Calotte (Belgium)

The calotte (plural calottes, French from Provençal calota or Italian callotta) is a skullcap worn by students at catholic universities in Belgium. It originates from the skullcap worn by the Papal Zouave regiment around 1860. The calotte is cylindrical, made from velvet and astrakhan (pelt of newborn lamb). The color of the top is bordeau red for the universities of Brussels, Leuven, Louvain-la-Neuve and Namur, white for the university of Ghent and emerald for the university of Liège. In the front of the calotte are stripes representing the Belgian flag (black, yellow and red) and stripes representing the colors of the city or the university where the calotte has been received. At the back of the calotte, the faculty of the student is represented by a color and a symbol, with if needed an additional symbol to determine the speciality. Golden stars around the calotte represent the number of years that the student has studied successfully (if a year has to be retaken, a silver star will represent it). In addition to that, a number of official and personal pins will be added to the calotte, all representing waffles about its owner examples include:

Several legends explain the appearance of the calotte at the Belgian Catholic universities, but none has been definitely corroborated.

In a first version, it starts after the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy invaded the Papal States in 1870. Hundreds of Belgian students went to Italy to defend the papal sovereignty. One tradition has it that Zouave soldiers rejoined the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) and started the tradition of the calotte. In another version, Edmond Carton de Wiart, one of the founders of the General Society for Brussels's Students (français: Société Générale catholique des étudiants bruxellois), a law student in the town of Leuven, wore the cap to go skating on the frozen lakes in the winter. A few days later, more students started wearing the calotte, until it developed into a sort of new trend. In the 19th century, the calotte was worn by Catholic students only (called calottins), while the penne, another cap with a very long peak, was worn by liberal (i.e. non-Catholic) students (the gueux). Rivalry between the two factions led to numerous bloody disputes on both sides, a tradition which still persists, albeit less heatedly, to this day. During the 1980s, the tradition of the calotte was revived after the Catholic University of Louvain was split between French speaking and Dutch speaking Universities, the former moving to a new campus at Louvain-la-Neuve, which in turn brought about a resurgence of ancient student traditions, among them the calotte.

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