Festive costume of a young woman. Russians. Early 20th century. Yekaterinoslav Province, Pavlograd District, Ternovka village.

Russians

Costume, women's

The festive costume of a young married woman from Ternovka village is a pinafore set typical for the Russian tradition. It consists of a chemise, a woolen slant panel pinafore, a broad sash, and a multi-component headwear. The pinafore featuring in this costume, and the headwear provide the strongest evidence that its owners once lived in southern Russian provinces, whose inhabitants took part in the colonization of the new lands in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. The territory of Yekaterinoslav Province, like the other two provinces of Novorossiya: Taurida and Kherson, was populated by Russians gradually, starting from the 1760s-1770s. Those were waves of resettlers of different strata and social groups occurring at different times. On the one hand, the resettlement was spontaneous and self-directed. Fugitive peasants, Old Believers, retired soldiers arrived in the new lands. Simultaneously, the new territories were systematically colonized by the government, which granted lands to landed gentry as reward, and the gentry resettled to them their peasants who had lived in various parts of European Russia, mostly central. The settlement of Ternovka was founded in 1775 as an artisan settlement on the spot where a blackthorn ticket was cut down by order of the Azov governor. In that locality in 1909, archeologist, ethnographer, and local lore expert Vasily Babenko acquired a small collection of women’s garments, and in particular a festive costume. This collection has become the only one in the Russian Museum of Ethnography’s depository on the Russians of Yekaterinoslav Province. The core of the women’s festive costume is a long chemise with puffed sleeves decorated with red calico and machine-made lace. The slant panel pinafore of black homespun woolen fabric with chest embroidery in metal yarn is tied with a broad striped sash. The head is crowned with a kokoshnik head-dress with a patterned silk kerchief and silk tassels. Since Russians lived there in direct contact with Ukrainians, some features may be found in the clothing of Ternovka’s women that assimilate it to Ukrainian women’s clothing; they are wide chemise sleeves, and silk kerchiefs folded in a headband as headwear decoration.