Chechelnyk – Why do Ukrainians, in the 21st century and in an independent Ukraine, have to prove that they actually exist? The offensive governmental appointments have left a bitter aftertaste. It remind you of the words said by Cheburashka [a popular Soviet-time children’s cartoon character. – Ed.]: “We have been building, and building, and eventually, we have built!” So, what is it that we have finally built? How can the sovereign Ukrainian state appoint a Minister of Education who will not even acknowledge the existence of the Ukrainian nation?
For five years we had a patriotic president. However, his endless fights with the windmills, and his admiration for his own brand of patriotism reflected his narcissism, rather than the desire to work for Ukraine’s good. Instead of being a struggle against political opponents, it was a popularity contest between the president and his political supporters. Sadly, this struggle helped discredit the national idea.
Yet in this country there are millions of citizens who, through their way of life and everyday work, give shelter to Ukrainian traditions and help them rise from the ashes of internationalist communism.
But can tolerant progress win a victory over militant ignorance? This question is hard to answer, but one can say with certainty that this struggle has been going on for centuries.
Popular traditions, folk art, applied arts, and linguistic culture are the best proof of our identity and hence, our independence. And it is such carriers of identity that are Ukraine’s true heroes.
During the photo exhibit held by The Day in Chechelnyk, its editor in chief Larysa Ivshyna was presented with an embroidered linen towel. It was the present she liked the best. That is why, Ivshyna promptly inquired about the master who had created such a wonder.
It turned out that the talented embroideress lived in the faraway village of Brytavka, lost somewhere in the forest. Thus, I was instructed by the editor in chief to find the artist and tell the readers about her.
My trip was delayed several times, as the village lies 30 kilometers from the raion center, in the middle of the woods. The road to Brytavka can only be found on a map. It is hard to imagine how people traveled to the village during this year’s snowy winter. I decided not to risk it and wait for milder weather.
I have to admit that even the bright spring sun failed to dry up all the mud on my way to Brytavka. At times I doubted whether my car could cope with such a challenge. However, once I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome, and, instead of one story, I was entitled to several fantastic recitals and a po-werful charge of energy from these great, talented people and their little fatherland.
I was met by the village head, Lilia Korchevska. In her office, I spotted a few files with materials on the Holodomor, the terror famine. The village still has several witnesses of those terrible events, so the preservation of historical memory is the community’s special task. In Brytavka, they know the exact number of their fellow villagers who starved to death. Due to the notes made by the village medical assistant Nazar Osadchuk, who registered each death and made an entry of it in his diary, the present-day generation remembers each of the 636 victims of Holodomor.
During World War II, the Brytavka forest was the center of the partisan movement of southern Podillia. The guerrillas’ struggle against the Nazi invaders was depicted by the local teacher Kateryna Drachynska in her book The Tales of the Brytavka Forest. She used her own money to have memorial plaques made, to immortalize the names of those who died from famine, repressions, and perished in the war. These plaques were placed next to the village church.
Later, I met Vira Podilska and Olena Riaba. Podilska used to work as a language teacher at the local school. She writes poetry – her first collection of poems is currently being prepared for print. Riaba is a master embroideress, whose works decorate people’s homes all over the world.
Being an artistic personality, Podilska has a sincere admiration for the embroideress’ skill, which is why she told us the following story.
The multicolored, mysterious world of flowers attracted her since early childhood. She would wonder: how can a plain flower bud, which looked like a pointed stick just The Day before, blossomed into a purple, pink, or blue trumpet of morning glory at dawn? The modest, unpretentious flowers, decorating the farmers’ yards since times immemorial – marigolds, mallows, calendulas, dahlias, and asters – seemed to the girl to be a true miracle. As years went by, this fascination with the wonderful world of nature morphed into a passion for embroidery.
This ordinary woman from the picturesque village of Brytavka, wise and sensible, has for more than half a century been faithful to her love of hand-made beauty. Her cross-stiched linen towels, pillowcases, pictures, icons, and rugs have long ago traveled all over the world. “My embroidered linen towels are now in Moscow, Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Chechelnyk, and in our village, as well as in the neighboring ones,” said Riaba proudly.
She handed over a few embroidered towels and icons to the Church of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin. Her works are always displayed at the village, raion, and oblast exhibits of traditional folk art, inevitably inspiring genuine admiration. Last year, she presented The Day’s editor in chief with a unique embroidery depicting a bowl of roses, a symbolic representation of the tree of life.
