Embroidery was not an ornament. It was information. The stitching on the collar and cuff conveyed gender, age group, social position, wealth, and region. In the Biłgoraj Plain, this inscription took one of the most austere forms in the country: geometry arranged in stripes, one color per stripe, on homespun linen. This chapter is not about symbolism, which no one can confirm, but about what can be quantified: colors, stitches, places on the shirt, names, and dates.
I. BIŁGORAJSKA PLAIN: WHERE, WHEN, AND FOR WHAT REASON
The Biłgoraj costume – more often referred to as the Biłgoraj-Tarnogród costume in ethnographic literature – was worn in the villages of the Biłgoraj Plain, on both sides of the upper course of the Tanew River, in forest areas extending to the Sieniawa Forests, with its eastern border against the Solska Primeval Forest. This is not a relic of the Middle Ages: the costume was in daily use still in the first decades of the 20th century, began to be abandoned in the interwar period, and the war completed the process. The canonical description is Barbara Kaznowska-Jarecka's monograph "Biłgoraj-Tarnogród Costume" from 1958, issue 8 of the Lesser Poland part of the "Atlas of Polish Folk Costumes." The youngest field records date from 1956 – from a time when the costume was practically no longer worn.
The material was homespun. Men's – made of wool and linen, including wool from black sheep, women's – almost exclusively linen. The tone was austere: white and brown for men, white for women. All the color of this costume lies in the embroidery. A paradox: the most intense embellishment occurred in the interwar period, when the density of the embroidery became a sign of a farm's prosperity – precisely when the costume was already on its way out.
It is worth knowing what sustained this land, as it explains the local proficiency in fiber. Biłgoraj was a town of sieve makers: the guild operated under a privilege from around 1670, confirmed by Jan III Sobieski in 1693. In 1802, craftsmen constituted 67 percent of townspeople, and nine out of ten of them made sieves; at its peak, about one and a half million pieces annually were produced here, sold as far as Moscow and Tbilisi. The division of labor is crucial: men traded, women made nets – horsehair weaving, i.e., weaving from horsehair on a krojsa, a type of loom. Thus, weaving workshops stood in Biłgoraj homes, and women worked for years with thread counted to the piece. The same hands embroidered shirts.
II. COLORS AND STITCHES: WHAT THE SOURCES SAY
Media legend speaks of two colors. Ethnography is more precise: decorations were made in red, black, and blue, sometimes navy blue, and occasionally green. Red and black dominate and give this embroidery its recognizable tone, but blue is not excluded from the set. The background is always the same: white linen canvas.
Stitches varied according to the gender of the garment worn. Men's shirts were decorated with simple cross-stitch and black topstitching, while women's were adorned with chain stitch and simple flat stitch, using cotton thread. The embroideries were monochromatic and arranged in stripes, with the same motifs repeated on the shirt, apron, and headscarf – one set of patterns for the entire ensemble.
Elżbieta Piskorz-Branekowa's measurement drawings, made from the collections of the Zamość Museum and the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, delve down to the level of individual elements. The collar of a woman's shirt is almost exclusively red. The cuff – red, with chain stitch. The apron – always red. The zawiecie, a head covering for married women, is sometimes red or black. The zatyczka is a narrow strip of linen surrounding a wooden chamełka.
Where exactly is the embroidery on the Biłgoraj costume?
- Collar (binding) – a narrow band around the neck, almost exclusively red.
- Cuffs – sleeve finishing, red, chain stitch.
- Front of the shirt – a stripe running along the opening under the neck.
- Shoulder patches – rectangular inserts connecting the sleeve to the body in a shoulder-patched shirt; the place of greatest fabric tension.
- Apron – three stripes: two along the bottom edge, one along the seam line.
- Zawiecie and zatyczka – elements of a married woman's head covering, constructed on a wooden chamełka.
The ornamentation belongs to the family of geometric embroidery of the entire Lublin region: rhombuses, triangles, six-pointed stars, cross-stitches. Experts can discern the differences from a step away: the Krzczonów variant is finer, the Biłgoraj variant is bolder, with Lesser Poland influences and plant motifs interspersed among the figures. It's not one "Lublin embroidery," but four schools: Krzczonów, Biłgoraj, Zamość, and Chełm.
