BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

cultural construct from modernity. Shaped by the extreme political circumstances of the 1700s, the
distinguishable tartan and kilt had come to epitomize the dignified Scottish identity by the late
eighteenth century. Well into the 1700s, Scotland essentially existed as two detached portions,
having very little in common: namely, the “civilized,” English-and-French-influenced Lowlands and
the “barbarian,” “roguish” Highlands, as the author puts it. Whereas the Saxon Lowlanders followed
European fashions of waistcoat and breeches, the Celtic Highlanders wore the tartan – attire highly
adapted to the rocky and boggy terrain of the Scottish mountains, as well as cheap to obtain. Not only
did the tartan 22 firmly connect the Highlanders to Ireland, whence they had come from, but the large
majority of Scotchmen considered it “a sign of barbarism; a badge of roguish, idle, predatory
Highlanders … a nuisance… to civilized, historic [Lowland] Scotland.” 23
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, England had crushed the last of the Jacobite
Rebellions in Scotland (1745), subdued the population, and outlawed the Highland dress with an act
of Parliament (1746). Thereafter, the tense relationship between England and Scotland provoked
many a Scottish nobility to adopt the tartan in symbolic resistance to English oppression. Ironically,
while powerful Lowlanders elevated the Highland dress to an emblem of Scottishness, the
Highlanders themselves substituted the tartan for breeches during the thirty-five-year-long English
prohibition (the 1746 ban was later repealed) never to reconstitute its former omnipresence.
Ultimately, it was the need of Scotland to resist subjugation and promote a dignified national identity
that transformed the tartan-and-kilt dress from “a badge of barbarism” into a symbol of heroic
heritage. Neither the tartan nor the kilt possessed the ancient pedigree they were purported to have,
but rather sprang from the Scottish drive to assert a distinct, noble identity. In the end, Highlanders
and Lowlanders forged their sense of belonging together, as Scotsmen, in opposition to English
tyranny and adopted the tartan and kilt 24 as the national costume of Scotland. Simply stated, in the
turbulent, modern age of nationalism, symbols of national identity have been abundantly, generously,
22 Tartan is a cloth woven in geometric patterns of color (Trevor-Roper, 18-19).
23 Trevor-Roper, 15.
24 The kilt was invented by the Englishman Thomas Rawlinson, an ironsmith, to serve the practical purpose of
holding the tartan of his Highland workmen in place while they operated his furnaces in the eighteenth century.
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