NOTE: The Red and White 32 x 200 cm pieces of embroidered cloths will vary from what is shown in the picture.
A rushnyk is a ritual towel, and each of these are hand embroidered onto cotton fabric in Ukraine. The word comes from ruka, meaning hand, and a regular rushnyk would be simply a towel, a piece of cloth that a person could use to wipe his or her hands. Rushnyk has acquired and is currently used in a double meaning: it retains its simple meaning of “towel” and it has also acquired the meaning of ritual object. The ritual rushnyk is a very important item to which a great deal of meaning is ascribed. It is used at every point of a Christians life with their baptism, Easter Pascha baskets, everyday life, wedding, and funeral.
Practically, rushnyki are used for giving honor/additional beauty for icons (as seen in the below picture)
A rushnik is also traditionally used to cover a faithful Orthodox Christians Easter (Pascha) basket:
For Interior Decoration on windows, tables, etc:
Weddings:
The betrothal ritual [zaruchennia] was a ceremonial step “taken to solidify the promise to marry between the two parties. The hands of the young couple and their parents were bound together with a rushnykby one of the matchmakers, who then pronounced [an incantation], "I’m not tying a knot, I’m tying your word." The young couple knelt on a ritual cloth and were blessed by the parents, after which gifts of various textiles were exchanged as a sign of the uniting of the couple and the two families.
Often the ritual towels used in wedding ceremonies were preserved for the funeral rites, when they were either placed in the coffin with the corpse or tied on the cross erected over the grave.
Ceremonial towels were integrated into all family-rituals. Rushnykywere used to welcome new-born infants, who were wrapped in them. A linen cloth was “one of the main ways of marking the transitional state of a new-born... A piece of linen was the necessary ritual object” to be used when baptizing an infant. The cloth symbolizes “the world of culture in which the child entered from the world of nature.” This cloth would be preserved to make a wedding towel, and wedding towels were preserved for funeral rituals, when they were placed in the coffin or tied to a grave cross.
In the Ukrainian funeral ritual, the use of rushnyky function in a similar way. They create a magical pathway to the world of the dead and thereby help lead the soul of the dead to repose. In some regions of Ukraine, the coffin was lowered into the grave on long woven rushnyky, which, according to folk belief, symbolized the road to the “Other World.” The rushnykwas placed not only on the coffin but also inside [it], since people believed that the angels used the ritual cloth to carry the soul of the deceased to heaven.