We held the conversation that follows because of a social network post written by Liubov Yankiv-Vitkovska, an associate professor of the Department of Geodesy and Astronomy at the Lviv Polytechnic National University, head of the Lviv Astronomical Society; to the post, she attached photos of special embroidery designs: “these embroidered fabrics come from the village of Chahriv, but identical and similar elements were also present on the tablecloths, curtains, and towels made in the native village of my great-grandfathers... It is located near Rohatyn and Halych, almost in the middle of the Galician Kingdom. Regardless of how various colonizers would rename our cities and villages as they took their turn at ruling Ukraine, the old embroidered tablecloths preserved the ancient history of our country forever!” As Den/The Day’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna commented, “It offers beautiful and convincing evidence that the memory of the Kingdom of Rus’ lives in our people’s minds, and embroidered fabrics are kind of our manuscripts, evidence of popular nobility. Volodymyr the Great’s trident, Daniel of Galicia’s crown, and leonine nature...” Let us recall that Den’s latest book, The Crown, or Heritage of the Kingdom of Rus’, which we expect to become sensational news and spark a lively discussion, will be launched at the Publishers’ Forum in Lviv on September 15. You can order it now at https://day.kyiv.ua/uk/library/books/korona-abo-spadshchyna-korolivstva-....
We discussed with Yankiv-Vitkovska the nobility that “speaks” through embroidery as well as the connection between ethnographic and cosmic matters. Our first question, though, was as follows: how did a professional physicist and astronomer get fascinated with ancient embroidery, its signs and codes?
“Firstly, my deceased mother embroidered a lot, and embroidery went in parallel with book-reading in our family,” she told us. “At home, we had a tablecloth, a bedcover, a blanket, and a bed sheet made by my great-great-grandmas and inherited from mother and father’s families. I learned to do embroidery very quickly. It was like a hobby. It was especially fascinating because all this was forbidden when I was studying, I mean everything Ukrainian. Thus, my mom and her sister were educating us as they taught us embroidery and showed patterns and signs. Using elements of embroidery, my mom taught me patriotism, telling me what a trident, a lion or a crown was... This could not be done openly then, because it was still the communist regime era.
“Also, we knew even as children that a girl had to embroider a shirt and a wedding towel for herself, that is, we learned this at home. In addition, my husband served as a diplomat in Poland, and then as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Latvia. So, as the wife of a diplomat, I was supposed to represent my nation properly, which involved telling about its culture and history. Meeting with other wives of diplomats, I told them about Ukraine. And since Ukraine’s story necessarily includes embroidery, I studied everything about it in more detail and more thoroughly.
“My education job also obliges me to bring in elements of interest to students in my lecture courses on the basics of space monitoring. It is clear that this branch of science allows one to offer interesting information about space. Notions of space and objects present in the celestial sphere are ethnographic components of each nation’s identity. The Ukrainian embroidery patterns include cosmic signs, and if you look at figures painted on Trypillia ceramics, patterns on towels, you will find that many of them are related to schematic symbols of astronomical objects. Our embroidery elements are very close to characters used by the ancient planetary civilization. These signs were similar in cosmic matters, including images of planets, constellations, and in ethnographic circulation here in Ukraine.
“All these signs on our embroidered fabrics are closely interwoven with cosmic signs that denote the movement of the Sun, the movement of the planets, and the chronology. They are organically combined together, not artificially. Thus, the color of the Sun on the heraldic lion is that of our life-giving star which enables life to exist on Earth, while the sky background is light-blue... Everything is clear. As I know, the Greek word for ‘embroidery’ is ‘cosmos.’ It is just that we do not talk about it frequently enough yet. Space studies are also not given due attention. In my opinion, the fundamentals of astronomy should be a first-year course in every department of every college, since progress in the knowledge of the world without knowledge of the laws of space is impossible. So, do we need an educated nation, or do we need ignoramuses?
“By the way, I and my students conduct astronomy workshops for children and intend to write a book about what we see in the sky and how to watch the sky. This should be a truly Ukrainian book in its spirit.”
The embroidered fabrics that you showed have got us interested also as signs of our history, which had been suppressed and needs to be made relevant enough. What is your opinion about this?
