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“I was embroidering the towel with a sincere hand and praying to God for fate and godsend”: hybrid beliefs presented on Ukrainian rushnyks

  • Tetiana Brovarets

    Tetiana Brovarets (PhD in Folklore Studies) is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Folklore Studies in Maksym Rylsky Institute for Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of the Interactive Index of Folklore Formulas (Epigraphic Embroidery): http://volkovicher.com/ (the password: 2707). To date, there are 2868 items of epigraphic embroideries in the Index.

    Since June 2022, she has become a member of the volunteer building battalion Dobrobat (mainly clearing the rubble of houses that were destroyed as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Working in the ranks of Dobrobat, widely using the method of participant observation, it was possible to collect a significant layer of modern oral history in the de-occupied Ukrainian territories, as well as preserve and digitate some units of the intangible cultural heritage of Ukraine.

    https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-2572; https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57223885098; https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/2384905. E-mail: tetiana.volkovicher@gmail.com.

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Published/Copyright: March 7, 2025

Abstract

The paper is devoted to such a unique phenomenon of so-called written or fixed folklore, as Ukrainian epigraphic rushnyks containing a specific verbal formula “I was embroidering the towel with a sincere hand and praying to God for fate and godsend” which were popular at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Considering the communication of these towels according to the well-known multimodal scheme, the author states that such rushnyks with inscriptions could use all five modes (spatial, visual, linguistic, aural, and gestural one), having already become not quite rushnyks in its traditional sense. On the one hand, these embroidered towels functioned as drawings or open books (locating on the wall with two hanging ends). On the other hand, they also could be gifted for the road, thus symbolizing the path, as it was typical for more traditional and older samples. Concerning modern interpretation of these towels, hybrid beliefs and identities are frequently connected with them. In addition, the article claims that rushnyks’ inscriptions, functioning simultaneously in several roles (in particular, they could be both embroidered and sung), provoke us to develop more deeply the theory of speech acts in linguistic pragmatics.


Corresponding author: Tetiana Brovarets, Maksym Rylsky Institute for Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine, E-mail:

About the author

Tetiana Brovarets

Tetiana Brovarets (PhD in Folklore Studies) is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Folklore Studies in Maksym Rylsky Institute for Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of the Interactive Index of Folklore Formulas (Epigraphic Embroidery): http://volkovicher.com/ (the password: 2707). To date, there are 2868 items of epigraphic embroideries in the Index.

Since June 2022, she has become a member of the volunteer building battalion Dobrobat (mainly clearing the rubble of houses that were destroyed as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Working in the ranks of Dobrobat, widely using the method of participant observation, it was possible to collect a significant layer of modern oral history in the de-occupied Ukrainian territories, as well as preserve and digitate some units of the intangible cultural heritage of Ukraine.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-2572; https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57223885098; https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/2384905. E-mail: tetiana.volkovicher@gmail.com.

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Received: 2024-05-26
Accepted: 2025-02-22
Published Online: 2025-03-07
Published in Print: 2025-05-26

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 13.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lpp-2024-0017/html
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