection dating to the early 20th century. Palokë Laca—or in the fashionable, early-20th-century Italianised form of the name, Paolo Lazza—worked as a silversmith in the city of Scutari (today Shkodra), Albania, selling his wares from his shop and at the local bazaar to support his wife and five children. After his wife died, his business began to decline, and he decided to look for a new way to make a living. From that time forward, each year when summer started, Laca travelled the coastal regions of the Adriatic Sea, peddling his jewellery and other bazaar wares and clothing. Each autumn, he would pass through Fiume to reach Vienna, where he would spend the autumn months in trade. It was likely on just such a trip that in 1911, he visited the Ethnography Department of the Hungarian National Museum, which purchased several hundred pieces of jewellery and textiles from him. Some of these are thought to be objects that he made himself or inherited from his family.

The museum inventory entry for the purchase includes Laca’s name and nationality, the year, and a list of the actual items, but reveals nothing of Laca’s story. In 2024, however, thanks to fresh research we came across both Laca’s original name and the names of his descendants, one of whom was the abovementioned Jozef Martini, his great-grandson. It was these newfound relatives that recounted their family lore about Laca and his travels, though the sale to the Budapest museum was a detail that they hadn’t known. Later, Martini visited Budapest personally to view the collection and gather ideas for the design of a new scarf. The scarf’s patterns draw inspiration from the motifs seen on an artefact from Shkodra, a red coat called a japanxha that was worn as part of a Catholic woman’s outfit. Adorning the centre and four corners of the symmetric composition are symbols for the eight-petalled flower-of-life motif, surrounded by stylised fern wreaths and daphnes, serpent symbols, said to confer familial harmony, and bird motifs of a type seen, among other places, on Albanian archaeological finds.

Thus, the scarf is an exciting artefact for multiple reasons: it is a personal testimony to its designer’s family heritage and sense of cultural belonging; and it is also an example of how museums work together with source and heritage communities, a collaboration that, in this case, has connected Shkodra to Milan, vendor to creator, great-grandfather to great-grandson, and all of these to the collections of the Museum of Ethnography.

Written by: Boglárka Mácsai

Photos: Krisztina Sarnyai and László Incze