Peter's search for details on a "mystery fez"

I’m going to be posting this over at MetaFilter as well, but I thought I’d put this up here first.

The hat in this picture is an oddity. It belongs to Peter’s cousin Larry, who collects militaria and has some seriously interesting and unusual pieces; but neither he nor P. can work out what country issued it.

The basic hat is a tarboosh or fez that P. says will make most British viewers of a certain age think of the comedian Tommy Cooper. However, this one has a khaki military cover with a neck-flap, as worn by East African askari soldiers in WWI German service, shown here, and the eagle badge on it is what makes things confusing.

(The rest of the text refers to a Flickr photoset: click here to see it.)

The fez itself is the red object in the first shot. Its outside was “pretty standard-looking”, so P. didn’t photograph that; he tried instead to get pictures of the inside label. The knotted cord in the middle holds the tassel in place, the black thread at the edge attaches the lining to the (woven straw) body of the hat and its outer red felt cover. So far so ordinary; but the label is marked with what look like Islamic images of crescents and stars (“Ottoman Turkish?” wonders Peter) yet has four letters , “A O X E”, in either Greek or Cyrillic – both Christian alphabets. Also, the eagle on its army cover is very Orthodox-Christian looking, its crown surmounted by a cross and its claws holding a sword and a scepter.

(It isn’t the German Imperial Eagle as sketched in the uniform website: that was a metal badge rather than embroidered in place. In addition the German eagle’s “Hohenzollern” crown, hangs clear of its head on two distinctive streamers, and its claws are empty.)

The eagle on the fez-cover is much more in the Imperial Russian style, used both there and in various Balkan countries (Albania, Montenegro, Serbia some still use it) except for one rather obvious omission: they all have two heads, while this has only one…

So there’s our mystery object. We haven’t been able to find out what country used a Eastern-European style of Heraldic eagle with only one head on an army fez-cover, from an area that sold Moslem-type hats labeled with either the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Can anyone cast a little light on our mystery object? Any answers would be much appreciated, and better than what we have, which is, right now, none…

[tags]militaria, fez[/tags]