“I fully agree with this statement. I was born in the city of Rohatyn. Always, despite working far away, we came to visit our parents for Christmas and Easter holidays. The parents have already died, but there are many friends who always invite us to celebrate the Day of the City [August 6. – Ed.]. Among other interesting events, it includes an exhibition of embroidery. These photos picture embroidered fabrics from that exhibition. However, a diligent search of our house would bring forth similar pictures, featuring lions, eagles, falcons – all crowned –and tridents. It is just as I was taught in my childhood with the verse ‘The lion and the trident are your signs.’ This was a tablecloth coming precisely from the village of Chahriv, and this is from the nearby village of Vyshniv, the town of Zhuravno, Bukachivtsi, Cherniv. This is a triangle from which my mother’s great-grandparents came, and Halych as well. When telling tales to me as a child, my mother said that this area near Halych, including Chahriv, Vyshniv, and Nastashyne, had been populated by high-born boyars, the freemen who made up the retinue of Daniel of Galicia. According to a legend, there was one Nastka Chahrova (Nastashyne and Chahriv are two villages next to each other), the mistress of prince Yaroslav Osmomysl or Daniel of Galicia, who captivated the prince not only with her beauty, but also with wisdom and nobility. Of course, we should mention Nastia Lisovska, known to the world as Roxelana, who was educated in the aristocratic Galician spirit; she spoke several languages, was able to understand people and tenets of a different faith, and because of this she stole the heart of the head of what was then a powerful state. A special spirit, a special kind of education took shape in our lands over millennia. I was brought up with such legends, then I told them to my dear daughters, but they were also ‘backed up’ with embroidered fabrics featuring all these tridents and lions... It was all in the hearts of our people. We communicated with these old embroiderers during the Day of the City in Rohatyn, and after just a couple of hours, my friend sent me a picture of her grandmother’s embroidered fabric from Radekhiv, where all these signs are also present... When I looked through my archives of embroidery, I found similar patterns from Kyiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhia... Our kingdom extends far beyond the borders of contemporary Ukraine.
“But speaking about our Rohatyn, it did not start developing only in the year 1390 when the city was granted self-government according to the Magdeburg Law. According to the Polish version, Rohatyn appeared through amalgamation with the village of Fylypovychi on the orders of their king. However, a settlement called Rohatyn had long existed there before, and it even had an archimandrite...
“By the way, there is a village called Perenivka near Rohatyn, which actually means Perunivka, the village of Perun the thunder god. It housed the Rohatyn Stonehenge, that is, even in pagan times, people in our lands were very smart, and they self-developed and explored the world at a rather scientific level.”
We are preparing for publication a new book, entitled The Crown, or Heritage of the Kingdom of Rus’. It seems to us that we need now to take from the past those aspects that can support us, like our aristocratic history. It offers examples of nobility that we have to cultivate by improving both ourselves and our elite. How do you think, do these signs on embroidered fabrics, such as crowned lions, speak to us modern people?
“They do, and Ivshyna very aptly wrote about the nobility of spirit on Facebook. This nobility still exists. It has simply been intentionally forgotten and sometimes destroyed, but it speaks to us because it has a special power, this is our cosmic code that nobody can destroy. This is not about some social division, where only landlords can be aristocrats. The nobility of spirit was characteristic of our region as a feature of those who worked honestly, transformed our land, explored the world, learned, helped others... People who lived here could read, they were able to embroider, knew that one should embroider with threads that would be preserved for centuries, and they could afford to buy these threads, as simple peasants ordered them from France or China... In ancient times, they used hemp and flax threads painted with natural dyes, later switching to woolen or silk ones. I know a little about this, because one of my paternal great-grandfathers was a weaver and owned a loom. These were ordinary peasants, but noble people, not some country bumpkins. Their nobility involved supporting children through grammar school and college... Incidentally, I did research in preparation for our scientific workshops themed ‘Church and Space Research,’ and found that Ukrainians were best represented among holders of European Master of Arts degrees in the 16th century. That is, Ukrainians sent their kids to study in European universities, and some Ukrainians from our region even became famous scientists in the times of old.
“On the other hand, our nobility harmed us, because we were easily cheated, then robbed, conquered due to our kindness and decency... Conquerors then forbade all things Ukrainian to erase our historical memory and turn us into slaves... The imperial ideology destroyed everything that reminded us of our roots... They even cut out tridents and blue-and-yellow ornaments from embroidered fabrics, persecuted people for it, arrested them for wearing embroidered garments or for singing Ukrainian songs...
“My father did time in Vorkuta ‘just so,’ just because he was studying at a grammar school in Berezhany... and the reason for his arrest was simple – they just wanted to destroy the Ukrainian elite... Then, after the war, the grammar school was transformed into a teaching college, and he was a first-year student there. It was an intentionally fabricated criminal case – the communist government killed its own functionary and blamed local students for it, then almost the whole first-year student body was arrested, my daddy was convicted by a troika tribunal, and he went to the camps of Vorkuta aged 19. He was subsequently rehabilitated, but his career was irreparably harmed... And I learned about it only when I graduated from school. Mom explained to me with hints that I should not try to enter either the history department or that of foreign languages where I was preparing to go, but only the physics or mathematics one, because our situation was such and such. And this was so not only under the Soviet Union, it started even earlier, as we were colonized for centuries. If not for this nobility of spirit, we would have been destroyed. They killed and arrested us, changed the names of cities and villages, burned books... Still, our culture and language have been preserved through embroidery. This testifies to the depth and strength of this embroidery code! The nobility of spirit of our soldiers is also worth remembering, as they fought for the independence of our land, stayed in hideouts to the bitter end and did not surrender, waged underground struggle, because they had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, I recall the village where my grandparents came from hiding a woman from the underground until the late 1980s. It all really happened. Is there another such army in the world? This is our great history, and we have a great future ahead of us, because the nobility of our ancestors is genetically recorded in every Ukrainian. This provides us a foothold in the world. Therefore, you do very right to raise these issues. We have subscribed to your newspaper for many years, our family is following your publications, and your book idea is a good one too.”
