Collection: Unique Ukrainian Handcrafted Necklaces

Gerdan necklaces, sylianky and beaded ropes — the three Ukrainian traditions

A gerdan is the long, flat Ukrainian beaded necklace woven on a loom: thousands of glass seed beads, row by row, following a chart the way embroidery follows a canvas. The old ones carried a village’s whole year — diamonds for sown fields, zigzags for water, eight-pointed stars for the sun — and were worn over the vyshyvanka on feast days. Ours keep the loom and the patterns and add poppies, sunflowers, wolves and owls to the vocabulary. A gerdan sits flat on the chest, hangs from a narrow ribbon of beads, and weighs far less than it looks.

A sylianka is its older sister, worked with needle and thread instead of a loom — a net of beads that lies close to the collarbone like lace. And the bead-crochet rope is the round, snake-like necklace, a tube of beads crocheted over thread, which is why it bends so easily and why so many of ours are, in fact, snakes.

Every necklace here is handmade in Ukraine from Czech glass seed beads; most exist once. If you are choosing for someone else, our Ukrainian gift guide sorts them by price and occasion, and the field notes explain what a gerdan is and how to read the patterns.