Vleeshal
Inheriting Knowledge Indirectly:
Traditions, Bridges, Blocks
and Rupture
24 June 2025
Vleeshal
Inheriting Knowledge
Indirectly: Traditions,
Bridges, Blocks
and Rupture
24 June 2024
The image: Darali Leli wearing ayshon, traditional wedding hair piece made by Tatyana Moskvina, monisto made by Galina Matveeva, and contemporary Udmurt dress made by Darali Leli. Photo by Elya Lugovaya
Milyausha: I am a craftswoman (though I’m not sure I like that word) specializing in carpet weaving and textile panels inspired by Bashqort ornaments. My grandmothers wove, my grandfather wove, but I had no idea about it. My grandmother, however, really cared that I knew how to do handiwork — she praised her kelin (daughter-in-law), my mother, for teaching us to knit and scolded her other daughters-in-law for not passing these skills on to their daughters. I only truly started learning the craft when I entered the Art and Graphics Faculty at Miftakhetdin Akmulla Bashkir State Pedagogical University, where I met our dean, Talgat Khasanovich Masalimov. He is a painter, a graphic artist, and a master of decorative and applied arts. In the early 2000s, he began reviving traditional Bashqort felt art. Through conversations with him, I realized how powerful traditional art is, and felt compelled to immerse myself in it.
Darali: I do not have formal training. My introduction to traditional Udmurt clothing came from rummaging through my grandmother’s wardrobe in the village of Staraya Monya and trying on my mother’s Udmurt dresses. I had looked at these garments since childhood — wondering, for example, why the neck was always covered, and why the collar always had three buttons? After graduation, I got into organizing fashion shows featuring local designers, studying contemporary dresses based on traditional cuts, and learning from Tatyana Nikitichna Moskvina, a master of Udmurt dressmaking. She, in turn, gathered her knowledge from elderly women who shared their secrets of Udmurt dressmaking with her.
Milana: I have a friend, artist Ruslan Mazlo, who works with the traditional craft of ardzhen, a reed mat weaving. He learned this skill from his mother, who got it from her mother — this craft has been passed down through his family. He transformed this craft from traditional craft into contemporary art, which now supports his livelihood and family. I work with felt-making, but I never had any experience of this craft being passed on within my family — no one in my family was involved in felt-making. I learned it from my painting teacher, Larisa Abayeva while studying in college. We became close, and I began working with her after classes.
The image: Milana Khalilova working with felt
Photo by Maxim Kerzhentsev
Aisha: Unfortunately, none of my immediate relatives — neither my mother nor my apa — taught me felt-making, shim-shi (reed weaving), or traditional patterns. As far as I know, no one taught them either. But as I got older, I realized just how skilled with their hands my apa and my mother are. My apa taught me to knit. She would buy wool, dye it, and knit for herself and our family. Knitting isn’t a traditional Kyrgyz craft, but it was a common Soviet-era practice, and my apa passed that tradition on to me. And I would like to think of knitting as a recent ancestral practice in my family.
Knowledge is not always passed down directly — it also happens through observation, just by being around. Not long ago, I was learning to dye wool, and as I caught the scent of wool steaming in a pot of boiling water, it brought back a childhood memory—the smell of warm, damp wool from my apa’s hand-knit pants drying on the radiator after I’d come from the cold. In a way, through knitting, my apa managed to preserve our family’s connection to wool-working.
Milyausha: In the documentary Miyakinskaya Rainbow — Asaly Palas. In the Masters of Folk Weaving in Bashqortostan, one of the filmmakers asks the weavers if they are passing their craft on to the next generation. One of the women replies that nowadays, no one — meaning my mother’s generation — is interested in it. Mösliämä, one of the film’s heroines and a weaver from my mother’s village, also did not understand our interest when we visited her. But for me, it was so important to meet her while she was still alive and talk to her. For her, carpets and her skills were just part of everyday life.
At Mösliämä’s, I saw a palas (a flat woven rug) with huge red roses — Bashqort women started weaving these in the second half of the 20th century, borrowing ornamentation from Ukrainian and Belarusian artisans, as well as from knitting charts, postcards, and even chocolate box packaging that was introduced around that time. Most often, patterns were passed from one weaver to another. If a kelin (a new bride) arrived in a village, she would bring a new carpet with her, and if the village hadn’t seen that pattern before, the local weavers would adopt and reproduce it. They did not sketch designs back then — they wove them directly by eye from the original carpet. New carpets were important because people rarely traveled, so creating new designs and developing ornamentation was an exciting and valuable process.
Darali: Our conversations are also a way of passing down knowledge. We are like a single organism — if I’m missing something, another person can fill in the gaps, and vice versa.
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The image: Paper ornaments-making workshop in Almaty, led by Aisha Jandosova, using templates by QAYTA. Photo by Sima Omarqulova
Kelin is a term used in Qazaq, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Uyghur, Uzbek, and Bashqort languages to address a daughter-in-law.
Ardzhen is a traditional Circassian craft of weaving mats, practiced by both men and women. These mats were commonly made from reeds.
Shim-shi or Chiy is a traditional Qazaq and Kyrgyz mat made from the stems of shi/chiy, a type of steppe reed.
Felt-making is a traditional, but not originally Circassian, wool-working technique. While Circassians used wool to create individual elements of clothing, they did not traditionally produce large, felted textiles with unified narratives or ornamentation. Felt-making as a technique is also present in Bashqort, Udmurt, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Qazaq cultures.
