<i>“I was embroidering the towel with a sincere hand and praying to God for fate and godsend”</i>: hybrid beliefs presented on Ukrainian <i>rushnyks</i>

Abstract The paper is devoted to such a unique phenomenon of so-called written or fixed folklore, as Ukrainian epigraphic rushnyks containing a specific verbal formula “I was embroidering the towel with a sincere hand and praying to God for fate and godsend” which were popular at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Considering the communication of these towels according to the well-known multimodal scheme, the author states that such rushnyks with inscriptions could use all five modes (spatial, visual, linguistic, aural, and gestural one), having already become not quite rushnyks in its traditional sense. On the one hand, these embroidered towels functioned as drawings or open books (locating on the wall with two hanging ends). On the other hand, they also could be gifted for the road, thus symbolizing the path, as it was typical for more traditional and older samples. Concerning modern interpretation of these towels, hybrid beliefs and identities are frequently connected with them. In addition, the article claims that rushnyks ’ inscriptions, functioning simultaneously in several roles (in particular, they could be both embroidered and sung), provoke us to develop more deeply the theory of speech acts in linguistic pragmatics.