11 April 2023 в 07:12

Kikas, festive outfits and gold-embroidered headscarves: how “The Kokoshnik. Beauty Traditions” exhibition to impress visitors

Sbornik (shamshura). Vologda Governorate, the late 19th century. From the collection of the Kolomenskoye – Izmaylovo Moscow State Integrated Museum-Reserve

They will learn about the origin of the word ‘kokoshnik’, how and where this headdress was worn, which outfits it complemented and what Peter the Great had to do with it.

On April 12, the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve will open an exhibition called “The Kokoshnik. Beauty Traditions” to be accommodated in the Palace of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich and to display Russian festive and everyday headdresses worn by girls and women in the mid-18th and late 19th centuries.

The Russian traditional costume is very conservative, its elements being often passed down in families from generation to generation. In fact, it is generally associated with peasant traditions, because decrees of Peter the Great forbade city dwellers to wear traditional costumes, so the ethnic identity was preserved mainly in the countryside.

Traditional women’s clothes involve a lot of superstitions. For example, some elements of clothing were believed to protect against wicked people or evil spirits, after all a woman was the keeper of the hearth, she raised and took care of children, so she needed a greater protection; that is why leaving the house without a kokoshnik was akin to shame.

The name was derived from kokosh (‘hen’), because the kokoshnik looks like a comb on top of the chicken’s head. Visitors will also see how markedly traditional Russian headdresses varied from region to region. The so-called one-horned kokoshniks with a convex part above the forehead were characteristic of the Olonets Governorate, while high peaked kokoshniks were worn by women in Kostroma or Yaroslavl and two-horned kokoshniks shaped like a crescent moon were typical of Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod from where they spread throughout the Middle Volga region. The exhibition presents headdresses traditionally worn in Arkhangelsk, Olonets, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Galich, Tver, Moscow, Tula, Ryazan, Voronezh, Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Volga region, Kazan, Sviyazhsk, and Ufa.

A kokoshnik is the most elegant headdress, its front part abundantly decorated with pearls, nacre, colored glasses or genuine precious stones, passementerie, embroidery, inserts of patterned silk fabric or colored foil. The occipital part was made of silk or velvet and embroidered with golden threads. No two kokoshniks are the same, although they all have similar shapes and cuts.

Visitors will also see other headdresses, such as kikas, sorokas, povoiniks and volosniks, in addition to maiden headbands and crowns. The exposition also presents festive outfits from Arkhangelsk, Voronezh and Kazan Governorates, gold-embroidered headscarves, popular lubok prints, and paintings.

The project is organized jointly with the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan, the Ethnographic Museum of Kazan Federal University and the New Jerusalem State Museum of History and Art.