Riaba was born in the hard year of 1938. Her father did not come back from the war. Her mother, with three little children on hands, was recruited to the Donbas, and from there the family moved to the Kuban region in the North Caucasus. There, in the steppes near the Don, she worked as a shepherd and mail carrier. In the terrible winter of 1950, while delivering mail during a blizzard, she lost her way in the snow-covered steppe and froze to death. Olena, 12, and her two younger brothers were now orphaned. The children had to part, as they went to live with different relatives.
Little Olena was brought to Brytavka, to her great-grandmother Oksana’s place. “Those were hard, post-war years,” Riaba recollected, “but in the evenings, when the entire family gathered at home by the light of the oil lamp, or even a candle, we would embroider, spin, sew, husk the corn, hull the beans – and sing.”
Her Aunt Horpyna introduced the girl to the art of embroidery, and ever since she would not part with needle and thread. “What kind of embroidering was it,” she said bitterly, “when we never had enough thread or cloth.”
After school, Riaba wanted to study to become a car attendant: the girl was lured by faraway, unknown routes. Yet her grandma was too old and feeble, her aunt was very sick, and she had to go and work with the beet growing team on the local kolkhoz. Thus, the mattock became her “profession,” and craving for the unknown passed into her talent as an embroideress.
At 19, she got married and moved with her husband Yukhym into the house that her aunt left her. With two little daughters and plenty of work on her hands, the young woman still managed to find the time for her hobby. She was thirsty for beauty and created it mostly when the nature was covered in a gray shroud of sadness in late fall, or when it hid the rich autumnal colors under the white cerement of oblivion.
Spring, summer, or early fall was no time for embroidering: it was only work, work, and work, both at home and on the kolkhoz. From dawn till dusk she toiled, with barely any time for sleep. She would get up at daybreak to cook and do something about the house, because after an endless day out in the kolkhoz fields she had to mind her own little plot of land, and take care of her children and husband.
Yet, despite the neverending work, she would find an hour or two for embroidering. That was a blissful time of immense joy for her soul. Fantastic flowers came to life in her embroidered towels, and played with such wild, bright colors that she would forget her chores and problems. She felt as if she were a creator of her own dream fate, if not of a new reality. These are perhaps the moments when a human being speaks with Eternity.
She was soon to drink another bitter cup of life, an unsoothable pain, as her elder daughter Nina died at a very young age, leaving the tiny Natasha in her care. Riaba became a virtual mom for her little granddaughter – just like her great-grandmother Oksana was a mother for her.
Natasha grew to become a good, worthy person. Now she has a family of her own, and her teen daughter Yasia goes to school. “I only wish my girls had more patience for embroidering,” Riaba sighed. “The young have quite different interests.” However, she still hopes that with time, the hearts of her dearest will open to this beauty, and their grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s strong genes will win over.
And yet Riaba is not alone in her passion for embroidery. Apart from her, there are a couple score other skilled embroideresses in the village. So there is some hope that the art of embroidery will last, unlike some other traditional arts and crafts, which are either extinct or on the brink of oblivion already.
Riaba’s room looks like a museum of embroidery. On the walls there hang several embroidered icons, notably The Intercession of the Holy Virgin and The Nativity of Jesus Christ, and a portrait of Taras Shevchenko. All the icons and photographs are decorated with embroidered towels of unspeakable beauty.
The bed is decorated with a heap of pillows in embroidered pillowcases, which nearly reach the ceiling. They are strewn with roses, poppies, and dahlias; funny little kittens are hiding among the flowers. Meanwhile, the hostess produces stacks of embroidered towels, pillowcases, sheets, rugs, and pictures. When I asked the artist which flowers were her favorite, she answered, “Just any flowers. They are all beautiful, and I love them all.”
Yet roses and poppies prevail in her embroidery. A bunch of field flowers brought to mind the scent of a hot July noon; an apple branch in blossom breathed fresh spring air, and apple twigs with fruit (embroidered, of course!) suggested childhood memories: exactly such twigs with apples were kept at my home, under the icons, in the “clean room,” till Christmas.
Each towel or table cloth is decorated with exquisite hand-made lace, and this magician of a woman never repeated a pattern twice.
