Association of Ukrainian Women in Trieste (Association of social orientation)
Association of Ukrainian Women in Trieste (Association of social orientation)
Today we are all here to honor the great holiday organized by the Ukrainian Women’s Association in Trieste – the World Vyshyvanka Day.
Vyshyvanka Day is an international holiday designed to preserve the ancient folk traditions of creating and wearing ethnic embroidered Ukrainian clothing. We usually celebrate it on the third Thursday of May and do not consider it a public or religious holiday. Anyone can join it by wearing an embroidered shirt.
Ukrainian embroidery is one of the types of folk decorative art of Ukrainians, where an ornamental or thematic image is laid out on fabric or on the skin with a net, a thread, a satin stitch or a cross stitch. Towels, shirts, bedspreads, hoops, pillowcases, and much more are embroidered in this way.
The idea of the World Vyshyvanka Day event was proposed in 2006 by Lesia Voroniuk, a student of the Faculty of History, Political Science and International Relations at Chernivtsi University, and was inspired by the embroidery of student Ihor Zhytariuk, who regularly wore it to classes, as did many other students. Later, the idea was picked up in other regions of Ukraine, as well as by Ukrainians abroad.
According to historians and archeologists, certain elements of the embroidery existed on the clothes of the Scythians who lived on the territory of modern Ukraine even before Christ.
Later, the Trypillian culture made a great contribution to the development of this art form. Foreign travelers of the 15th and 16th centuries mentioned Ukrainian embroideries of this period. Embroideries have also been preserved from the Cossack times of the 17th and 18th centuries. The largest centers of embroidery at that time were Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, and later all of Ukraine.
Through the centuries and to this day, the Ukrainian people have carried their love for embroidery and preserved the special traditions of creating it with a combination of modern forms of clothing and new patterns. Each region of Ukraine boasts its own unique customs associated with the national ornamentation on clothing.
