Cloth is a rather expensive material in nomadic culture, so each of its shreds and patches was always used secondarily. It is a “participant” in wedding, funeral, and memorial ceremonies, and the rag also appears in hospitality traditions. In Kazakh, the patch “qūraq” is derived from the word “qūru” and has two meanings. One is “death”, “die”, “disappear”, “vanish”, “destroy”, and the other is “create”, “make”, “build”, “connect”. Two mutually exclusive semantic meanings are demonstrated here: “from destruction to creation”, which is inherent in the semantic content of the patchwork things themselves: from death to birth, from chaos to harmony, from burial to marriage, etc., which we interpret as a symbolic expression of the duality of the world.
The quilt “qūraq körpe” (or several pieces of it) is an important part of a Kazakh bride’s dowry, made in traditional times mainly from ritual rags – zhyrtys – collected over many years in special chests and passed from generation to generation, from the older woman to the younger. Qūraq körpe can be called the union of opposites and a projection of the starry sky, a projection of life.
