Ağrız

The ağrız is a mystery garment worn by very poor male agricultural laborers (all but one of the recorded wearers are escaped slaves) and made of the mystery fabric “ağrız,” which was probably a variety of felt.

As igriz (or rarely agriz), it appears in Ottoman-era 16th-century Hungarian customs records.¹ It’s usually written kebe-i igriz, Ottoman Turkish “felt (or felt garment) made of igriz.” Pach Zsigmond Pál, who studied the Hungarian textile trade extensively, believes the root of the word is Latin griseus, from pannus griseus, “gray cloth.” This was a medieval term for a cheap, undyed cloth made from the wool of differently colored sheep and used for coarse clothing, or as the lining of fine clothing.² The phrase was in use in 13th-century Hungary,³ leaving plenty of time for it to encounter the Ottoman Turks and be exported to Anatolia alongside Hungarian “gray cloth.”

If Pál’s theory is correct, then the fabric may have changed along with the name. The only examples of pannus griseus I could find were from Tyrol,⁴ hundreds of miles to the west and a poor point of comparison. However, this pannus griseus was 16th century, contemporary with the Istanbul-area records of slaves wearing ağrız, and it was clearly a woven fabric, while the Hungarian and Istanbul records describe igriz/agriz as felt. Possibly the 16th-century Hungarian product was a gray felt made from the wool of differently colored sheep.

1. Zsigmond Pál Pach, “Aba, kebe, igriz. Posztófajták a hódoltsági török vámnaplókban a 16. század derekán,” [Types of cloth in the customs accounts of the Hungarian Turkish territories at the middle of the sixteenth century] Törtenelmi Szemle 29, no. 1 (1997): 1-19. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
2. Nutz, Beatriz. “Medieval and Early Modern Silk Textiles in Tyrol. Extant Finds, Production and Trade.” European Textile Forum, 2017. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
3. Zsigmond Pál Pach, “Pannus coloratus és pannus griseus a XIII. századi Magyarországon” [Pannus coloratus and pannus griseus in thirteenth-century Hungary], in: Tanulmányok Karácsonyi Béla 70. születésnapjára, ed. Péter Kulcsár, Béla Mader, and István Monok (Szeged: JózsefAttila Tudományegyetem Központi Könyvtára, József Attila Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar Magyar Történeti Tanszéke, 1989), 71–80. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
4. Nutz 2017.