Lielvārde Belt
The Lielvārde belt: a wide woven wool sash of red-and-white geometric patterns, with small figures worked into the bands, worn with Latvian folk costume and woven in the Lielvārde region of central Latvia. Folklore remembers it as a protective band that warded off evil, and since the 1970s the repeating patterns have been read by some as a hidden code of the universe — even of human DNA — a theory championed in popular writing though not by all scholars. The folklorist Janīna Kursīte traces its red-white symbolism to ancient protective clothing and incantations, and the belt was admitted to th