Tezos

The Hopeless Love Flower

Creator

tz1e49f9DTcSsiNg3hxKnBUTod6FpJwFhzh3

Description

Somebody decided at some point that yellow tulips meant hopeless love. Not the red ones, not the white ones. Yellow specifically. The Victorians had a whole system for this, and yellow meant you already knew the answer was no. But here's the thing. In the Ottoman Empire, the tulip was basically holy. The word "lale" in Turkish uses the same letters as Allah when written in Arabic script. So for a few hundred years, the meaning was completely sacred. Then the flower gets to Holland, and within a generation, people are trading single bulbs for the price of a house. Tulip mania, 1630s. The whole economy almost crashed over it. So you've got one flower that went from God to bankruptcy in about a century. And then the painters got involved. After the crash, tulips started showing up in vanitas still lifes right next to skulls and dead candles. The reading became something like foolishness, vanity, people losing their minds over a pretty thing. I find it kind of funny, actually. The same bloom that meant paradise in Istanbul meant financial ruin in Amsterdam. Nobody sat down and decided this; it just happened. The meaning kept sliding around depending on who was looking and what had just gone wrong in their economy or their love life. Maybe that's the most honest thing about flowers in general. People keep loading them with meaning, and the meaning never holds. It gets replaced by the next story, the next crisis, the next heartbreak. A yellow tulip in 1550 and a yellow tulip now are the same thing botanically, and absolutely nothing alike symbolically. I guess that says more about people than about tulips.

Traits

Tag

aiart10k

Tag

springvortex