The rushnyk: cloth as a ritual instrument

A rushnyk is a length of woven linen, usually between one and three metres, embroidered at both ends and left plain in the middle. Every Ukrainian household of any traditional bearing had several, and each had a designated use.

What it is for

The rushnyk marks transitions. That is the single organising principle and everything else follows from it.

At birth, a child was received onto one. At a wedding, the couple stand on one during the ceremony — the rushnyk pid nohy, and there is a whole body of belief about which of them steps on it first. Bread and salt are offered to guests on one. Icons in the house corner are draped with one. At a funeral, the coffin is lowered on them, and they are left at the grave marker.

The same object, differently embroidered, marks the beginning and the end of a life and the threshold of a household. The plain middle section is not undecorated by oversight; the embroidery is at the ends because the ends are where the object is held, and the middle is where the passage happens.

The motifs

The vocabulary overlaps with embroidery on clothing and with pysanka decoration, and the reasons for that overlap are discussed elsewhere in this section.

The tree of life is the most common central motif on a wedding rushnyk — a stylised plant with symmetrical branching, sometimes with birds, sometimes rooted in a vessel. It reads as a genealogy and a wish for continuation.

Paired birds for the couple. The eight-pointed star. Rhombs for the sown field. Grapevines, particularly in Podillia. And in the western regions, geometric compositions with almost no representational content at all.

Colour follows the regional patterns described in the entry on the vyshyvanka — red and black in the centre and east, red on white in Polissia, polychrome in the Carpathians.

The state use

The rushnyk appears at official ceremonies: the bread and salt welcome for visiting heads of state, presidential inaugurations, military honours, the reception of remains.

That is not an invented tradition in the pejorative sense. It is a domestic ritual object promoted to public use, which is exactly what happened to a great many national symbols across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is unusual here is how recent the promotion is and how completely it was accepted — the object carried enough shared meaning that nobody had to be taught what it signified.

Practical notes

For anyone receiving one: it is a considered gift and it is not a table runner. It carries a specific meaning depending on the motif, and a giver who knows the tradition will have chosen it accordingly.

For a collector or buyer: hand-woven linen with hand embroidery is distinguishable from machine work on the reverse, as with any embroidery. Older pieces — pre-1940 — come to market regularly and are frequently underpriced relative to their technical quality, because the market for them is thin outside Ukraine.

The best collections are in the folk art museums in Kyiv and Lviv and in the regional museums, several of which hold locally collected material of very high quality that has never been catalogued in a foreign language.

Related in this archive

• Trypillia: the culture beneath the black soil
• Pysanka: the egg as a written charm
• The kobzars and the sung epic: a tradition that was ended

The same cloth appearing at every threshold from birth to burial left me with a thought about how much work one object can do. I am not the person to explain its meaning. What I noticed is functional: it is portable, storable and transferable — precisely the three properties a tradition needs in order to pass between generations.