Chernihiv

30 May 2022

I am trying to drag myself out of the all-pervasive sense of despondency over the war in Ukraine to start writing my blog again. I’ll begin with some memories of my visit to Ukraine nearly 20 years ago in much happier times, and particularly to the town of Chernihiv, which suffered awful violence and terror early on in the current conflict, with many homes and lives destroyed.

I was there in October 2005 and I remember lots of trees in their autumn colours in the squares and parks. My friend Audrey and I had been lucky enough to be invited to stay in Kyiv with Mary, from the British Embassy, who was also keen on textiles. Mary arranged some wonderful visits for us, including to Chernihiv.

First we went into a church which had become the Museum of Folk and Decorative Art, where traditional textiles were displayed – folk dress of the region and a magnificent collection of embroidered and woven ritual towels (known as rushnyky in Ukraine). Some of these towels were enormously long and were seen to advantage hanging in the lofty space of the building.

We met two delightful women – the curator of the collection and a local embroiderer, who told us how she and her friends were determined to pass the skills of traditional Ukrainian embroidery on to their children and grandchildren. She showed us some of her own work and was clearly pleased that we were so interested in everything we saw. Somewhere at home I will have her name and address in a notebook. I can’t help but wonder what life has been like for her and her community over the past years – and what their day-to-day life is like now. Women who are no different from me and my friends – who love our homes and our families and gain pleasure from beautiful things and from being creative.

We also visited the Chernihiv Historical Museum. I’ll write about the textile collection there in my next post.

This large tapestry hanging shows a Ukrainian woman on the left and Russian woman on the right in their respective forms of folk dress, joining together to display a rushnyk bearing the slogan, in Ukrainian – ‘Glory to October’ (ie to the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917).