The Sacredness of the Sodas

ENStraw gardens that require a lot of diligence, patience and peace of mind from their maker are coming back to our homes and our holidays. Thanks to the efforts of folk artists, the familiar traditional decorations for Christmas, Easter and weddings - sodai - are reborn and are once again becoming an unforgettable part of our homes. Wonderfully perfect and intricate, they are perhaps one of the most mysterious of our old folk crafts. Today it is difficult to say how old the custom of straw garden binding is, as we have no historical or ethnographic records to attest to the time of its origin, but it is known that the production of various objects from plant fibres and wicker is one of the oldest crafts of mankind. Sodai are decorations for the inside of the house, strung out of straw connected by thread or horsehair, and hung from the ceiling beams, usually in the best corner of the room, near the seat of honor at the table. A Lithuanian sodas is usually a combination of hexagonal units made of straw, reeds or other stems strung together on a thread. The simplest and most common straw garden is octahedron-shaped, consisting of two pyramids with a common base. One pyramid has its apex pointing upwards, the other downwards (Fig. 1). Smaller octahedral units of the same shape are attached to the four corners of the base of the pyramids and to the lower apex of the pyramid. [p. 41].

• Etnologija / Ethnology
• Menotyra / Arts