That little girl in the middle there is Tea Turalija. She grew up in
Bosnia and Herzegovina surrounded by tattooed women. Every day she would
plant kisses on her great grandmother's hands, thinking nothing of the
etchings on her arms. When she got older, Tea discovered that all the
inked-up old folk around her were from the final generation of a secret
Catholic cult that developed while Bosnia was being occupied by the
Ottoman Empire. The cult members identified each other by tattooing
their hands and arms using a compound ink that was made up, in part, of
human breast milk.
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Ethnic Croatian Catholic communities in Bosnia suffered hell under the
Turks during the Ottoman reign, with the majority of them forced to
convert to Islam. Girls were raped, children were taken to Turkey as
slaves and Turkish Chiefs had the right to sleep with Christian women on
their wedding nights before the bride's husband even got a look in.
Lame. In response to such violations, women took to tattooing themselves on
their hands, fingers, chests and foreheads with crosses and other
ancient ornaments. They believed such practices would create a spiritual
guard that would ward off the Turks, or would at least let people know
they were once Catholic before undergoing a forced conversion.
At the height of the cult, mothers took to tattooing their children at
home, usually before they were ten years old. The tattooing process
involves using a crude needle and a special solution made of charcoal,
grime, honey and milk extracted from the bosom of a lactating woman who
has already had a male child. "We used mother's milk from the woman who has a male child because only
that milk was good for tattooing," claims Tea. "We also believe this
kind of milk can cure eye pain."
Although the cult outlasted the Ottoman oppressors, communist
authorities made tattooed women targets of hate campaigns. Threatened
and treated like criminals, they would often lose their jobs due to
their religious allegiances. Eventually women stopped tattooing their
children out of fear and the practice was more or less extinct by the
1950s.According to Tea, tattooing was neccessary during the Turkish occupation
of Bosnia and Herzegovina so that the children could be protected from
kidnapping. Many had their names or initials tattooed into the skin to
prevent their identity being taken from them.
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One woman spoke to Tea in mystic tones about the tattooing process.
"There was a paraffin lamp," she began, "milk was taken from the woman
who feeds a male child and it was mixed with the soot from the lamp.
Then she took the needle, dipped it and tattooed a cross on my hands
until the blood ran. My hand was numb so I didn't feel anything. She
wrapped it and I held it like that for one day without washing."
Tea herself has not yet been tattooed. "I would love to one day," she
told me, "but only using the tattoos of my people, because they are a
part of our identity and carry the meaning that no other tattoo could
have for me. If I have children one day, I will give them these tattoos
for protection, so that they know who they are. I would like them to be
tattooed with mother's milk, as it was always done. The only problem is
we would have to have some help from a modern tattoo artist, because the
people who knew how to do it the traditional way are not alive
anymore."
- Text via 'The Croatian Tattooed Grandma Cult' by Alex Hoban via Vice UK, here.
