Our men used the long winter break to get a hold of a few new pieces of garment. We don't want to keep them from you.
Dress of a Hellenistic Soldier
Since I grow more and more interested in the late hellenistic era, I used one of the wall-paintings in Agios Athanasios as reference for a new set of clothes. A few great depictions of Macedonian soldiers survived the ages in these tombs. I have selected the following painting for my reconstruction:
As you can see, the soldier is wearing a Chlamys of the Thessalian type, decorated with broad stripes on the sides of the cloth. The colour on the original painting has faded over the years, but it looks to me like the typical salmon/red you can get from dyeing with madder. My version of the mantle was hand-woven by Sirko Galz. Unfortunately he ran out of yarn on the last centimeters, which is why a small piece of the mantle is dyed in a different colour. This can happen when you work with natural colours and makes my Chlamys even more unique.
Beneath the chlamys, the soldier is wearing a grey Chiton, decorated with white longitudinal stripes, which are typical for hellenistic clothing. The cloth was also made by Sirko Galz. Since ou can't get a nice grey from natural dyes, he used a black dye and created the grey colour by interweaving.
Since one Chiton is not enough, I had a second cloth made. This time I used another painting from Agios Athanasios as a reference. I wanted to reconstruct the Chiton of the third soldier from the left. This cloth is also dyed with natural colours - madder and then reinforced with cochenille - and woven by Sirko Galz. the cut is the same as the grey Chiton.
For every Climate
Because it sometimes gets cold on our camps, I finally decided to get a bad-weather equipment. For this I used a nice blue wool cloth we dyed some time ago using dyer's-weed, and I made a sleeved Chiton out of it. You can see such sleeves on paintings and reliefs, e.g. on the Alexander Sarkophagus. together with the new Chlamys, I shoudl be well equipped for cold nights at the campfire.
Finally, I crafted an Exomis for especially warm days, which doesn't have as much cloth as the Chitones above. the cloth is also hand-woven and dyed in a saffron-yellow out of safflower.
Macedonian Chiton
Sparates was also busy over the winter and had a new Macedonian Chiton made. this one comes hand-woven from Marled Mader. It is dyed in red and is decorated with stripes in a light purple. This purple seems to be loved by the ancient Macedonians, and Marled managed to create it using natural dyes with a "secret recipe".
