chapka

plural chapkas · alternative czapka · alternative schapska

1. A type of hat worn by 19th-century Polish cavalry (and later some Napoleonic troops), consisting of a high, four-pointed cap with regimental insignia on the front, and now associated with Polish independence and nationalism.

   1 more example

   He rejoined the Twenty-Second Lancers at Cape Town—all the squadrons together again for the first time in two years—and sailed for home. The new King himself reviewed them after their arrival, having granted them time enough to discard their khaki and put on again the glories of blue and gold, schapska and plume, lance pennons and embroidered saddle cloths.

   1936 February, C[ecil] S[cott] Forester [pseudonym; Cecil Louis Troughton Smith], chapter II, in The General, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Company, →OCLC, page 15

plural chapkas

1. alternativeAlternative form of shapka.

   She laughed at our surprise, pulled off her fur chapka cap, and shook loose long blonde hair.

   1985, Jerry Sage, Sage, Miles Standish Press, →ISBN, page 397

   5 more examples

   On July 18, 1921, shortly before midnight, the Tatar leader was returning to the Pera Palace Hotel, accompanied by his brother and four other people, all wearing the traditional Russian chapka, after a last drink at a kiosk in the nearby public garden.

   1990, Jacques Derogy, translated by A. M. Berrett, Resistance & Revenge: The Armenian Assassination of Turkish Leaders Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations, Routledge, published 2017, →ISBN

   Wool-and-faux-fur chapka by Rei Kawakubo, $775 at Barneys and Comme des Garçons Boutique (116 Wooster Street).

   1994 August 29, New York, volume 27, number 34, page 92

   So I took off my fur hat, a classic Russian chapka made of beaver that I had bought in Moscow, and gave it to him as my “Siberian gift.”

   1995, Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents, Seattle, Wash.; London: University of Washington Press, published 2001, →ISBN, page 328

   Clad in a cassinette nightshirt out at the elbows, a rabbit’s fur chapka tugged down past his ears, and a pair of weevil-gnawed moccasins worn through at the toes, he appears much the bedraggled half-wit, but lolled tailorwise atop his swaybacked paint in the middle of Main Street polishing off the last of his gingersnaps, the dust-talced, squint-eyed old veteran is listening fully mindful.

   1995, Bruce Olds, Raising Holy Hell, New York, N.Y.: Picador USA, →ISBN, page 167

   Jacky puts his cap back on his head. It’s a Russian chapka, a fur hat with its ears turned up into the top, giving him the look of a caricature of a president of the Court of Justice.

   1997, Yves Béon, translated by Yves Béon and Richard L. Fague, edited by Michael J. Neufeld, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age, Westview Press, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., →ISBN, page 11