The traditional shirt. An ethnographic study of the clothing of the North Caucasian Cossacks

Introduction. Traditional folk clothing is an object of research for many specialists. Having gone a long way, the clothing has preserved elements passed down from generation to generation, which over time have become its tradition. A special connection with the original source – an object of material culture – is important and required for the traditions to be understandable and accessible to a contemporary.

The Materials and methods. The object of the research is the clothing of the Cossack population of the linear villages of the Transkuban region in the mid-19th – early 20th centuries. The goal of the research is to identify the types of clothing components at the regional level. The objective of the research is not only to describe the object of material culture itself, but also all possible collisions that entailed its existence, therefore, from a number of research methods, chronological and typological methods have been chosen.

The Research results. Unique household items, including traditional clothing items, are currently the property of museums; access to original clothing exhibits for various specialists is limited for various reasons. Museums publish materials from their collections; this information most often consists of a list of objects that are in the museum and their ethnic affiliation. This is not enough for the introduction of materials on clothing into scientific circulation; first of all, it is necessary to know a detailed description of the object of material culture and, in addition, without the typology of the object, important details can be overlooked. In addition to local history museums, in the 1980s, so-called People’s Museums were created and operated in some villages on the territory of the Krasnodar Territory, where household items of the Cossack population of the villages, including clothing, were presented. Over time, for a number of reasons, some of these museums ceased to exist; the fate of the original clothing exhibits also developed differently. Therefore, the materials collected in these People’s Museums and the materials collected in territorially remote local history museums will undoubtedly be the most valuable sources for future generations of researchers and various specialists.

Discussion and conclusion. The work on identifying the types of material culture items in the former linear villages of the Transkuban region using women’s and men’s shirts as an example has shown that the most archaic forms – tunic-shaped shirts – were not used by the indigenous population of the Transkuban region villages; among the studied original exhibits, variants of women’s shirts have been identified that have not been described in any ethnographic literary source known to the author.

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