SIGNS

A pattern: decoration or a sign ?

Textiles, like other creative works of country people, has its iconography and symbolic meaning. The meaning of some separate fabric pattern is rarely noted while collecting ethnographic material today. According to data from field research, country people linked separate fabric patterns with the world of nature, things, religious symbols (see 'Cross patterns'). Bedspreads are a recent occurrence of country culture, so it is difficult to establish the iconographic meaning of separate archaic elements that came from other fabrics or things.

The deeper meaning of patterns as signs lies in layers of old world outlooks; for the people of the 20th century, textiles remains an important present, a relic, and a symbol.