III. FROM LINEN TO NEEDLE: ANATOMY OF THE WORK
Before the first stitch was made, the fabric had to be produced. The entire chain – from the flax field through fiber processing to weaving on the loom – was carried out by one person in one household. Folk weaving began to decline from the mid-19th century, when mechanization lowered the price of factory-made material, but it held out longest in the countryside. The consequence is crucial for embroidery: homespun linen has a visible, regular weave. The thread can be counted with a finger and eye.
Hence the division of Polish folk embroidery into counted and non-counted. In counted embroideries, the pattern is not drawn on the fabric – it is measured on the warp and weft threads, just like a sieve mesh on a krojsa. No tracing paper or template is needed, but memory and a pattern book: a strip of fabric with rows of embroidered samples, letters, and motifs, which once made, served for decades.
Stitches of Polish folk embroidery: two families
- Counted (pattern measured on fabric threads): half cross-stitch, cross-stitch, chevron, plaits, interlacing.
- Non-counted (pattern freely executed): flat, raised, crocheted, chain stitch, satin stitch, shaded, appliqués.
- Dialectal names – local varieties had their own terms, for example "Istebna cross-stitch" or "Janina stitch."
- Biłgoraj, men's clothing – simple cross-stitch plus black topstitching.
- Biłgoraj, women's clothing – chain stitch and simple flat stitch, with cotton thread.
Threads are the other half of the equation. Initially, only natural raw materials and a narrow palette were available: white, black, red, burgundy. Red came from madder, blue from woad and imported indigo. The industrial revolution put factory-made threads – wool, cotton, silk, and even metallic – into embroiderers' hands, and it is factory mouliné, not plant dyes, that is responsible for most of the brightest preserved colors. Stories of colors that wouldn't fade through generations of river washing should be taken with a grain of salt.
IV. ARMOR, STAMP, PRICE LIST: WHAT WAS IT FOR
Folk embroidery in Poland developed from the 17th–18th centuries but flourished in the second half of the 19th century, alongside the crystallization of regional costumes. And here is a fact that tourist brochures ignore: originally, embroidery served to reinforce seams, and only later became decoration. "Armor" is therefore not a metaphor, but a construction. Just overlay the list of places where Biłgoraj embroidery sits on a map of shirt tensions: collar, cuff, shoulder patch, bottom edge of the apron. These are precisely the points that wear out first.
The second function is a stamp. Embroidery was used to identify the owner's gender, age group, social position, wealth, and regional affiliation. The skill was passed down the female line: girls learned for years under the tutelage of mothers and grandmothers, without a guild, without an apprenticeship, without paperwork. This is a fundamental difference from sieve-making next door – there was privilege and mastery, here family and memory.
The third function is a price list. The density of the embroidery was a public valuation of the household, displayed on a person on Sunday. The scale can be seen in the Kashubian example: a cap embroidered with silver by Marianna Okuniewska was worth twelve thalers. This was not haberdashery, but wealth worn on the head.
And a warning. In folk beliefs, red was considered a color protecting against demons, associated with fire, love, and struggle – this belief is nationwide and well-documented. However, the elaborated "code" of meanings attributed to Biłgoraj embroiderers, with black as the earth and red as the blood of the lineage, is a later, popularizing interpretation. There is no source for it, so it is not in this text. The true code of this embroidery is prosaic and more interesting: it is information about a person, not about the cosmos.
V. ŻUKOWO AND WDZYDZE: WHO SAVED KASHUBIAN EMBROIDERY
In Kashubia, one can pinpoint specific places and names – a rarity in Polish embroidery. The starting point was the embroidery workshop of the Norbertine convent in Żukowo, working for the church: drawn-thread embroidery, flat stitch, metallic threads wrapped around a silk core. The convent was suppressed in 1834, but ten sisters remained on pension and continued teaching; the last Norbertine of Żukowo was Sister Agnieszka Bojanowska (1786–1862). It was her students who took the craft outside the convent walls: Marianna Okuniewska no longer embroidered chasubles, but linen aprons, blouses, and doilies.
