Throughout history, the clothing, the sartorial picture of Thrace, which is strikingly diverse, evolved out of the demographic shifts and changes provoked by the historical events in the region, which were in turn determined by its distinctive geophysical features.
A combination of ancient Greek and Byzantine elements, with Oriental and western influences, formed the various styles of dress which we know of in Thrace from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards. The women in the villages of Evros prefecture wore some of these until 1965.
From the end of the eighteenth cenntury, the development of trade, economic prosperity, and new social customs in the urban centres of Thrace led to an early urbanisation of clothing. The European apparel of the upper class influenced the garb of the lower social groups around them. In the rural communities, which lived in the isolation imposed by the closed agricultural economy, the women always made the same costumes.
The various ethnic groups which co-existed in Evros prefecture, and in Thrace as a whole, from the start of the Ottoman Empire ― Greeks, Pomaks, Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Roma ― contributed to the sartorial diversity of the region. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 fixed the boundaries of Greek Thrace and gave rise to the most important movement of populations for the Greek people. When the refugees from the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and north-eastern Thrace settled all over northern Greece, including Evros prefecture, they enriched the sartorial picture with their own costumes, and changed the sartorial map of Evros prefecture beyond recognition.
