Never one to resist a pretty box, I had to bring this one home with me when I saw it in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago. The brightly painted peasant girl looks so carefree, straight out of a soviet era myth.
I would tell you all about it, but I can't read Cyrillic. Can anybody help, please? Pectopah is my limit. My mother in law used to write to her sister in Cyrillic script, proper joined up writing, but she is no longer with us.
The flowers on the side are especially pretty, because with the decoration on the lid, they needn't have bothered with the sides, but they did. It is a shame that the camera angle has played havoc with the right angles.
The box measures a little under 8 inches by 5 inches, and is perfect for keeping my circular knitting needles in, with stitch holders and nappy pins and a needle gauge. I shall never get used to the metric needle sizes, so the gauge is very handy because it shows the old sizes too. Why did a perfectly straightforward system have to be done away with, so a size 9 became two and three quarter millimetres? Thus speaks an old gal who learnt to knit over fifty years ago.
When I saw this girl in a red sarafan, I realized that this is our Russian beauty. Although a box was made in the distant 1980 in Ukraine (then in the Ukrainian republic of the SSR) in Chernovtsy at the souvenir factory "Bukovina". The box stood at a rate of Soviet rubles about 8 dollars. They called her "Alyonushka", a character from a Russian folk tale. That's all that is written on these labels.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how this box got into your distant country ...
Thank you Margarita! I am so glad you have seen it! There are Ukrainians in this country as a result of the Second World War - most of the old generation have died by now. It could be that someone went back on a visit to the Ukraine and brought back this souvenir.
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