Semantics of the Ornament of Wedding Woven Towels of the 9–18 Centuries and their Role in Wedding Rights

The wedding ceremony is one of the integral stages of a person's life, richly saturated with traditions. A wedding is on a par with such events in a person's life as birth and death. For many centuries, the peculiarities of its conduct, rituals that should be observed, have been formed. Textiles occupied an important place in the wedding tradition. It was not only part of the bride's dowry, but also accompanied the entire procession, being an integral part of it. At the same time, the wedding textiles had to be decorated with a certain ornament bearing a sacred meaning, since pagan beliefs played an important role in the wedding process. With the adoption of Christianity, wedding customs have changed, but the importance of textiles in wedding activities has remained the same. Embroidery and weaving were an ordinary women's needlework and a kind of entertainment, in which the principle of “copying” was preserved, that is, sewing according to the pattern, the canon. When creating a dowry and, in particular, towels, young girls copied the drawing and ornament of an earlier period. That said, Slavic pagan symbols were able to find their place in Orthodoxy and were copied from generation to generation. The original semantic load that the Slavs put into reproducible patterns was eventually forgotten. But the repetition of ancient ornaments continued on wedding textiles, namely on towels. Thus, it was believed that these symbols protect a young family from the evil eye and help to find happiness. An important place in the design of wedding textiles is occupied by such symbols as “orepey” (or “burdock”), “World Tree” (or “Tree of Life”) and “Great Goddess” (or “Great Mother”, “Makosh”), depicted as a female silhouette.