Today at 23:08
At the Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine, the spirit of modernity is tightly interwoven with ancient times. Dozens of locals come here to immerse themselves into traditional Ukrainian crafts.
Folk artist Viktoriya Fil started painting Petrykivka at the age of nine. Since then, this creative work remains her obsession.
“First of all, Petrykivka appeared as a wall painting. As the village was poor, people wanted to decorate their houses. The first brushes they used were made of cat hair,” Fil said.
In Petrykivka, this ornamentation decorated the whitewashed walls of peasant houses. Basically, it was painted on traditional stoves, the main wall of the house, and the frames of windows and doors. According to Viktoriya, it has some sacral meaning.
“Previously, the perimeter of peasant houses was painted with red clay. People of the past were painting kind of a protection line belts. A rooster is a keeper of the house, and of fire. That is why, as our grannies say, the roosters were painted on the stove,” Viktoriya Fil said.
The first step in creating the Petrykivka picture is choosing a color. Our ancestors had neither gouache or oil colors. Therefore they used some natural materials such as the ordinary juice from carrots, beetroots, blue cabbages and so on.
A tourist from Canada Dianne Jennings and her husband also came to the workshop, to dive into the art of their ancestors as they both have roots in Western Ukraine.
” I think it is important to preserve the culture because a lot of traditional practices get lost. I think, when we continue those things, we learn a little bit about the plants and a little bit about the culture. I think it is important to know where we come from,” Dianne Jennings said.
In 2012, Petrykivka painting was recognized as part of the intangible cultural heritage of Ukraine. And one year after, they included it in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Eventually, this technique became a brand of Ukrainian culture.
