Tkachenko

Tkach is the Ukrainian word for a weaver, and Tkachenko is built off it with the ending that means his son. The suffix marks the country as much as the trade: Tkachenko is the central and eastern Ukrainian form of the name western Ukraine says as Tkachuk. One occupation made two surnames on either side of a line drawn through the country, and a bearer can read from his own spelling roughly where his people stood.

German made Weber of the same job and English made Weaver, and Tkachenko belongs with Smith, Taylor and Thatcher: the byname that stuck because a man's trade was the most useful thing anyone could say about him. Tkachenko records a job, and it is numerous because cloth was wanted in every settlement and made in most of them.

A loom does three things and then does them again. Shedding raises and lowers the heald frames so the warp, the threads running the length of the cloth, parts into a clear gap called the shed. Picking sends the weft across through that gap. Battening drives the new pick up against the fell of the cloth with the reed, and without that blow the spacing would be wide and irregular: not cloth at all.

The weft rode on a shuttle thrown hand to hand with a picking stick, and width was the limit on a man working alone. A broadloom was one too wide for the weaver to pass the shuttle through the shed himself, so it took a second pair of hands, often an apprentice and always an expense, until John Kay's flying shuttle of 1733. Twills and satins wanted more skill and more hours, so the cloth of ordinary houses came off plain and the pattern went on afterwards, printed from wood blocks or embroidered.

Wool was the predominant fibre of medieval Europe, and behind it came linen and nettlecloth for the lower classes. That second rank is the household's half of the story: flax, nettle and hemp grew where a family lived and went from the ground to the loom with no merchant standing in between, while cotton was an import that reached Sicily and Spain only in the 9th century. Hemp made canvas and heavy cloth, and the difference decided what a house could clothe and equip itself with.

The loom was never the constraint. The supply of thread has always limited the output of a weaver, and while spinning was done on a spindle one man at a loom could eat the work of several spinners. The great wheel replaced the spindle method and the treadle-driven spinning wheel followed soon after; the loom was unaltered, but with thread arriving fast enough it could now be worked continuously.

Handloom weaving was done by both sexes, with men the majority partly because battening took strength, and the household worked around the man at the frame. The women of the house spun the thread he needed and attended to the finishing, and he worked at home, sometimes in a well-lit attic room where the light was best and the winter days longest. Some houses wove only what they wore. Others held loomweights far past their own needs, and those were the ones with cloth to sell.

The weaver worked at home and marketed his cloth at fairs. As weaving became an urban craft the men doing it applied to establish guilds, which set the training a man needed before he could call himself a weaver and the standard his cloth had to meet. The guild also settled who was allowed to sell: that right belonged to the cloth merchant of a city's weavers guild, who stood between the tradesmen at their looms and whoever wanted the finished piece.

By the 13th century this had hardened into the putting-out system. The merchant bought the wool, gave it to the weaver, bought back the produce and set the rates of pay, and the wealth it made him is still legible in the wool towns of eastern England at Norwich, Bury St Edmunds and Lavenham. Then the 14th century took the ground away: the Black Death of 1346 cut the population by as much as half, and arable land that could no longer be manned went under sheep. Traders from Florence and Bruges bought the wool, landlords had it woven beyond the reach of the towns and their guilds, and weavers who had worked in their own homes were gathered into purpose-built buildings with hours and output regulated.

Guilds were mostly men's institutions, and a woman commonly entered one as a master's wife, widow or daughter. The cloth trades are where the exceptions gather. At Rouen women had held full master status in 7 of the city's 112 guilds since the 13th century, and exclusively female guilds multiplied in the 17th century at Paris, Rouen and Cologne. Clare Crowston's work names the trades behind them: linen drapers, hemp merchants and seamstresses.

Petro Fedorovych Tkachenko was born on 21 December 1878 in the village of Syniavtsi, in Sosnytsia county near Chernihiv, and lost his sight at nine. At sixteen he was apprenticed to the kobzar Andriy Hayduk, then studied three years under Tereshko Parkhomenko. Opanas Slastion wrote in 1906 that he knew three dumy, the sung epic poems: the duma of the brother and sister, the duma of the widow and her three sons, and the captives' lament. In 1905 he lived two months in the house of the historian Dmytro Yavornytsky, director of the Yekaterinoslav Historic Museum, playing to visitors and illustrating Yavornytsky's public lectures.

Heorhiy Kyrylovych Tkachenko (1898-1993) reached the same instrument from the opposite direction, and nothing on record joins the two men but the word they carried. He finished at the Kharkiv Art School, qualified as an architect at Vkhutemas in Moscow in 1929, designed many of the parks around the Moscow city centre and moved to Kyiv in 1964. He had taken the kobzar art from the Slobozhan kobzar Petro Drevchenko, and he was the last living example of the Slobozhan bandura tradition played on a traditional folk instrument: eight dumy, five psalms, twelve historic songs, 29 folk songs and five dances. He is counted the founder of the movement for authentic performance practice on Ukrainian folk instruments.

Nadiya Volodymyrivna Tkachenko was born on 19 September 1948 at Kremenchuk and took up the pentathlon at eighteen, training with the Vanguard sports societies in Donetsk Oblast. She won the European title in 1974 and set her first world record of 4,839 points taking the European Cup of 1977. In July 1980 she won the Olympic title with 5,083 points, the only woman ever to break five thousand outdoors and holder of the last world record set before the pentathlon gave way to the heptathlon in 1981. She coached young athletes in Donetsk and was made an honorary citizen of the city in 2005.

Vladimir Petrovich Tkachenko, born 20 September 1957, played seventeen years as a centre at 220 cm, with Stroitel from the age of sixteen and then CSKA Moscow. For the Soviet Union he took Olympic bronze in 1976 and 1980, gold at the 1982 world championship and EuroBasket gold in 1979, 1981 and 1985, and he entered the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2015. Viacheslav Volodymyrovych Tkachenko, born 1973, skated pairs with Svitlana Prystav for three World Junior medals before the pair went on to represent Ukraine; he has coached at Dnipro since 1998, where his student Anna Khnychenkova won Ukraine a place at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Igor Valentinovich Tkachenko (1964-2009) flew as a colonel, led the Russian Knights display team and commanded the 237th Guards Aviation Showing Center at Kubinka air base; he was made a Hero of the Russian Federation in August 2009, and the asteroid 269390 Igortkachenko, found that year by the amateur astronomer Leonid Elenin, carries his name. The rest of the record joins up nowhere: Darya at the draughts board, Sergey off a Kazakhstani ski jump, Serhiy on a Ukrainian football pitch. They are not one family and never were. They are what is left of every village that needed cloth and had one household able to make it.