Embroidered towels with crosses and floral ornaments (“sprouted crosses”) from the Russian peasant women in Western Siberia

The identification and reconstruction of the sense-making elements of embroidery of ritual towels of the Siberian peasant women in the context of ornamental creativity and traditional worldview allows us to answer questions about the basic values of the Russian culture and the possibilities of their transmission in current conditions. The source was the author's field materials (towels with crosses and floral ornaments, recorded during field research from family depositories, religious buildings, mainly Old Believer prayer houses, as well as the author's diary entries) of the East Slavic ethnographic expedition of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the villages of Western Siberia (1978-2010). The ornaments of the women's handicrafts of the second half of the 19th to early 20th centuries analyzed by the author allowed to interpret the image of a double “sprouted” cross as the focus of vegetative forces, the “grain code”, which is so relevant for wedding towels. Its transformation towards a symbol of spiritual salvation of a person was reflected in ties with funeral and memorial rituals (tying on grave crosses, serving “at the commemoration of the soul”). The author does not share the point of view about cosmological origins of the image of a double “sprouted” cross, since in these cases, the fact that such patterns are located at the bottom of multi-figured compositions, often between the symbols of the “sown field” (according to B.A. Rybakov). Moreover, with such reasoning, plants (flowers, wheat heads) emanating from the crosses are considered as decorative additions only, which contradicts the laws of ornamental systems with their susceptibility to semantic symbolism. Against the background of the information received about the purpose of the ornamented towels in question, the question arises of the relationship between ascertaining and interpretive observations, which belongs to theoretical foundations of ornamental art and requires further research.