Folklore & Esoterica
Wells, springs and the beliefs attached to water
Water is treated as a boundary, a remedy and a witness. Most of the practices around it turn out to have a public health logic underneath.
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
Charms and spoken formulas
The spoken charm is a genuine literary genre with a stable structure, a fixed set of images and a considerable body of collected text.
Folklore & Esoterica
Opishnia and the clay tradition
A town in the Poltava region has been making pots for a very long time, and it survived the twentieth century by becoming a museum of…
Folklore & Esoterica
Mourning customs and the memorial days
The relationship with the dead here is maintained on a schedule. Certain days belong to them, and on those days the cemetery is the busiest place…
Folklore & Esoterica
The oak, the willow and the viburnum
Three trees carry most of the symbolic weight in Ukrainian folk culture, and one of them ended up on shirts, in songs and on the coat…
Folklore & Esoterica
Hutsul craft: wood, brass and colour
The Carpathian highland tradition produces objects that are immediately recognisable and almost never plain. The reasons are geographic before they are aesthetic.
Folklore & Esoterica
The motanka doll and the faceless figure
A cloth doll made without a needle and deliberately without a face. Both of those rules are the whole point of it.
Folklore & Esoterica
The regional map of the embroidered shirt
A vyshyvanka is not one thing. The colour, the stitch and the placement change from region to region, and a specialist can read a shirt like…
Folklore & Esoterica
The didukh: a sheaf in the corner of the room
On Christmas Eve a sheaf of wheat is brought into the house and stood in the corner of honour. It is one of the oldest surviving…
Folklore & Esoterica
Folk medicine and the village healer
Village healing combined herbs that worked, charms that did not, and a psychological framework that mattered more than either. Separating the three is the interesting part.
Folklore & Esoterica
Petrykivka painting
A decorative painting tradition from one village, made with a cat-hair brush and a finger, and recognised internationally as intangible heritage.
Folklore & Esoterica
The rushnyk: the cloth that marks every threshold
A long embroidered cloth appears at every important moment of a life here: birth, marriage, welcome, burial. It is the same object used four different ways.
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