How Far Back Can the Faceless Cloth Doll “Motanka” Really Be Traced?

There is a small doll made by rolling and wrapping cloth and tying it with thread. The head is wrapped in a scarf, a skirt and apron are wound around the waist, and a red sash is tied on. It has no arms or legs, and nothing is drawn on its face. In Ukrainian it is called “motanka” (мотанка), or “lialka-motanka” (лялька-мотанка).

This doll is often introduced with claims that “the face is left blank to ward off evil” or that it “traces back to the Trypillia culture.” What follows draws, as of September 2026, on academic sources including the entry “Folk toys” (2011) in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ЕСУ), the state encyclopedia Velyka ukrainska entsyklopediia (ВУЕ), and a 2025 paper by a researcher at the National Historical and Ethnographic Reserve “Pereiaslav” on its own holdings, as well as the Ministry of Culture’s national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. We also look at where these two claims come from.

A Name from “Winding”

Old Names and Current Names

“Motanka” comes from the verb motaty (мотати), meaning “to wind.” A 2025 paper by Nataliia Demianenko of the Pereiaslav reserve states that the name comes from the method of making it by winding cloth.

Encyclopedias use other names as well. The ЕСУ entry “Folk toys” writes “knotted dolls” (вузлові ляльки); ВУЕ gives its headword as “knotted doll” (Вузлова лялька) and lists “motanka” and “lialka-motanka” as alternate names. In villages, the ЕСУ entry states, the doll was also called “kukla” (кукла) or “baba” (баба).

No Needle: Wound and Tied

Demianenko’s paper documents seven motankas held by the Pereiaslav reserve. In 2009, at the request of a researcher at the reserve, they were made by a woman born in 1948, from the village of Vinyntsi in Kyiv oblast, following what she had learned from her grandmother, who was born in 1902.

According to the paper, five of the dolls take a female form, made by rolling cloth into a shape like a scroll and tying it wherever needed, without any needle. The head is wrapped in a scarf, cloth is wound around the waist like a skirt, an apron is put on in front, and a red sash is tied around it. There are no arms or legs, and no eyes or nose on the face. The tallest is 33 centimeters and the smallest 19, the size determined by the size of the cloth used. The remaining two are swaddled infant figures made by wrapping and tying a woman’s scarf.

The same paper records, from an interview with this woman, that as a child she had about 20 cloth dolls, each with its own name, and that some dolls could be made quickly by bundling hay or straw.

Cloth, Grass, Straw, Bread: Comparing Kinds of Dolls

The ЕСУ states that the most widely made dolls in villages were handmade ones of cloth, straw, grass, and corn. Listing the dolls found in the sources gives the following.

Dolls in the Historical Record

As an early example of the doll appearing in written records, a 2025 paper by Kozoriz of the Nizhyn regional history museum cites two Volyn court records. One is a complaint about villagers who “went to a neighboring village carrying a kukla” in 1562 and got into a brawl; the other concerns people who were beaten while traveling from village to village carrying a doll in the same way, in 1573. The paper, drawing on the ethnologist Stepan Kylymnyk and the historian Orest Levytsky, frames this as an Easter doll custom. However, whether this “kukla” was a wrapped cloth doll cannot be determined from the records the paper cites.

According to ЕСУ (2006), one of the first people to study children’s play and toys was Marko Hrushevsky, a priest in the village of Subotiv, in what is now Cherkasy oblast, who published a record of children’s games in volume 86 of the journal Kievskaia starina in 1904. ЕСУ describes his work Children in the Customs and Beliefs of the Ukrainian People as one of the earliest studies of children’s ethnography.

From the late 20th century, Oleksandr Naiden and the painter Liudmyla Orlova surveyed and collected dolls from around the country, and their collection is now at the National Museum of Toys in Kyiv, a 2021 paper by Stakhurska-Kozoriz states. Naiden is also the author of the ЕСУ entry “Folk toys.”

Why No Face?

The explanation for the absence of a face differs by source.

• Demianenko’s paper (2025): the 2009 interview recorded the belief that evil could enter the doll through the eyes and nose of a face, and that villages always feared the evil eye. The same paper notes that in a few rare cases a cross was stitched onto the face or eyes and a nose were drawn on with soot
• Stakhurska-Kozoriz’s paper (2021): explains the prevalence of faceless dolls in connection with beliefs about the soul
• ЕСУ (2011): does not touch on whether the doll had a face, but states that handmade toys in villages, until around the end of the 1960s, also served as a protective charm (оберіг) alongside education and play

All of these explanations come from interviews and research of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Among the sources checked for this article, none showed how 19th-century ethnography described the reason for the absence of a face.

Whose Claim Is “It Traces Back to the Trypillia Culture”?

One also comes across introductions that link the motanka’s origins to the Trypillia culture, a farming culture of the pre-Christian era. Among the encyclopedias and papers checked for this article, none made this claim.

What the encyclopedias and papers state is more modest. ЕСУ describes the iconography of the knotted doll of the central Dnipro region as the “most archaic” among toys, and explains it as “representing the figure of a spring fertility goddess.” Kozoriz’s paper holds that the doll played an important role in pre-Christian ritual, and situates it within a “dual faith” in which pre-Christian and Christian belief overlapped. Dual faith is covered in the article on Ukraine’s folk spirits. Both are scholarly interpretations, and no primary source demonstrating a link to the Trypillia culture could be confirmed.

The “Kniahynia” Now Widespread

According to ЕСУ, what is now widespread in Ukraine is a knotted-doll form called “kniahynia” (княгиня, meaning “princess”), based on the traditional iconography of the central Dnipro region, created by makers such as S. Hrybak, S. Rak, and O. Prydivarova. The entry also names makers of traditional dolls in other forms.

Demianenko’s paper also states that old handmade dolls have vanished from everyday life and are now being remade based on the testimony of elders and historical materials. It follows that the motanka most often seen today is, in many cases, not the very doll children in villages once played with, but a new doll modeled on it.

Not on the National Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory

Checking Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture’s national inventory of intangible cultural heritage elements — through the additions made by Ministry of Culture Order No. 700 of June 23, 2026 (up to protection number 126) — there is no entry for the motanka or dollmaking.