CALLIGRAPHY

Arabic writing and calligraphy

Arabic writing has many different styles - there are more than a hundred of them. But there are six main styles - geometric (mainly Kufic and its variants), and italic (naskh, ruka, thulut, etc.).

Tughra is a unique calligraphic technique that is used as a royal seal. These emblems were highly decorative and became especially popular during the heyday of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Nishangi or tughrakesh is a calligrapher specially trained to write tughra.

In zoomorphic calligraphy, words are used to create figures of a person, bird, animal or some other object.

Kufi (or Kufic) is known for its proportional dimensions, angularity and squareness.

Thulut - means “one third”, which refers to the proportions of the pen relative to the earlier Tumaar style. It is used as an ornamental letter.

Nasah, which means “copying”, is one of the earliest writing styles with a developed system of proportions. It is famous for its purity of form and readability, and is used in copying the Koran.

SYRIAN FOLK

Syrian folk costume.

A woman's costume consists of trousers, a shirt, a sweater or jacket, mainly made of blue cotton fabric, and a headscarf, tied differently than for men. The traditional festive clothing of women is very colorful - multi-colored and embroidered dresses, sweaters, sleeveless vests, cylindrical hats, bedspreads. In cities, the bulk of the population dresses in a European style, with emphasized elegance. But there are also women in national clothes and even covering their faces with a black veil, the wearing of which in the past was mandatory for city women.

Villagers most often wear striped shirts that fall to the heels - kunbaz - or shorter shirts and wide pants that taper below the knees. You can often find a Syrian in the traditional clothes of a nomad: a long wide shirt, an open caftan, often decorated with braids, a large white or checkered headscarf folded diagonally, intercepted by a dark woolen cord (ukal).

PAUK

Wickerwork.

Wickerwork is an original phenomenon of Belarusian national culture that has no analogues in the world.

Straw as a material for weaving was used by the Eastern Slavs at the turn of the 2nd-1st centuries. BC.;

XX century - the flourishing of Belarusian wickerwork.
In Belarus, wickerwork has been practiced for a long time. The roofs of dwellings were covered with straw, it was used as bedding and feed for livestock, for shoes and clothing for people, it served as a bed, and in lean years it was mixed into bread. Household utensils, hats, toys and jewelry were made from it.

Our ancestors believed that straw stored the living energy of nature, so in ancient times products made from it were endowed with magical powers and were considered amulets.

A mysterious talisman, with which many legends and traditions are associated, was the straw “spider”. According to tradition, straw spiders were hung from the ceiling on Christmas Eve in the most honorable place - in the red corner of the peasant hut. For a year, the spider “protected” the owners of the house, and all misfortunes and illnesses were “entangled” in its web. Since the Slavs from ancient times revered fire as a symbol of purification, a spider that had “served” for a whole year was necessarily burned before Christmas, and a new one was hung in its place.

These amulets were woven from golden straw, assembled from many figures in the form of pyramids or rhombuses. Ball-shaped spiders, which resembled the sun with their ray-like legs, were also common. The weightless openwork product protected, brought prosperity, health and at the same time decorated the house.

FOLK

The Belarusian costume, having common roots with Ukrainian and Russian national costumes and formed on the basis of the mutual influence of Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian traditions, is nevertheless distinguished by its originality and is an independent phenomenon. In addition, it absorbed the trends of international urban costume and thus fit into the pan-European context.

There are at least 3 types of Belarusian folk costume:

- peasant;

- bourgeois;

- noble

The Belarusian peasant costume has deep historical roots and has retained many archaic features. Combining practicality and aesthetics, it was and is much more than just clothing or a work of art. The Belarusian peasant costume reflected local traditions, the needs and social status of the representatives of the Belarusian people, the worldview of the craftsmen who made it, and entire meaningful stories are sometimes read in the decorative ornament. Usually it is the peasant costume that is meant when they talk about the national costume of Belarusians in general.

Traditional folk weaving has long been widespread in Belarus. The raw materials for it were linen, wool, and hemp. The processes of its processing and preparation were carried out manually: the threads were spun using a spindle and a spinning wheel, they were whitened or dyed (in decoctions from the bark of trees, plants, flowers), woven on hand looms, from the end of the 19th century. - on their technically improved versions - workbenches, which expanded technological and artistic capabilities.

COLOUR

The Belarusian ornament is a traditional set of symbols and colors that our ancestors have used for many centuries since pre-Christian times.

These colors have deep symbolism. White background is the color of purity. Red is the color of the sun, blood as a symbol of life, and in general a symbol of life

Why is the ornament on clothes placed only in specific places - on the collar, on the cuffs, along the shirtfront, on the headdress around the face? It is there where there are “gaps”, where evil can enter the human body. Everything else is protected by fabric. And the fabric was woven on crosses on which these signs were applied.

Perhaps the Belarusian ornament is the most restrained, the most ascetic of the three East Slavic ones.

Belarusians did not have symbols of death

— All these symbols are very strong signs that should protect a person. Although we don’t put the meaning of a talisman into them now. And our ancestors believed that they help. That’s why we didn’t have signs that would symbolize death, pain, grief.

The Belarusian pattern has a minimum of colors. Until the century before last there were only two - white and red: the unchanging white background as a symbol of purity and purity and the varied, rich in shades of red as the color of warmth, joy, sun, wealth, health.

At the end of the 19th century, black appeared in the Belarusian folk ornament - not as the main color, but as an outline, shading the lines of the pattern.

Belarusian ornaments almost always have clear geometry. Line, cross, diamond, square, stripe.

If the vegetation is grapes or geometrically correct oak. If the bird is made of diamonds or squares. Maximum stylization, minimum picturesqueness.