DIAKOWSKY DARIA

Date and Place of Birth: April 5th, 1942, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

Date of Interview: March 3th, 2025

Place of Interview: Toronto

Interviewer: Oksana Kuryliw

Length of Interview: 50 min

(Excerpt):

Interviewer: Have you put on many, or curated many exhibits? Any one in particular that kind of stands out? That says Yes! this is the one that I really thought was fantastic?

Daria: You know it's hard to say which was my favourite. One of the most interesting ones was the one that we called Mamyna Sorochka, in which we took the beautiful chemises that were part of the Ukrainian costume. Actually clothing. These were not costumes. These were the clothes that were worn by villagers every day. They certainly had very special ones that were worn on special occasions and Sundays, and we've been able to collect these, and to be able to present them to the entire community and to Canadians who are interested in these things. Certainly, any of the people who are interested in needlework have come to our museum to discover what there is.

And I guess the Sorochka helped me not only understand what embroidery came from that, but we were able to put on a very special presentation that allowed us to show photographs or slides of the regions from which these Sorochky came from and understanding of how they were unique to that particular region.

So, I think that was the most complex one, and one that we were able to share and repeat on a number of occasions to various groups that were interested in the embroidery of Ukraine and embroidery in general. And that was a beautiful thing to work on. We were able to add music to it, lighting. We had young girls carrying out these particular shirts because we do not allow them to be worn there. Artifacts within a museum. But they were able to carry them out and show various parts pointing to the sections that we were describing in the narrative. So it was probably the most exciting and complex one that we've made, but we've had many, many interesting exhibits, and all of them proved both challenging and very rewarding.