Tree of life

The tree of life is a symmetrical plant composition: a small tree, bush, flowerpot or single flower with branches spreading to both sides, hung with leaves, blossoms and fruit. Scholars of ornament consider it the central cosmological image of Ukrainian folk art. It is best known from rushnyky (embroidered or woven ritual towels), but it also appears on shirts, in weaving and on pysanky (wax-resist Easter eggs).

Meaning and interpretations

Art historians Oleksandr Naiden and Mykhailo Selivachov call the tree of life the main universal cosmological image of Ukrainian folk ornament. Scholars link it to pre-Christian ideas about the structure of the world and note that it is widespread in old legends and medieval apocrypha. In such compositions, they write, solar signs, natural elements, birds and animals come together, and the whole design is usually three-part and symmetrical.

The most common scholarly reading draws on the idea of a world tree, an image shared by many cultures: a tree that links the sky, the earth and the underworld, and in some readings also the past, present and future. Ukrainian koliadky (Christmas carols) preserve stories of a tree standing in the water. In one carol recorded in the 1830s, a sycamore grows in the middle of the blue sea, and three doves perched on it discuss how to create the earth and the sky. Folklore parallels like this give scholars grounds to read embroidered trees with birds as an echo of ancient creation myths.

A second layer is Christian. The tree of life appears in the Bible — in the Garden of Eden and in the Book of Revelation — and the “tree of paradise” was a familiar motif in church art. For a village embroiderer, these layers most likely did not contradict each other: an old composition could be seen as the garden of paradise, and a blooming flowerpot as a wish for well-being and fertility.

Field interviews about beliefs in central Polissia, northern Ukraine, published in 2022, offer an interesting glimpse. One woman explained that an embroidered tree or flowerpot is a “tree of life.” The researchers also cite an observation that in the Zhytomyr region in the late 20th century the tree was embroidered in two versions: one growing from the ground and branching at the top, and one sprouting from a seed. The latter was linked to the feminine principle and fertility. Keep in mind that these are late 20th- and early 21st-century records, when books and the press may already have shaped what embroiderers believed.

How to “read” the composition

Scholars often suggest reading the tree of life from bottom to top: the base (pot, hill or seed) is the earth and the roots, the trunk is the middle world, and the crown with birds is the sky. This is a scholarly model built on comparisons with folklore and the mythologies of other peoples. It helps you see a design’s structure, but it does not mean every embroiderer consciously “encoded” three worlds.

Researchers also remind us that plant motifs were often named after plants even when they had been geometrized beyond recognition. So a “tree” might be a lush flowerpot or just a few diamonds stacked on a vertical axis.

Where it appears

Ritual towels. In the embroidery of the Kyiv, Poltava and Chernihiv regions, the core of the design is a vertical, flowerpot-like plant motif, and the tree of life is one of its main elements. It is also the principal motif of the woven towels of Krolevets in northern Ukraine. Towels had ritual uses too: in Polissia, for example, people recall embroidered cloths used to drape icons.

Embroidery. Art historian Tetiana Kara-Vasylieva counts the tree of life among the motifs that reflected old beliefs and survived in ornament until the end of the 19th century. She lists local variants: the “broken tree” and the “branch” in the Poltava region; the “flower tree” or “bouquet” on towels of the Middle Dnipro region, along with the “little apple tree” and the sosonka (little pine); and “little trees” and “little pines” around Yavoriv in the west.

Pysanky. On Easter eggs the tree of life is more often shown as a flowerpot, and Hutsul eggs from the Carpathians feature two deer flanking a pine. Some researchers treat the sosonka as a separate motif (by one interpretation it depicts horsetail), so it is best not to equate it automatically with the tree of life.

How it is depicted

The tree of life has no single canonical form, but several schemes are common:

Variant	Description
Flowerpot (vazon)	a pot, vase or triangular base with symmetrical flowering branches
Tree with birds	two birds facing each other on the branches or on either side of the trunk
Tree with animals	deer, horses or other animals on either side of the trunk
Bouquet, “flower tree”	a lush flower on a stem, typical of Middle Dnipro towels
Geometric tree	“broken tree,” “little trees,” “fir tree” — in techniques that favor straight lines

The tree usually stands upright in the center of the towel end, beneath a horizontal band of ornament. The composition rests on symmetry: the left and right halves mirror each other. On pysanky, the base of the pot is often covered with dots and dashes, which are interpreted as seeds and water — a modern reading, not a folk explanation.

Colors vary by region. In the Kyiv region, embroiderers worked in red with black or red with blue; in the Poltava region bright red dominated. Our illustration uses a black trunk, green branches and red flowers — a combination that does occur, but is not “required.”

Myths and modern interpretations

“Yav, Nav and Prav.” A popular explanation says the three tiers of the tree are the worlds of “Yav,” “Nav” and “Prav,” and it turns up even in library reading lists. This triad comes from the so-called “Book of Veles.” The scholar of medieval East Slavic literature Oleg Tvorogov concluded that the text is a mid-20th-century forgery connected with the émigré Yurii Myroliubov, whose own writings use the same three terms constantly. No such names appear in ethnographic records, so this is a modern interpretation.

“A family tree.” Reading the tree of life as a genealogy, with each branch a generation, feels natural today, and many embroiderers now give their work exactly that meaning. But it is a new meaning, not a recovered “ancient” one.

“The oldest unchanging symbol.” The world tree idea is genuinely ancient, but the embroidered flowerpots of the 19th and 20th centuries also have later roots: art historians link the flowerpot motif to Renaissance influences, and some motifs came from church art. Folk art kept borrowing and reinterpreting.

The tree of life and Berehynia. A female figure with raised arms is sometimes called a “Berehynia” and seen as a variant of the tree of life. Some scholars did suggest it may be a stylized flowerpot or tree; see the Berehynia page. For the wider context of Ukrainian plant ornament, see our guide to Ukrainian embroidery symbols.