More than 100 traditional Moravian folk shawls preserved in new digital collection
Women in the South Moravian town of Lednice have created a new online collection documenting more than one hundred traditional woollen shawls known as vlňáky. Once a common part of winter folk costume in the Podluží region, these scarves survive today mostly in family collections.
Vlňáky, or woolen shawls, are a traditional part of women’s folk costume, especially in Moravia. Often richly embroidered or patterned, they were worn over folk dresses as large square or triangular shawls with fringes. In colder weather, they served to cover the shoulders and head.
In Podluží, a lowland wine-growing region in southern Moravia near the Austrian and Slovak borders, women used to wear vlňáky as part of their winter folk costume. A women’s association from Lednice, called NaKrojené Ledničanky, has been collecting and photographing these shawls for more than a year.
The goal of the photo documentation is to show the richness of local folk costume traditions and to help people identify a vlňák they may have found at home among the belongings of a great-grandmother. To this day, they have documented 106 different patterns, about thirty of them with known names, says Hana Pijáková from the NaKrojené Ledničanky group.
“For example, this one is called perníkový, or ‘gingerbread’, after the colour that resembles gingerbread. This one is very widespread and is called ledkový or skalkový, meaning stone-grey.”
In the past, Lednice was part of the Podluží region, and today local residents are seeking to reconnect with that heritage. This has brought new interest in traditional vlňáky.
The group collects only those shawls that were worn specifically in that region. In other parts of the country, different types were used, explains Zuzana Martinková from Lednice.
“In the Hanácké Slovácko area, they wear single-coloured shawls with a slightly different structure. I’m not an expert on textiles, but they are kind of knitted. The same applies in the Kyjov region. My great-grandmother used to say, ‘That one is a blanket shawl — put it on when it’s really cold.’”
The Lednice women were inspired by an earlier collection effort in a nearby South Moravian village several decades ago, explains Růžena Kašíková.
“It started when we were looking for a gift for our mother, and we saw various shawls that women had stored and would say, ‘This one is from my mother and this one from my grandmother.’ That’s how we realized it was a wonderful heritage that should be shown and preserved.”
At the time, around 300 shawls of different patterns were collected for an exhibition. The NaKrojené Ledničanky association now has a smaller collection, but it is digitally documented.
Photographs of the vlňáky, both named and unnamed, are available on the group’s Facebook page. The original shawls, made from wool of Australian sheep, are no longer produced, and many of them are more than 100 — some even 150 — years old.
