Folklore & Esoterica
Ivan Kupala: fire, water and the shortest darkness
On the night of 6 to 7 July — or 23 to 24 June, depending on which calendar you keep — people jump over fires, float…
Folklore & Esoterica
The ritual year, the symbols embroidered into cloth and painted onto eggs, the Carpathian practitioners and the philosophers — the older layer beneath modern Ukraine.
Folklore & Esoterica
The vyshyvanka: embroidery as a written language
Regional patterns are specific enough that a practised eye can place a shirt within about fifty kilometres. The motifs were protective before they were decorative, and…
Folklore & Esoterica
Pysanka: the egg as a written charm
The name comes from the verb to write, not to paint. Wax is applied with a stylus, the egg is dyed, and the process repeats from…
Folklore & Esoterica
The rushnyk: cloth as a ritual instrument
A narrow embroidered length of linen appears at every threshold of a Ukrainian life — birth, marriage, burial — and at state ceremonies. It is not…
Folklore & Esoterica
Trypillia: the culture beneath the black soil
Six thousand years ago the land between the Dnipro and the Dnister held some of the largest settlements on earth. They left almost no weapons, a…
Folklore & Esoterica
The kobzars and the sung epic: a tradition that was ended
Blind itinerant singers carried a body of narrative verse across Ukraine for three centuries, organised into guilds with their own training, rules and secret language. The…
Folklore & Esoterica
Molfars: the Carpathian practitioners and what they were for
In the Hutsul villages of the eastern Carpathians there was a specialist who read weather, treated illness and settled disputes nobody wanted in front of a…
Folklore & Esoterica
Skovoroda: the wandering philosopher and the three worlds
He refused a bishopric, a professorship and a court appointment, and spent thirty years walking between villages with a flute and a manuscript bag. His epitaph…
Folklore & Esoterica
The folk calendar: a working year organised by ritual
Before there were almanacs there were saints' days, and each one carried an instruction: sow now, stop grazing, cut the hay, do not begin anything. The…
Folklore & Esoterica
Koliada: the winter cycle, the twelve dishes and a calendar that moved
A sheaf of wheat carried into the house, twelve meatless dishes, carollers with a star, and a wheat-and-poppy dish eaten before anything else. In 2023 the…
Folklore & Esoterica
Why the old layer matters now
Traditional culture has become one of the ways people here state who they are. Treating that culturally rather than politically is both possible and more accurate.
Folklore & Esoterica
The craft revival and its market
Traditional craft has a market again, which keeps it alive and simultaneously pulls it towards whatever sells. Both effects are real.
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