Bast as a ritual shoe

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

What would seem simpler, bast shoes are rural wicker shoes, common not only among the peoples of Europe, but in one form or another throughout the whole world, a poor shoe for every season.

"To go on the road - weave five sandals." The Swedes even had the term "bast shoe mile" - the distance that can be covered in one pair of bast shoes. I don’t say a word for my neighbors, but for the Slavs with the enthim wanderers, everything turns out not as it seemed to us from cartoons and pictures from books …

So, at the International Conference "Fashion and Design" held by the Ethnographic Museum of St. Petersburg, the most exciting for me personally was the report not of a fashion designer or designer, but of the St. Petersburg archaeologist Alexander Valentinovich Kurbatov.

Kurbatov suggested on the basis of the abundant factual material of the excavations, in particular the Novgorod ones, that bast shoes …

What bast shoes are not so much everyday as ritual shoes

For … in the excavations of ancient settlements, bast shoes are not found, but cemeteries and burials reveal the ancestors-deceased entirely in little bast shoes.

What's the turnover, huh?

Here is his similar article about bast shoes, taken from the Internet.

The speaker, being an official scientist, and they are people extremely cautious in terms of sensations, understanding what biased and corrosive company he is speaking to, the more he was correct and conjectural. And yet he said a lot. My friend, a fashion designer, and I almost jumped: yes, it is exactly so! But bast shoes cannot be worn for a long time - the leg shrinks instantly! - this is the first thing that we said out loud, and then began to reason:

1. One bast shoe needs several meters of birch bark or bast. How much should be prepared for one family? And for the village there are twenty yards? And for a city, albeit not a big one?

We would live now not in the taiga, but in the treeless tundra! If people also cut down trees for the sake of bast, then there would be no deciduous trees.

2. Bast shoes wear out in a few days, while handmade leather shoes serve not for years - for decades! And there was no shortage of leather as a material - almost everyone kept cows and other cattle.

Not so long ago, after the war, with a total shortage of everything (my mother told me this), most people in Karelia wore homemade shoes. From the skin, naturally. It is not much more difficult for a skilled man to make furry boots than to knit wool knee-highs for a woman.

3. Historians who study ancient texts confirm that a synonym for “die” was the expression associated with shoes. Namely, "put on shoes in molds." Kurbatov said in his report that our ancestors had more than eighty types of bast shoes and their names are also diverse. Having accepted these two facts, let's look in the Pomor dictionary, what kind of mold is this … maybe also a kind of bast shoe? Exactly! Plesnaya (or metatarsal), it turns out they called the foot of the foot and called it paw, hence the word bast came, as I think. Here's a bast shoe - a receptacle for the soul.

Immediately I remembered: "My soul is gone!" - that is, I almost died of fear …

4. Well, now the most eloquent thing about bast shoes is from the treasury of our language. Let's re-read old Russian sayings about bast shoes, and there will be no doubts about their understanding:

Lapti weaved, and buried the ends,

I changed my boots for bast shoes

"Today ghouls and ghouls, and tomorrow they put on sandals"or similar, but with the same cautionary meaning: "Today ghouls, tomorrow ghouls, and there, you see, ghouls and in bast shoes", "Guli not one in bast shoes", "Guli and guli, but in bast shoes and boots."

Now let's try to find modern analogs to ancient expressions:

Drunk in bast shoes.

Throw back bast shoes.

Bast shoes away.

I'm sure many have succeeded: "drunk to death", "throw off the sandals", "discard the hooves" - right?

Great? Yes … And where does the picture for the post?

For the sake of truth, it must be added that bast shoes also had a protective function.

They took care of leather shoes and tried not to walk in them in the mud, only spanked them in bast shoes.

And on the road:

Arriving home from the conference in Petrozavodsk, we heatedly discussed the ritual purpose of bast shoes with all our friends - of course!

And suddenly one friend exhales the following: "I thought it was grandma's whim … She had prepared clothes for her burial in advance, and she had sandals on her feet for this solemn exit! I even asked several times:" Why sandals ?! " And she always answered the same: "It will be easier to reach God in sandals!"

For reference: that grandmother was from North Karelia, what happened at the end of the 20th century, that is, quite recently.