Vasilisa the beautiful

Vasilisa the Beautiful is the heroine of many Russian fairy tales; she could be a good witch or a daughter of the sea king. She gets help from animals, birds, plants and forces of nature. Her dress is always decorated with pearls. It’s no accident that her image on the scarf is depicted with ornaments and elements of Russian wooden architecture. After all, wooden architecture is the oldest type architecture in Russia; it’s the very soul of Russian traditional dwellings. Just like a man cannot live without a soul, and isn’t content with only material things, houses in a country of endless forests couldn’t be just buildings, they were works of art created by talented carpenters, who were the masters of their craft. Peculiar wooden patterns decorated the buildings, guarded the house and the family. Many well-known patterns, inherited by almost all nations of the globe, originate from the upper Paleolithic (rhombic and meandered line patterns). We easily identify “Greek” patterns, but we have no idea that they have been with us since ancient times – our ancestors decorated their homes with them back in the 9th century. The tale about Frog’s skin is the tale about body as the soul's retreat, as its home.