The second point is Wdzydze Kiszewskie. Izydor Gulgowski (1874–1925) arrived here as a teacher on October 15, 1898. A year later, he married Teodora Fethke, born on September 24, 1860, in Wielkie Chełmy, trained in painting at the Lette School in Berlin. In 1906, they bought an eighteenth-century cottage from farmer Michał Hinc and set up a museum in it – the first open-air museum in Polish lands. In 1911, Izydor published "Von einem unbekannten Volke in Deutschland" in Berlin.
Teodora took on the embroidery work. There was not enough ethnographic material to copy old patterns, so she reconstructed them, drawing inspiration from Kashubian furniture making, ceramics, and church art. She trained over a hundred embroiderers, and her designs were exhibited in Berlin, Gdańsk, Warsaw, Poznań, and Toruń. This is how the Wdzydze school came into being. It was not a rediscovery of tradition, but its conscious design from regional sources.
The third point is interwar Żukowo. In 1926, an embroidery circle was launched there with instructor Kazimiera Hinc, meeting at the Gleinert family's inn. From 1928, the sisters Jadwiga and Zofia Ptach, students of the last Norbertine nuns, worked on a larger scale, supported by Maksymilian Lewandowski from Kościerzyna; their variation, based on vestments from the convent, is known today as the Żukowo school. In January 1932, the School of Kashubian Folk Industry was opened in Kartuzy, run by Franciszka Majkowska (1882–1967). In 1939, the Żukowo circle had fifty members. Everything ended in September.
Kashubian Embroidery Schools and Their Palettes
- Żukowska – Ptach sisters; seven colors with a predominance of blues, very little red; tulips, clovers, pomegranate, palmette.
- Wdzydzka – Teodora Gulgowska; ten colors: seven basic plus violet, pink, apricot, and brown.
- Wejherowska – Franciszka Majkowska and Anna Konkel; all colors equally represented.
- Tucholska – Helena Grabkowska; at least eleven shades of gold and amber.
- Borowiacka – patroness Honorata Bloch; tones of golden autumn: brown, orange, yellow, olive.
- Chojnicka – lots of blue, red practically only in cherries, delicate patterns.
- Pucka – varieties of blue; waves, nets, starfish, sea holly.
- Słupska – eight colors, four shades of blue, no red.
- Gdańska – exclusively shades of blue.
VI. THE REST OF THE COUNTRY: SEVEN COLORS, WHITE LACEWORK, ŁOWICZ CONTRAST
The canon of Kashubian embroidery consists of seven colors: three shades of blue – light, medium, and navy – as well as green, yellow, red, and black; in Kashubian, jasnomòdri, mòdri, cemnomòdri, zelony, żôłti, czerwòny, czôrny. This scheme evolved from practice, not a top-down code. Barbara Rezmer, in her guide "How to embroider in Kashubian," lists twenty-eight names for embroidery floss colors. The seven colors are a compositional rule, not an inventory of spools.
Kurpie has two schools within one region. Puszcza Biała adheres to red and black in striped patterns on linen, with geometric stars, rhombuses, zigzags, cross-stitch, and chain stitch – visually, it is the closest relative to Biłgoraj in Poland. Puszcza Zielona went the other way: white embroidery on white linen, using openwork stitches where the effect is carried by texture, not color. Podhale reduced embroidery to a single motif: the parzenica on trousers and belts, in red or black, using chain stitch and satin stitch.
Łowicz is the opposite of Biłgoraj: maximum contrast, red, orange, strong green, navy blue, yellow, and violet, large roses, poppies, and rosettes arranged in stripes, using satin stitch, chain stitch, knot stitch, and rice stitch. Opoczno shows how quickly such a school can change: the oldest Opoczno embroideries were made with white or red backstitch and straight stitch, and only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries did the cross-stitch combined with other counted stitches and flat embroidery create a style recognizable at first glance. Four strategies, one rule: the pattern must be effective from a distance, in motion, on a person.
