As part of our anniversary celebration we wish to honor all the generations that have gathered here to seek the pleasures of nature, healing waters, and camaraderie with friends and family. On April 3rd we celebrate the Cülevskis, and their wonderful Chule blankets.
Dimitrije and Vera Cülevski first came to Glen Ivy in 1968. Better known as Chule, for more than 40 years he has been Glen Ivy’s most enthusiastic and frequent guest. You may know him as the elderly European cherub of the mineral baths, an ivy leaf on his nose held in place by thick glasses. All who know him love his zest for life.
The Cülevskis are from the city of Bitola in southwestern Macedonia, just north of the Greek border. The land is naturally beautiful and the people are tenaciously cheerful in character. Having mastered the traditional skills taught to him by his father and grandfather, he had his own small shop in Bitola circa 1940. In addition to weaving, he also spun his own wool into yarn and dyed it in homemade vats. After the war he moved to a larger shop along the Dragor River in Bitola, and became locally known as the master weaver in a town of master weavers. Weaving was and is his passion. It’s in his blood. Chule is the 5th generation of weavers in his family, who altogether produced rugs and blankets for a century and a half.
Weaving is an ancient textile craft in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads, called the warp and the filling, or weft, are interlaced to form a fabric. The warp threads run lengthways on the piece of cloth, and the weft runs across from side to side. Cloth is woven on a loom, a device that holds the warp threads in place while filling threads are woven through them. The way the warp and filling threads interlace with each other is called the weave.
The fabrics of our lives are woven of the warp of our character and the weft of our choices. Every day—indeed, every moment— our behaviors, how we express ourselves, pass like weaver’s shuttles left and right, revealing patterns in our fabrics. Like all of us, Chule is more than a weaver of blankets. Across generations he and Vera weave an old world and a new in the warp and weft of their lives. Their love and their blankets touch many people. The colors are vivid, the patterns rich, the results lasting. Chule’s blankets are both facts and symbols of a life’s work.
Through all those years the Spa was growing too, and Chule often remarked on the entrepreneurial parallel: “Give a good product at a fair price, and you’re happy, I’m happy, everybody happy.” His vision for his business was “to warm the world with blankets.” He saw Glen Ivy’s as “to warm the world with water.”
With each blanket comes a measure of history along with the touch of two special spirits, woven together through time.
