Folklore & Esoterica
Protecting the intangible
You cannot put a wedding song cycle in a display case. Safeguarding a living practice requires a different method from conserving an object, and the method…
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
Ornament on buildings
Vernacular building here carried decoration in three materials, and each was applied by a different trade with a different rhythm of work.
Folklore & Esoterica
The icon: technique, canon and the Ukrainian variant
An icon is made to a procedure that has barely changed in eight hundred years, and the Ukrainian schools took liberties with it that are worth…
Folklore & Esoterica
When the calendar moved
Ukraine moved Christmas from 7 January to 25 December. What happens to a set of customs when the date they attach to changes is a genuinely…
Folklore & Esoterica
Kyivan baroque and its symbolic world
For a century and a half, educated Kyiv thought in emblems: images paired with mottoes and verses, read as a system. It produced a visual language…
Folklore & Esoterica
The philosophy of the heart
A recognisable line of Ukrainian thought holds that the seat of a person is not the intellect, and it runs from an eighteenth-century wandering teacher through…
Folklore & Esoterica
The folk song archive
A very large body of song was collected, written down and later recorded, mostly in the last hundred and fifty years, and mostly just in time.
Folklore & Esoterica
Protecting a house
Building a house was accompanied by a set of practices concerning where it stood, what went under the first course and who crossed the threshold first.
Folklore & Esoterica
The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the transmission of learning
An institution founded in the seventeenth century, closed in the nineteenth, and refounded in the twentieth. What it transmitted across those gaps is the interesting part.
Folklore & Esoterica
Skovoroda: the wandering philosopher and the three worlds
An eighteenth-century philosopher who refused every position offered to him and spent thirty years walking between villages. He is read again now, and the reasons say…
Folklore & Esoterica
The bandura and its repertoire
The bandura is not simply a national instrument. It is a specific technology built for a specific job, and the job was carrying long narrative songs.
Folklore & Esoterica
Storks, cranes and the birds that carry meaning
In Ukrainian custom certain birds are not decoration. They are attached to specific ideas — arrival, departure, the household, the soul — and the attachments are…
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