A fabric embroidered with fate

A very interesting text written by Ewa Zwierzyńska and published on the Czasopis portal. The text has been published a few years ago and since deleted, so good job I downloaded and translated it. It is a bit long, but describes an ancient Slavic tradition of embroidering towels with spells, a tradition which is dying as we speak. I hope you will find is as fascinating, as I did!

The embroidery on the ceremonial towels inspired not only the article below but also one of out Tales of Old Gods - The Marks of Gods

Hand-embroidered ritual towel from Podneprovie region

Embroidered towel carries many symbolic meanings. For centuries it has been a companion of human life, from sunrise to sunset, on regular and on holy days, from birth to death. It used to be present in every household, today it’s seen rarely – on icons in Orthodox churches or in small villages in Eastern Poland. Do we realise that this white piece of fabric is a magical object, full of mysterious and deep meaning?

How important an embroidered towel was for our ancestors we can learn form an old Slavic legend about the winter hibernation of the land, when all snakes and reptiles travel to Vyraj (in Slavic mythology a magical place where souls go after death – translator’s note). If a courageous one wishes to see this mysterious event, he or she can witness it in the deep forest, in the middle of the night. At the front of the procession of snakes and reptiles walks the Snake King, wearing a crown made of gold – the symbol of power and wisdom. Our ancestors taught the courageous ones that in order to not to miss this moment, they should take an embroidered hand towel, spread it on the ground, kneel on it and bow. Seeing the bow, the Snake King will take his crown off and give it to the courageous one, together with the secret knowledge about the Universe, the wisdom, the gift of soothsaying and speaking the language of Nature. This is the secret wisdom – the code of life and of the Universe, the spells, the supplications and dreams our grandmothers embroidered on the white linen.

Not all the hand towels carried a deep meaning. Those plain, regular ones were simple, with little ornamentation. They were used in day to day activities like washing hands or dishes, covering the bread and wrapping the food taken out to those, who were working the fields. Most commonly those towels were smooth or woven only with a few stripes. The celebratory towels looked completely different. Created for family or community feasts and other celebrations, given as an offering or used in rituals. Towels like that were woven in the Lent, when the souls washed off the earthy dirt to gain sanctity and find the union with God. The embroidered pattern was not only a decoration, but a set of symbols carrying a deep meaning. The illiterate village women used those symbols to tell a story. The towels became a sort of a book, written in the alphabet of pictures. One of the most skilled embroideress said: “I’m illiterate, I can’t read or write. The patterns on my towels are everything I know, they’re my whole education. You can learn from them, like from a good book or a movie, about people and life, about animals, I tell stories about the Sun and the stars, about health and disease, about the fate of a woman, about everything in life”. The embroideresses put pieces of their souls in their towels, they told stories about their dreams, they whispered prayers or spells, woven in with the treads, which made the towel a magical item, capable of influencing and changing the reality. The very special role of the towels is indicated by the way they were stored. Regular towels were folded into a rectangle, but the special ones were rolled and stored like scrolls or manuscripts.

A towel like a Milky Way

The symbolism of the hand towel began with the spinning of the thread. In many mythologies the thread is a symbol of our lives. The association between a thread and human life is common to many cultures. The very usage of the word “fabric” in phrases like “the fabric of reality” or “the fabric of the Universe” stipulates the basic thread making up the whole reality/Universe. The act of weaving brings up the cosmological symbols. The rules of this craft are similar to the rules upon which the Universe was created.

In the mythologies of the world all the deities of fate are female, who spin and weave. In the ancient Egypt it was Isis – the Goddess od art and craft, the ancient Greek believed that the art of weaving was given to them by Athena – the Goddess of wisdom and the Romans called this Goddess Minerva. In Rus’ the patroness of the weavers was Paraskiewa-Piatnica. Even the old Christian iconography portrays the Virgin Mary with flax and a drop spindle. The female spinner, creating a thread from a chaos of flax became almost a demiurge, a creator of the fate of the mankind. The act of spinning was seen as similar to creating the Universe, and the thread, wrought around the spindle brought to mind the very fabric of the reality. The shape of the hand towel – a long rectangle of linen – represented the path. Typically, the fabric was the same length as the height of the person for whom it was created, sometimes however it was double or even triple the person’s height. Like our lives the towel had the beginning and the end and between them there was the path everyone has to follow in their lives. Slavs believed that our life is a travel on the road of our fate, like on the Milky Way. What represents the Milky Way better than a long towel made out of white fabric? The Milky Way is not only our life on Earth, it also takes us to Heaven, past the death. It is a heavenly bridge, travelled by both the living and the departed. The souls of the dead can follow it to move from the Afterlife to the Earth. This is why during the celebration of Dziady (Slavic feast commemorating the dead ancestors – translator’s note) the windows were opened, and white towels were hanged through them – to make it easier for the spirits to find their way back home and to participate in the ceremonial feasts.

