Motanka dolls

Hanna Mariienko with the giant motanka doll she made for the Brighton & Hove Ukrainian community’s Ethno Echo cultural event, held as part of the Brighton Fringe Festival on 3 May 2025, and other motanka dolls she made in her Oberig (Amulet) Workshop.


The motanka doll is an interesting thing. Researchers still can’t decide whether it was used by Ukrainian women in the past as an amulet – something that would be placed in a home to bring prosperity, or something people would give to soldiers going to war, to keep them safe – or whether it was just used as a children’s toy. We now think that it could have been a combination of both. In the current times, we give these dolls as amulets, and we hope that they can keep the people who receive them safe.

A lot of what we know about the modern motanka is to do with things that Ukrainians invented more or less recently. Unfortunately we don’t have many reliable sources that can tell us what the colours and symbols traditionally meant. Some researchers say that we only have a few old books about motankas, and there isn’t anything in them about motankas being amulets, or about their colour symbolism. Other people say that those books were written in the 19th century, and the authors only went to a few villages to do their research, but there are modern Ukrainians who were told by their own grandmothers and great-grandmothers that motankas are amulet dolls, and why their great-grandmothers used particular colours when making them. I don’t really think we can know for sure.

So it’s all a mixture – a bit of passed-down knowledge, a bit of fan fiction, a bit of academia, a bit of folklore. But I think we can see one of the most important reasons for art and for folklore here. It is needed to heal people and help people in their times of trauma. We can definitely say that these are now amulet dolls, because we started sending them to the soldiers on the front line, and the soldiers say that they keep them safe, so we have given the dolls this meaning. This is our ancient and modern folklore: it’s the combination of the ancient stuff and the response of the Ukrainian nation and modern young people to the ongoing war.

Vladyslava Bondar



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