Today at 12:08
The first post is just a few meters away from the village road sign. Natalia Kozakova has been selling these brooms for more than 25 years. The brooms are always brand new. The smaller ones cost about $1.5 dollars, the bigger ones $2.
“Pick and choose, take a look. The small ones cost 35 hryvnias, the bigger ones – 40,” broom peddler Natalia Kozakova said. “We bind them together with thread and twigs. It depends.”
Svitlana Voloshyna was taught how to make brooms by her mother. The process takes her around 20 minutes. You need a workbench, sharp knife and millet stems. A bushy brooms consists of three bundles of matching length.
When the bundles are bound together the middle is cut out and formed into a comfortable handle. To make sure customers will be pleased, Svitlana tries out every broom with her hands and even her feet.
“I also do it like this. I stand on the broom so that it will soften up. Here it is. It fits your hand well. Try it,” Voloshyna said, offering up the broom.
Svitlana also sings in a local folklore group called “Kalynka.” Her colleagues stopped by to visit and sing a few songs. Their songs about brooms are unique, which is how people at regional fairs, can tell that the singers are from Lyman.
“When they make a broom, they try it out for sturdiness. There is a lot of millet in it. This is a good broom. To make sure it will serve for a long time we pour boiling water on it and then it won’t dry out,” Tetiana Shcherbak of the Kalynka folk group said.
The women remembered that in the old days, all of the fields were planted with millet. September is harvest time in Lyman. People come to the field and hunt for pink millet stems.
Recently though, fewer and fewer people are making brooms. Young people are not interested in the trade. But Lyman residents are certain that broom making is their cultural brand, and hope it will help the village prosper.
