The Blue Fairies of Filiz
Our guest in the last episode of "Suzanne" is designer Filiz Telaku. We're sharing a series of her favorite illustrations, as we imagine what creatures they represent and what feelings they evoke.
“Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!”1
Dreamy and playful, intriguing and mysterious, mystical and natural: when visiting Filiz Telaku’s (Kosovan designer better known as Skyte) series of “blueprints”, it’s not too difficult to recall Peter Pan and his faeries.
Skyte’s illustrations created through cyanotyping (a special method of non-silver photographic printing process) do look like fairies, secretive creatures of mythology, impossible to catch or photograph, because they hide so well.
Fearies were omni-present in Barrie’s “Peter Pan”, but we can trace the fascination with faeries bit further back even, in the art created during the short but influential period of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in UK, established by artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Return to nature was their call. So in "Peter Pan," we can see echoes of that Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on nature, fantasy, and the mystical.
The idea of Peter Pan as a boy who never grows up, living in a magical realm called Neverland, surrounded by faeries, can be seen as embodying the Romantic notion of eternal youth and the escape from the constraints of reality. Skyte’s blue fairies of Prishtina certainly embrace these ideals.
But we don’t have to go so far to imagine the qualities of these beings of folklore.
Fairies are omnipresent in Albanian mythology too, for at least few thousand years. We know them as Zana in Kosovo and north Albania. They dwell in forests, springs and rivers where they sing and the bath in the waters.
Our zanas though are not cute little Tinkerbells from Peter Pan – no, they are somewhat more temperamental, lethal even for those inadvertently enroaching their faerie grounds. In old days, each of the northern Albanian tribes had their own zana.
Franciscan friar and writer Gjergj Fishta in his “Lahuta e Malcis” (Highland Lute) says Zanas are descendats of muses of old times, who escaped Mount Helicon and settled in Albania. The very term Zana is thought to originate from the Latin Diana, the Roman goddess of hunt and moon, a nymph of the forest.
In the heroic epic of old Albanian mythological figures of Muji and Halil, there are many verses with zanas. And they are not kindly creatures at all:
“When you get up to the high mountain pastures,
There you will find three broad shady meadows,
You must take care on them not to make merry,
You must take care not to strike up a carol,
You must take care not to lie down upon them,
For this is the home of the three fearsome zanas
Who surely have come to repose in the shade there,
To lie at their leisure amongst the cool breezes.
Well and alive they will let no one pass them!”2
Skyte’s creatures do seem more modern. In their veiled playfulness they evoke same visual curiosity as the photograms of the Albanian-British photographer Lala Meredith Vula, in the series titled “Toys”. These faeries of Filiz seem more at home in the modern dwellings - not hiding in the forests of yesteryear, but in the urban jungle of contemporary cities. Creatures more related to Neil Gaiman’s world. Gaiman’s character Sandman poses the right question for all naysayers who don’t believe in faeries:
“Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, she wasn't a fairy. She was a librarian. All right?”3
So, are Skyte’s urban fairies the harmless free spirits roaming in nature or the hurtful huntresses in urban hinterland, lusty for men’s hearts?
Or maybe bit of both?
"Peter Pan", by J.M. Barrie
“The Marriage of Gjeto Basho Mujo” in “Songs of Frontier Warriors”, translated by Robert Elsie
The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections, by Neil Gaiman