TSIGAI BREED WOOL – OUR “TRADITIONAL” DOMA

You know how it is with tradition. We sometimes forget where, and above all when, the culture we call traditional actually came from. The more elaborate decoration of folk costumes is only about 150 years old. The fairy tales we read to our children often share little more than the plot with the truly old ones. Spinning wheels were certainly not used here three hundred years ago. The culture of the salaš (mountain shepherd huts) was brought from the Balkans by the Wallachian colonisation, together with our "traditional" sheep breeds. 

The Tsigai breed originally comes from Asia Minor. It migrated through the Balkans, Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania to the northern Carpathians and the Hungarian Plain, and in the 18th century the Wallachian colonisation brought it to northern Hungary and Bohemia. It spread mainly because of its finer wool, finer than anything that could be produced from the Racka and Valachian sheep until then.

• The name Tsigai itself is etymologically linked to the quality of its wool. In Romanian, țigaie as an adjective means short, wavy, fine, silky wool, and as a noun the sheep that produces it. The first written mention in Romanian dates from 1649, when a merchant from Câmpulung asked a merchant from Brașov for this type of wool. By contrast, turcana (the name for the Valachian and Racka breeds) means long, coarse wool and the sheep that produces it. Hungarian authors believe the root of the word probably comes from Old Turkic and refers to a sheep with fine wool and a curly fleece. 

In Slovakia, the breed became the second most important, with roughly 185,000–200,000 animals around the year 2000, mainly in central and eastern Slovakia. A 1997 report stated that Tsigai made up about 38% of Slovak sheep and that all Tsigai and Valachian sheep in Slovakia were dairy sheep.

• Numbers have been falling since then. The population dropped from 142,944 head in 2012 to 91,239 in 2020. That same year, 5,613 purebred ewes were registered, and the breed is classified as "monitored", one level below endangered. From 2014 to 2020 it was included in a support scheme under the Rural Development Programme, and once subsidies began to be paid, the number of registered animals stabilised.

With such widespread breeding, ordinary crossbreeding is of course unavoidable. In textile practice, this means Tsigai wool from different flocks can vary quite noticeably.

Adult ewes weigh 40–45 kg with a height at the withers of 60–65 cm; rams weigh 65–75 kg at 70–75 cm. The fleece is white, and the face and legs are dark. Lambs are often born black, dark grey, light ash-grey, dark brown or yellowish brown, and turn white with age.

• Unlike the Valachian, Tsigai does not have a double coat (undercoat and outer hair) but a uniform fleece. It belongs among the semi-fine wool breeds, and although wool from individual animals can differ for the reasons above, the fibre averages 29–36 µm in diameter and 7–14 cm in length. Clean fleece yield is usually 50–60%, as it contains roughly half as much lanolin as merino.

The fleece is almost always white, with a silvery sheen and a "foamy" inner structure. After washing it is greyish rather than snow-white, because of the black fibres scattered among the white ones; Tsigai sheep have heads and legs covered in black hair. Breeders' experience suggests that when flocks are milked (as they are in Slovakia), the fleece can be heavier and longer, but also coarser.

• Traditionally, Tsigai wool was used for fulled cloth, rugs, trousers, coats and sturdy slipper socks, while the shorter, finer lamb's wool was felted into hats. Its fluffy sheepskins were also prized.

In general, as the use of sheep's wool in Slovakia declined, so did the breeding of this breed. That is why we are so happy to offer you a taste of its return to the market, and we hope this drop in the ocean will grow into a living spring :-)

You can find our Tsigai yarn in its natural colour HERE and hand-dyed HERE.