Friends, today we want to tell you about an incredibly talented Ukrainian woman who has popularized Ukrainian embroidery in Crimea for more than 50 years – Vira Royik.
The woman was born on April 25, 1911 in the city of Lubny, Poltava region. Since childhood, Vira was fond of drawing, playing the piano, and choreography. At first she didn’t like embroidery at all, but over the years the girl fell more and more in love with this art.
Vira successfully worked in the Lubny artel of embroiderers, where she began to creatively rethink folk patterns and compose original works from traditional elements. They immediately began to be highlighted at exhibitions in which the young craftswoman participated.
The basis of the craftswoman’s creativity was a geometric pattern using a wide variety of embroidery techniques – cross, tightening, troianka, liakhovka, underlining, buckwheat, column. The craftswoman took the subjects for her works from the surrounding reality.
Even her right hand, damaged during the war, did not become an obstacle – Vira learned to embroider with her left hand.
On the advice of doctors, Vira Royik and her family moved to Crimea in 1952. To warm sunny Simferopol, where she really felt better. She got a job as a methodologist of decorative and applied arts at the House of Folk Art, also organized embroidery clubs in high schools, opened artistic embroidery courses at the Teacher’s House, and did embroidery.
The great merit of Vira Royik is that she was the first in the Soviet period to begin to promote Ukrainian folk embroidery, national culture and art on the sunny Crimean peninsula. To achieve this, the woman brought to life an almost fantastic idea – she created a mobile painting salon.
Vira Royik considers one of the most exciting moments in her creative activity the moment when she heard that she had been awarded the title of Honored Artist of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
For more than half a century, Vira Royik lived in Crimea and throughout all these years she tried to develop Ukrainian arts and crafts there.
On October 3, 2010, at about 4 p.m., her heart stopped. She was buried in Simferopol.
The work of Vira Sergeevna Royik has received well-deserved recognition in different countries of the world. Museums in Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Canada, Mongolia, Poland, Russia, Turkey, France, Croatia, Hungary and others have her works. She received thousands of rave reviews from Germany and America.
Photo: tusovka.kr.ua