  We address the elliptically shaped vortex solitons in defocusing nonlinear
media imprinted with a composite Mathieu lattice. Elliptic vortices feature
anisotropic patterns both in intensity and phase, and can only exist when their
energy flow exceed some certain threshold. Single-charged elliptic vortices are
found to arise via bifurcation from dipole modes, which, to the best of our
knowledge is the first example in the context of optics studies of symmetry
breaking bifurcations for the phase dislocations of different dimensionalities.
Higher-order elliptic vortices with topological charge could exhibit spatially
separated single-charged phase singularities, leading to their stabilization.
The salient features of reported elliptic vortices qualitatively hold for other
elliptic shaped confining potentials.
