Petro Honchar and his wife Nina Matviienko, People’s Artist of Ukraine, have conceived something that has never been done before in Ukraine. They organized a folk art festival for children, called Oreli, whose scale and content rivals Oleh Skrypka’s annual Dream Country festival.
The idea to devote an entire festival to children is particularly welcome these days, when parents have less and less time to spend on their offspring. The Ethno Sound Production Company, famous for organizing the Trypillian Circle folk festival in Rzhyshchiv (Kyiv oblast) this past summer, got together with Ukrainian folk groups, folk artisans, methodologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and psychologists to help Honchar and Matviienko organize their festival.
“We are the people. Nobody is going to come to us, nobody’s going to do anything, or take care of our kids’ future. It is we who must think about tomorrow and make sure our children won’t forget about us in the rush of playing video games and watching TV,” said Matviienko.
Last weekend the inner courtyard of the national folk art center, the Ivan Honchar Museum, welcomed children from all over Ukraine. They listened to performances of authentic Ukrainian songs, played ancient Ukrainian games, and attended workshops. Their biggest joy was the fact that they were the main focus of the festival.
The word “oreli” refers to the cradle in which a baby was placed immediately after its birth. As the festival organizers explained, it is a “symbol of spirituality, high spirits, and the unforgettable and sublime feelings of childhood.” The festival started with the opening of the exhibit “The Child in the Traditions and Everyday Life of the Ukrainian People.”
This unique exhibition features children’s belongings that parents normally throw out after long use. Generally, there were very few items of children’s clothing, toys, and cradles from all over Ukraine, and there were only single exemplars of certain display items. The exhibit’s curator, Yaroslava Levchuk, spent one year collecting the exhibits from eight museums, including the Poltava Regional Museum, the Kyiv Museum of Folk Decorative Art, the Lviv Regional Museum, the Kyiv History Museum, and the Museum of Folk Architecture and Everyday Life of Ukraine.
“We collected things that you cannot see anywhere else. For example, there are a lot of embroidered shirts for grown-ups both in Kyiv and Poltava, but there are very few children’s ones. The Poltava shirt with white-on-white embroidery, which is a long piece of clothing that covers the body from head to toe, we were able to find only in the Poltava Regional Museum. No other museum has these kinds of shirts,” Levchuk told us.
“It is so touching to see that many of the children’s shirts were made from the sleeves of their mothers’ blouses. As a result, the embroidered sleeve became the front part of the child’s shirt. The embroidery protected one of the most important parts of the body – the chest. At the same time, we should pay tribute to our great grandmothers’ ability to economize.”
An entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to newborns. There are several cradles: woven, wooden, carved, and turned, and all of them show how much newborn children were valued. There are also wooden playpens and walkers. A walker from a Polissian village was contributed by Rostyslav Omeliashko, a historian and ethnographer, who has taken part in ethnographic expeditions to the Chornobyl Zone for many years.
The walker consists of a pole with a wooden square-shaped frame, which is fixed to the ceiling. A baby that can stand up is placed into the frame. The child pushes it, the walker turns around, and the baby follows it, walking in circles. Ethnographers think that the mechanics of this device helped children develop faster.
“The items from the Chornobyl Zone were selected together with the poet Lina Kostenko. We have a total of 26,000 exhibits, 33 of which are children’s things. I want to emphasize that each of them is “clean,” not radioactive. Not long ago I was in Prypiat, when suddenly I realized that it differs from other towns by the absence of children: only adults walk are seen on the streets. What we are displaying here revives that lost children’s world,” said Omeliashko.
The exhibition also features children’s musical instruments, including a 19th-century violin made of reeds and whistles. There are also toy weapons, like sabers and slingshots. Since children were made to work from childhood, their parents made toy tools for them: small rakes, riveting mandrels, and spinning wheels, to teach girls how to spin. The ceramic toy animal figurines, on loan from the Kyiv History Museum, range from the Kyivan Rus’ era to the present.
And what kind of presents did children in the past receive? They got things that would not poison a child if placed in its mouth, for example, toys made out of bread or cheese.
“The organizers of the exhibition did such a great job that we weren’t able to display all the items. About two-thirds of them remain in storage,” noted Petro Honchar, one of the chief organizers of the children’s festival.
(In an unexpected side-note, among the photographs that are permanently displayed at the Ivan Honchar Museum is a unique one from the mid-1920s, discovered by Ivan Honchar himself. The photo shows a woman with a small child dressed in Ukrainian folk costumes. A woman from the Kyiv region recognized herself on that photo when it was shown on TV.)
Childhood is capricious, short-lasting, demanding, and eternal. Children need love and attention, and without them no one can predict what the future will bring. Ukraine’s most famous folk singer, Nina Matviienko, hopes the Ministry of Education and Science, and the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports Affairs will begin supporting their initiative because “this is such a long-standing, painful problem that more delays are unthinkable.”
