[Edouard de Villiers]

Hi everyone.

I'm having two 15th century style turban helms made for me by Royal Oak armoury, so I was just wondering how you would go about wearing one with a turban if the helmet comes with a chain maille drape? Would you wear a turban under the helm for padding and then wrap another one around the outside?

How do you go about wrapping it? I've only seen guides on how to wrap it the Sikh way and my Muslim friends here don't wear turbans, so I can't ask them either.

Also, where would I find the appropriate type of cloth to use for a turban? Shemaghs (?) are way too small, even in the case of the largest ones and I don't think they'd be appropriate anyway.

Thanks in advance.

[Jeffrey Faulk]

Have you talked with Jeffrey Robinson about what he knows of historical fashions of wearing these helmets? I suspect that they would come with enough padding inside that you don't actually wear a turban underneath them. If anything was worn, it might be a skull-cap, which is fairly common in the Islamic world.

And no, a shemagh/kaffeyeh is not anywhere near sufficiently long and is not really appropriate for a helmet anyway. You would want a length of fabric several feet long that you can fold and wrap around your helmet if you want to go that route; I feel they look just fine without.

Wearing a turban by itself is basically a matter of holding one end against your head, wrapping the rest around in various manners, and tucking the other end into the folds to secure it; some styles use a pin or brooch. I can do a reasonable reproduction of a traditional West African Islamic turban, but am definitely not familiar with Turkish, Persian or Indian.

[Edouard de Villiers]

[Jasper B.]

If you want, I can give you the dimensions of the West African dessert scarves. Up in the touristy areas they are sold in a variety of sizes, colours and materials; once you go in to the dessert, there seems to be only one size, with regional/ethnic differences in dye and they are all made from cotton (which would, of course, not have been available in the old times). For a dessert scarf, silk would do you no good: you need a fabric which soaks up your sweat so that it can slowly evaporate, thereby creating a 'micro climate' which cools your head and keeps your skin from drying out.
I can try to explain how you wrap the thing around your head as well, but I don't think it would be all that useful for a 15th century style turban helmet.

J.B.

[Timo Nieminen]

[Leo Rousseau]

The term "Turban helmet" come from the look of the helmet where the fluting lines represents the folds of a turban, that doesn't mean you have to wear one neither over the helm nor under it. I can't remember of any period depiction of such a thing. So If the helm doesn't come with a padding, you will have to wear some padding cap.

CF : link to Boris Bedrosov's Yushman Project for reference.

[Mart Shearer]

From what little I've seen, the turban helmets lack any kind of rivets for a suspension system, or holes to sew a lining into them. A few manuscripts show the helms removed, but it's usually a shaved head beneath. Perhaps the ubiquitous red fez which sometimes seems to have served as the base for wrapping turbans around?

http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/Walters...43_sap.jpg

Alternate to the fez, the kalpak would seem a useful option:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpak

[Edouard de Villiers]

Thank you all for the input.