The project Rituals of Resilience: Ukrainian Folk Costumes from Kula, Serbia took place during March 2022 at the Ukrainian Folklore Society Ivan Senyuk in Kula, Serbia, under the supervision of the Society’s president, Mr Filip Pronek. The city of Kula, located in the West Bačka district of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia serves as the center of the Ukrainian ethnic minority in the country. In the wake of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, our young Costume Committee member based in Kula, fashion historian Stefan Žarić, reached out to the local Ukrainian community to undertake research into their folk costumes on a voluntarily basis. Despite combining ethnography, folkloristics, oral history and costume history, the aim of the project was not to solely catalogue costumes to museum standards, nor to list their demographic and ethnographic nomenclature. The aim was to bond with the community through the narrative power of clothes and observe how costume tells stories of sociocultural, aesthetic and political integration and resilience, and moreover, how the costume itself becomes a ritual of resilience. As initial migrations of Ukrainians and other Slavic nations from the territory of Ukraine to Bačka region occurred in 1745, the first organized resettlement in Serbia in fact took place in Kula.
As such, Ukrainian folk costumes and customs have an almost three-century-long presence in Serbia, and particularly in Kula. While many other ethnic minorities in Serbia did create more hybrid expressions of their folk costumes through local variations by merging Eastern or Central European and Balkan influences, Ukrainian costumes remained true to their origins. This is not to say that Ukrainians were neither segregated by the domestic population nor that they refused or were refused integration. On the contrary, keeping their costumes intact, allowing them to visually differentiate yet socially integrate themselves, has been an ongoing ritual of resilience for the community. However, it is important to stress that throughout its historical development, Ukrainian folk costume appropriated certain stylistic characteristics of Polish-Lithuanian and Russian influences, among others. In that regard, costumes in the collection of the Folklore Society Ivan Senyuk in Kula could serve as narratives of both Ukrainian sociopolitical and sociocultural geography and history.
As in the rest of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, folk costumes were popular and usually the only available form of clothing both in Ukraine and Serbia (especially rural areas) until the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, when they were losing their appeal in favor of Westernized clothing and ‘European’ bourgeois dress. Until then, folk costumes, especially in an environment like Serbia, which historically has been considered a crossroads between the East and the West, served as signifiers of belonging, recognition and resilience. They were a semiotic tool of communicating one’s identity, culture, feelings, emotions – not just the notions of ethnicity and patriotism – through various social rituals.
Nowadays, the Folklore Society Ivan Senyuk and Ukrainian folk-dance festivals remain the only spaces and events for which the local Ukrainian community in Kula (as is the case for other ethnic minorities) dress up in their folk costumes. Occasionally, some women wear modernized versions of Ukrainian embroidered folk blouses, creating a versatile garment that would, to an eye unaware of different folklore and fashion traditions, seem ‘ethnic’ in a globalized world. On the other hand, children choose not to wear them so not to be singled out at school for not dressing in contemporary clothes. When a folk event takes place, the community know who originates from which region of Ukraine according to the choice of ornamentation, whether floral or geometric, the design of the sleeves, the dominant colors, types of embroidery and needlework, and many other features of folk costume. Folk costumes once again become both personal and collective storytellers, uniting the community in its diversity. The fact that after almost three centuries there are still people who wear them, even if just for the occasion of a folk-dance event, attests that the ritual of resilience never ceases, whether we wear folk costume or modern attire.
Stefan Žarić, Fashion historian
SOURCES:
Oral sources
Filip Pronek, the president of the Ukrainian Folklore Society Ivan Senyuk, Kula, Serbia
Literature
Dacešen. Vasilj, et al. 2013. Ukrainian Folklore. Kula: Ridne slovo.
Mateiko, K. 1977. Ukrainian Folk Clothing. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka.
Rather than photographing costumes in the standard of fashion museology, folk costumes from the Folklore Society Ivan Senyuk were photographed in a contemporary and youthful social media format. The accent was on details and designs which would at the same time ‘confuse’ and invite viewers to conceptualize the rest of the costume or ponder upon its origins.
