Sarma (headdress)

A sarma is a cone-shaped metal headdress made of two parts that fit into each other. The first part, a hollow truncated semi-cone that is held in place against the head by fine scarves or bands[1], rests on the forehead. The second one, which is smaller and serves to hold the hair, consists of a thin plate of silver pierced with arabesque motifs.

Sarmas, the headgear of the women of Algiers in the early nineteenth century, were worn by notables’ wives during the Ottoman period. In the eighteenth century sarmas apparently got taller and consequently heavier, and the metal plates were replaced by a system of metal threads soldered together and intertwined in long arabesques.

It is the metal threads that are said to be at the origin of the term sarma, which was still used in the early twentieth century by saddlers in Tunis to distinguish between ordinary silver thread wound on silk thread and sarma, pure silver thread. The name, which reached the Maghreb via the Levantines, is supposedly of Greek-Byzantine origin (from syrma: metal thread used for lace and embroidery). In Ottoman Turkey sirma also designated the thin metal thread twisted into arabesques that was applied on fabrics, whereas the term sarma referred to a simple embroidery stitch equivalent to the flat satin stitch. In Syria and Palestine in the late Ottoman period, the name sarma is attributed to a velvet dress embroidered in gold thread with a flat satin stitch.

The earliest descriptions of this high headdress came from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travellers. Some claim that it first appeared in the eighteenth century and trace its origin to the Near East[2]. This hypothesis is based on its height, as from earliest antiquity the civilisations of the western shores had inherited the principle of the tall headdress from ancient Egypt and the Near East. In the second millennium BC Syrian women wore high cylindrical tiaras covered with a veil at the back. From Crete to Phoenicia by way of Carthage and Iberia, tiaras were widespread at the royal courts.

Later the Mamluks of Egypt, heirs to the sumptuous Fatimid costume, brought the women’s headdress called the tantur into widespread use in city attire[3]. The headdress looked like a tumbler covered with a costly fabric[4].

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, headdresses in the Maghreb evolved separately from those on the eastern Mediterranean shores; cloth-covered tiaras were never part of women’s costumes in the North African capitals under Ottoman rule.

The height of the sarma and the thin veil adorning it have sometimes led to a parallel being drawn with other European headdresses, such as the fifteenth-century hennin or the hennin worn in Elizabethan England. In the late sixteenth century Algiers saw a vast influx of English, Flemish and Dutch newcomers. The connection with the hennin is akin to the hypothesis of the Near-Eastern origin of the sarma, since Eastern influences may possibly have contributed to the invention of extravagant hairstyles reminiscent of certain mitres worn by Syrian women. Other examples of sarmas are known: one belongs to the collections of the Musée du Quai Branly[5], the other is in Lebanon’s Beiteddine Museum[6].

[1]The colour of the scarf that holds it in place varies: black for Jewish women and coloured for Muslim women.

[2]However, this date corresponds to the waning power of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the Europeans, who turned the people of Algiers away from the influence of the Mediterranean East.

[3] In use amongst Muslim, Druze and Maronite women in the mountains of Lebanon; the material they were made of and their height indicated the women’s social status.

[4] In the early sixteenth century, Leo Africanus observed that the ladies of Cairo wore very costly narrow pipe-shaped headdresses measuring one palm (approximately 22 cm). In the Maghreb and in Muslim Spain this type of headdress was unknown; when Leo Africanus remarked that the women of Tunis seemed to have giants’ heads, it was because of the turban which combined with their hair to create a sizeable volume, similar to that which can be observed on fifteenth-century Grenadian women and sixteenth-century Morisco women. This hairstyle was not given up after the Ottomans reached Algerian and Tunisian shores.

[5] Sarma in openwork silver, Paris, Musée du Quai Branly, inv. 74.1968.5.169.

[6] Tantur, eighteenth–nineteenth century, Lebanon, Beiteddine, Beiteddine Museum, S31/1.