From cradle to grave

The towels symbolise also the thresholds, which we have to cross to enter the next chapter of out lives. The towel was present at every single crossover ritual. The thresholds were dangerous points leading to the unknown. It wasn’t only the physical thresholds, separating the space, but also those that separated the time. Any period of time that was separating one stage of life from the next was considered to be particularly difficult and sensitive to any factors which could disturb it. It was therefore necessary to perform a ritual, a set of spells and prayers to protect it and ensure a smooth transition to the next stage/period. The embroidered towel functioned as the ritual, the spell and the prayer.

The first contact with the towel took place during birth. The childbearing mother used it to bring relief from the pain and discomfort of the childbirth. The towel was hanged over a ceiling beam for the mother to hold it for support. The new-born as wrapped in a new, clean towel and carried to bath. After the ablution, which symbolically removed the remnants of the “other” world, the child was wrapped in another new, soft and thin towel.

The next important life event was the wedding. Through marriage the newlywed achieved a new social status, they were in a way born to a new life. Here the towel was used to tie up the two beginnings – the male and the female, two families, to clans. Every single stage of the wedding had its own, special towel. While preparing for the ceremony the bride had to weave several, sometimes over a dozen of towels, which constituted her dowry. Her spinning and weaving skills were compared to the skills she required as a wife, so it didn’t bode well if the towels were made badly. All important guests as well and the maid of honour and the best man were given a special towel. A day before the wedding a formal dinner was held for the marshal of the ceremony. The marshal started the meal with washing hands, used a towel to dry them and then kept the towel as a gift. On the day of the wedding the groom and the bride crossed over a towel while entering the church. They also stood on another one during the ceremony. The hands of the newlyweds were tied with a towel. The bride carried a religious icon wrapped in an embroidered towel. The icon was then hanged in the house of the husband and the towel had to stay there between the Easter and Christmas. During the wedding reception the newlyweds sat on a towel, sometimes they were also symbolically wrapped in one.

The last threshold was the death. After the death of a member of a family a window was opened, and a towel hanged up from it. It was a sign for the living that a death had occurred. For the deceased it facilitated the passing over to the Afterlife. On the day of the death a religious icon, hanging above the headrest of the deceased’s bed, was wrapped in a towel. The towel was kept there for 40 days – the time that, as it was believed, the spirit of the deceased was still present in the house. Only after 40 days it was allowed for the towel to be removed and washed, as it was believed that before that the spirit of the dead was living in it. A towel was used to decorate the cross leading the funeral procession. After the funeral the towel was donated to the church. In Podlachia (part of Poland) up to the 1980 a tradition of carrying the coffin on towels was still practiced. The towels used to carry the coffin were buried together with the deceased, who was also wrapped in a different towel, arranged along the edges of the coffin.

Anna Fionik from Studziwody in Podlachia, an ethnomusicologist and a leader of a folk band “Żemerwa” remembers times when the embroidered towels were used in the area of Bielsk Podlaski (a town in Eastern Poland).

“I am from the generation which grew up in towns not villages. Studziwody is a town and I don’t remember ever seeing the embroidered towels in the house when I was a child. The only place I saw them back then was the church. While performing the mass, with the bishop present, he washed his hands and dried them with the embroidered towel. There was something like a towel used during weddings, the newlyweds stood on a piece of white fabric, but it wasn’t embroidered any more. In the church of St. Michael in Bielsk Podlaski there were icons decorated with towels. In other churches the towels were swapped for more modern net curtains. My mum told me that in her youth a towel was used to encompass the marshal of the wedding, to signify his importance. The korowai (a ceremonial cake – translator’s note) was placed on a towel. The towels were also used to carry a child’s coffin. Women used embroidered towels to carry to the church the coffin or our little brother, who passed away in infancy. The towels were used most commonly when somebody died.”

