Colorful decorations or important sacred signs? Revealing the secrets of ornaments on embroidered shirts

Vyshyvanka Day is celebrated annually around the world on the third Thursday of May. This international holiday is designed to popularize the traditions of creating and wearing ethnic Ukrainian clothing. Therefore, it is logical that vyshyvanka was chosen for today's review of the lot.

The Ukrainian people managed, despite the centuries, to carry the love for this type of clothing and preserve the tradition of decorating vyshyvanka with patterns with an ancient sacred meaning. All existing ornaments were conventionally divided into three types - floral, geometric and zoomorphic.

Decorating clothes with embroidered plants - roses, bunches of grapes, poppies, viburnum, chernobryvtsy - has always had a direct connection with flowers, trees or fruits. Kalina is the main tree of the Ukrainian people: embroidered berries symbolized the blood of immortal and invincible people. Poppies acted as "defenders" of all living things, which is why embroidered shirts were so often decorated with them. Also, these wild flowers served as a reminder of the dead. They symbolized sorrow, love and people's memory.

Grape bunches on the example of an embroidered shirt sold at Violiti, personified the joy associated with creating a family. The vineyard is a field of life, where a man acted as a sower, and a woman as a guardian, nurturing and nurturing the family. As a rule, such ornaments were found on vyshyvankas of the central regions of Ukraine, in particular, the Kyiv and Poltava regions. In the Chernihiv region, family towels were decorated with vines and bunches.

Under the geometric ornaments understood all kinds of lines, geometric shapes and crosses. Rhombuses symbolized fertility, spirals - the fluidity and cyclical nature of time, crosses - protected from dark forces, and squares - personified life balance, order and success. In the ornaments of Podolsk embroideries, there are geometric motifs known since the times of the Trypillia culture.

Zoomorphic or animal patterns often conveyed the individual vision of the craftswomen - bizarre weaves while maintaining the traditional requirements for composition. These could be both images of animals, birds, fish as a whole, as well as their individual elements - wolf teeth, an ox's eye, carp scales, ram's horns, and so on.

You can look at the patterns on vintage embroidered shirts for hours. Each of them carries its own meaning, which was invested by the craftswoman for a particular person. Violity website subsection "Shirts, blouses, vyshivanki" can be devoted to this occupation for years, because there are more than 700 similar products.