Sialin

Sialin, women’s shawl, from the village of Koilani. It is made of dimiton, a silk fabric woven with four heddles, and decorated with the tie-dye technique. The basic colours are white, yellow, green, red and burgundy. The linear designs create a complex mosaic with lozenges, crosses, rosettes, straight, zigzag and curved lines, all of which are formed with dots, a result of the tie-dye technique. A large cross with an outline of white dots divides the shawl into four square parts, three of which contain a central lozenge design. At the centre of the shawl, there is a lozenge containing nine small squares with three white dots in their centres. The bottom left and top right square parts have the same lozenge variation, consisting of eight oblique parallel lines of yellow dots on a green background. The bottom right part is divided by yellow dots into thirty small squares, containing flowers with four white dots at their centres, in alternating red, burgundy and green colours. The top left part has a flower with five petals at its centre. Two sides of the shawl are finished in selvage while the other two end in tassels of warp threads, in the burgundy colour of the background.   It is preserved in very good condition. For similar examples, see Egoumenidou 1997, 43, fig. 12; Papadimitriou 2008, 15, 29; Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou 2010, 107, no. 74, 108, no. 75.   Dimensions: length 105 cm., width 110 cm.