The towels were also used during the field work and celebrations. The first sowing was done by a farmer using an embroidered towel to carry the vessel filled with the grain. The first crop was tied up with a towel. The towels were used to wrap the bread and to cover the sourdough. On St George day the whole family went out to the fields, carrying a korowai placed on a towel, and they walked around the field to ensure good harvest. Although the towel was used during the rituals in the field, it was not as important as in the family celebrations.

The source of happiness and wellbeing

Among the many symbolical meaning of the towel the most important appears to be identifying the towel as the source of good as well as the people’s belief that it has magical properties. The towel brought good fortune, peace, abundance and health. All the East Slavs held this belief. They saw the towel as an amulet of sorts. Its protective magic originated not only form the quality of the fabric but also from its colours and patterns. The most ancient colours on the towels were white and red. In the olden days only those colours were used for the sacred fabric. Red was the colour of the sunrise, the Sun, fire, energy and life. Together with white it gained magical powers. Red embroidery decorated both ends of the towel, which was woven from a white thread. White symbolised the eternity, limitlessness, sadness and the end. In the days of past white was the colour of mourning. Through the white colour the sadness is connected with the happiness. Newlyweds stand on a white fabric, the white fabric supports the coffin, it surrounds the icon – the sacred and the eternity, while the embroidered ends fall down loosely. In the XIX century colours other than red and white started to appear on the towels: black, yellow, blue, but they were only an additional decoration and did not carry any meaning. The oldest patterns on the towels were geometric. Do we realise that looking at the squares, triangles, crosses and stars we are looking at hieroglyphs? Similar symbols were found on ceramics and other artefacts discovered in archaeological excavations. Basing on the archaeological research we know that each tribe had their own clan patterns, which were used to decorate or mark their property. The meanings of this clan pattern are similar to markings used by beekeepers on their hives. The fabrics used in rituals was also marked with the clan patterns, building in this way a bridge with the ancestors. Some of the secret patterns were forgotten with the death of the embroideresses and it is possible that their meaning will never be understood. Thankfully we do have enough information to discover the meaning of many of the ancient symbols.

Some of the symbols used on the embroidered towels

On the embroidered towels we can find ancient symbols of the Sun, Mother-Earth, abundance (patterns called: Życień, Sporysz, Bogacz), the old Gods like Jarilo or Perun, the symbols of holydays, the ancestors, as well as the demons (Żytnie Baby, Rusalkas). The most common shape embroidered on the towels was a diamond. It was used as early as XI-XII century and can be found of fragments of fabrics discovered in kurgans. The diamond is an ancient symbol of life. It was the base for countless versions of the pattern. The simple diamond symbolized a field or a loaf of bread, the diamond surrounded by rays outside – the Sun, with the rays inside – the Earth. The combination of the Sun and the Earth symbolized life and often was embroidered on towels used in healing rituals. Women who could not wait to get pregnant embroidered the symbol of the Mother, the Child or Parakiewa-Piatnica, Russian patroness of the weavers. “At my village two older children died” – tells a resident of a village near Brest. “I am scared that my Sonia might die as well. I embroidered two towels with the pattern of the Child. One I took to the church and hanged in on an icon of the Holy Mother, the other one I took to the burial site of my granddad”. In the time of drought women gathered to pray together and to embroider the symbols of Rain on the towels, then they gave the towels to the church. They also had their ways of preventing or stopping a war, an epidemic or time of scarcity. To remedy an epidemic the women gathered in the evenings and in one night they weaved and embroidered a towel, which then was carried around the village and after that - buried. Sometimes many towels were tied together, to surround the village. An event like that happened in a village of Kalinkowicze in Polesia. In 1920, after the war, the revolution and other disasters fifty girls and women followed an advice of an old crone and in one day thy embroidered one towel, decorating it with secret patters, asking for protection from hunger, cold, disease and bad luck. Each one of them embroidered her own prayer. One of the participants of this event was found 1935 – she was able to explain the meaning of the symbols used in the pattern. They were symbols of the Mother, Kolada, Kupalinka, the Tree of Life and also symbols meaning happiness, health and family.

Similar events took place in many villages of Podlachia and Polesia. “In the centre of Studziwoda three crosses are standing” – says Anna Fionik – “one was erected to stop an epidemic. A man had a dream that in order to save the village all the men had to put up a cross and all the women had to weave a towel. Here again we can see the cleansing power of the white linen”.