VII. 1942–1989: DISPLACEMENT, FIRE, AND CEPELIA
The question "why did the Biłgoraj costume disappear" has a more specific answer than "because fashion changed." On the night of November 27-28, 1942, Aktion Zamość began – a German displacement operation led by Heinrich Himmler and Odilo Globocnik. It lasted until August 1943 and covered four counties: Zamość, Hrubieszów, Tomaszów, and Biłgoraj. Over 110,000 people were displaced, including about 30,000 children; about 10,000 of them died or went missing, and about 4,500 were destined for Germanization. The system included transit camps and confiscation of property.
Confiscation of property in practice meant a dowry chest left in the room. Clothes were not bought in a store – they were accumulated over generations, a woman brought them into marriage and passed them on. Evicting a hundred thousand people from their homes in nine months simultaneously broke the material chain and the chain of learning: shirts were lost, and the continuity of showing how they were made was lost. In the summer of 1944, Puszcza Solska near Osuchy became the site of the greatest losses for the Polish independence partisans. This is the context for the phrase "the costume was abandoned after the war."
In Kashubia, the fate was different but no less harsh. On June 16, 1932, a fire destroyed the Gulgowski museum; the cottage was rebuilt in 1936. September 1939 interrupted the work of the Żukowo circle. Franciszka Majkowska worked at the Kartuzy Ernährungsamt throughout the occupation. She returned to embroidery after the war: in 1956, she received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and Art, and the course she led in 1957 in Wejherowo marked the beginning of the Wejherowo school.
Then came Cepelia. The Central Office of Folk and Artistic Industry was established in 1949 by the Economic Committee of the Council of Ministers, headed by Zofia Szydłowska. The machinery was immense and – contrary to popular belief – substantively well-structured. In 1955 alone, art commissions held 74 meetings, evaluated 5517 designs, accepted 3483, and sent 3119 for production. In 1958, the Artistic Council and the Design Department were established, and products were shown at Expo in Brussels; from 1960, ethnographic assessment commissions operated, and in 1971, a Scientific Council was added. Approximately five thousand artists collaborated with Cepelia.
The scale shows what it truly was: the Zakopane Pattern Workshops alone employed nearly 250 people plus 150 outworkers in the mid-1960s, and the annual production value in 1965 amounted to 34 million zlotys. This is what craftsmanship transformed into industry looks like. Cepelia provided embroiderers with markets, materials, and money, and in the process turned regional patterns into catalog items – in cooperatives in Opoczno, Skoczów, or Maków, traditional rules were not always observed. By the late 1980s, the quality of products declined, and in the 1990s, the network of hundreds of outlets shrunk to a dozen.
Concurrently, the state took over Wdzydze. Teodora Gulgowska sold her collections to the State Treasury as early as 1929, becoming their custodian; in 1948–1949, the collection was transferred to the Pomeranian Museum in Gdańsk. She died on February 21, 1951, and was laid to rest next to her husband on the grounds of her own museum.
VIII. WHAT REMAINS TODAY — AND WHY NOWROCKY CHOOSES THE NEEDLE
On October 12, 2015, Kashubian embroidery of the Żukowo school was added to the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The decision was received from Deputy Minister Magdalena Gawin by embroiderers Maria Płotka, Bernadeta Reglińska, and Martyna Płotka; the application was prepared by the Żukowo Beekeeping Skansen Foundation.
"I remember times when embroidery was forgotten, now it has revived. Our competitions receive 300–400 works every year."
The numbers behind this quote are small and very specific. The circle led by Anna Barsowska and Salomea Rzeszewicz then had twenty-nine members aged from twelve to seventy-eight. One room, three generations, several hundred works annually. This is what living craftsmanship looks like when it has ceased to be a profession but has not yet become an exhibit.
On the Biłgoraj side, it's harder, because there is no unbroken line of teaching – there is reconstruction from documentation. The Museum of Biłgoraj Land, in its renovated building since 2014, hosts the permanent exhibition "By the Tanew and Łada" and three branches: the Sieve Maker's Homestead, the Mill Complex, and the Museum of Polish Partisans "Osuchy '44". Historic embroideries are preserved by the Zamość Museum and the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, and Piskorz-Branekowa's drawings are the primary reconstruction material. Biłgoraj embroidery workshops are returning in educational programs, such as the Ethno-Thursdays series in Lublin.