A towel for love

Like it usually happens the most popular symbols were those pertaining to love between a woman and a man. It was symbolised by flowers, most often roses, sometimes as a pair of doves. The positioning of the doves suggested the relationship between the couple. The doves facing each other marked a happy, fulfilled love, positioned back to back – an unhappy love, the doves following each other meant the beginning of a relationship. An 80 years old resident of a village in Belarus describes her experience: “When I was 17 I fell in love with Pavlik. He had light hair and eyes, I liked him very much and he was a good guy. I was advised to embroider a towel with doves. When Pavlik discovered it, he sent matchmakers to my house and then we got married. The doves brought me happiness. But there was a bad time too. I got ill on my stomach and I could not have children. I asked the crones what to do. I was advised to embroider the Mother and the Tree of Life. After that I got better, my stomach stopped hurting and I had children. I was happy and content.”

Until this day in the villages of the eastern Polesia there is a tradition of tying a towel as an offering at shrines on the crossroads, most commonly with the intention of having children. Sometimes not towels but scarves or aprons are used. The linen is not removed, so as the time goes the shrine becomes covered with layers of fabric and starts to look like figure of a woman. According to ethnographers the shrines become personification of spirits or the old Gods. The towels, scarves or aprons are left at cemeteries – aprons are tied to the graves of women, towels on the graves of men. The linen become almost a sculpture of the deceased. Some of the graveyards in Polesia look like villages for the dead. The presence of the deceased is particularly important during Orthodox All Souls’ Day, called Radunica and falling on the 9th day after Easter. After the mass and blessing of the graves the families gather around the graves of their ancestors and have a meal there. It’s commonly believed that the veil between the word of the dead and the living is so thin on this day, that it is possible for the deceased to penetrate into the word of the living and join the meal. The food is arranged on embroidered towels and a cross wrapped in more towels become the symbolic sign of the presence of the spirits.

The most important part of every house used to be the “holy corner”, where icons were placed. The corner was called pokuc’. The icons had to be decorated with embroidered towels. For thousand years the Orthodox icons coexist with the towels, but the towel is much older, it’s a pagan tradition. Before the Christianisation pokuc’ was a private shrine, were pagan deities and Gods were worshipped. It was separated from the rest of the house with a curtain made from an embroidered towel, separating the sacred from the lay. Christianisation destroyed the sculptures of the old Gods, but towels remained and were tied with the Orthodox icons.

Longing for the tradition

The XX century brought many changes, the towels slowly disappeared from the villages and the icons, the colours and the ornamentation changed. Cross-stitch and pereboras (a type of weaving with multicolour thread – translator’s note) were replaced by needlepoint and cutwork. Gradually the old symbols were abandoned, and flower motifs were used for solely decorative purposes. The towels started to be decorated with multicoloured flowers, birds, fruits, vine and others. The changes were influenced by the aristocrats and the Christian Church, mostly in the 1930ies, when the red and white geometric patterns almost completely disappeared. Ready made patters were introduced, regional difference in the embroidery on the towels started to disappear and then mass produced, printed towels made their entrance.

“Unfortunately, the tradition of hand made embroidered towels has almost disappeared”- says Anna Fionik. “Back in the day one could still see them on the icons, or crosses on the cemeteries, but now it’s been replaced by colourful ribbons and artificial flowers. There are still towels in smaller villages, stored in cupboards and chests. Rarely they are the woven, cross-stitched ones, most commonly the towels are decorated with flower motifs. In my house there is a few red and white towels embroidered by my grandmother in geometric patterns. We also have some towels that were gifted to us, but they are colourful, with floral patterns. It’s a bit better in Polesia, in Belarus. It’s a real treasury of the towel related traditions. Woven, embroidered towels are seen in almost every smaller town or village, in churches, private houses, on cemeteries. They are still used in wedding celebration. There are also museums of towels in Motol and Beździerz”.

Modern times are not tradition friendly, our needs are changing, and we don’t need the old customs any more, but is the future of the towels hopeless? The family of Anna Fionik from Studziwoda is the best example that the past does not have to be forgotten and the traditions can be revived.

“With the growing interest in folklore and ethnography, the embroidered towels are used more often in our house. We hanged them up on icons, started to use them in family and church celebrations. A few years ago we started taking the towels out in the field on St George day, and we walk three times around the field, carrying a korowai and an icon. We sing traditional songs, we pray for a blessing for our fields. Now I cannot imagine a life without an embroidered towel any more.”

Sources:

1. M.S. Kacar, „Biełaruski arnament”.

2. V. Labacheuskaya, „Bond of times – belarusian towel”.