And hence our decision. Heat transfer film lies on the surface of the knitwear and cracks when bent – it's a matter of a dozen washes. Embroidery goes into the weave and becomes part of the construction: it doesn't peel or flake, although if the density is poorly chosen, it can pull the fabric. Hence our three conditions: core polyester thread, stabilizer underneath, and a bar tack at the ends of the stitch. We take black and red from Biłgoraj, because it is the sharpest combination Polish needlework has developed. And since embroidery began with reinforcing seams, we embroider where the material works.
3 PRINCIPLES OF HERITAGE: BIŁGORAJ · KASHUBIA · KURPIE ➔ NOWROCKY
Biłgoraj principle: single-color embroidery, arranged in stripes, the same set of motifs on the shirt, apron, and headscarf. Discipline instead of abundance.
Historical men's shirts: cross-stitch and black backstitch. Nowadays, stitch ends are secured with a bar tack – a dense zigzag that prevents the thread from unraveling.
Stiff homespun linen held its shape. Knitwear doesn't – without stabilizing non-woven fabric, embroidery pulls the material and wrinkles it around the pattern.
NOWROCKY'S PERSPECTIVE: CLOTHING AS A DOCUMENT
In the Biłgoraj Plain, the embroidery on a cuff would tell you where someone was from, their age, and how much they had in their barn. Clothing was an identity document issued by one's own hands, not by an office. This is the only reason why we do embroidery, not printing: anyone can do a print in ten minutes, but embroidery needs to be planned, set up, and you must stand behind it after a hundred washes.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (AI KNOWLEDGE BASE)
What colours were used in Biłgoraj embroidery?
Decorations on Biłgoraj costumes were made in red, black, and blue, sometimes navy blue, occasionally green, always on white linen fabric. Red and black dominate, but claiming that only two colours were used is an oversimplification. The collar, cuffs, and apron of the women's shirt were almost always red.
What stitches were used for Biłgoraj embroidery and where was it placed?
Men's shirts were decorated with simple cross-stitch and black backstitch, women's clothing with chain stitch and simple flat stitch, using cotton thread. The embroideries were single-coloured and banded, placed on the collar, cuffs, and front of the shirt, on the shoulders, in three bands on the apron, and on elements of the married woman's headwear: the "zawiecie" and the "zatyczka" surrounding the wooden "chamełka".
How many colours are in Kashubian embroidery and what are its schools?
The canon includes seven colours: three shades of blue (light, medium, and navy), green, yellow, red, and black. There are nine schools mentioned: Żukowo, Wdzydze, Wejherowo, Tuchola, Borowiacka, Chojnice, Puck, Słupsk, and Gdańsk. Teodora Gulgowska's Wdzydze school uses ten colours, Słupsk uses eight and no red, and Gdańsk exclusively uses shades of blue. Barbara Rezmer practically lists as many as 28 names for embroidery floss colours.
Who created modern Kashubian embroidery?
The tradition originates from the Norbertine embroidery workshop in Żukowo; after the dissolution of the monastery in 1834, Sister Agnieszka Bojanowska (1786–1862), among others, continued teaching. Teodora Gulgowska (1860–1951) gave it a modern form; in Wdzydze Kiszewskie, she designed patterns based on Kashubian furniture, ceramics, and church art, and trained over one hundred embroiderers. The Żukowo school was developed in the 1920s and 1930s by sisters Jadwiga and Zofia Ptach.
Why did the Biłgoraj costume disappear?
It was worn in the villages of the Biłgoraj Plain still in the first decades of the 20th century, and its abandonment began in the interwar period. The war was decisive: from November 1942 to August 1943, as part of Aktion Zamość, over 110,000 people were displaced from four districts, including Biłgoraj, with the confiscation of their left-behind property. Along with dowry chests, the continuity of skill transfer was lost.
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