Bast shoe
Bast shoes are shoes made primarily from bast — fiber taken from the bark of trees such as linden or birch. They are a kind of basket, woven and fitted to the shape of a foot. Bast shoes are an obsolete traditional footwear of the forest areas of Northern Europe, formerly worn by poorer members of the Finnic peoples, Balts, Russians and Belarussians. They were easy to manufacture, but not durable.
Bast shoes have been worn since prehistoric times. Wooden foot-shaped blocks for shaping them have been found in neolithic excavations, e.g. 4900 years old. Bast shoes were still worn in the Russian countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today bast shoes are sold as souvenirs and sometimes worn by ethnographic music or dance troupes as part of their costume.
depicting a peasant making lapti.
In Russian, they are called lapti ; this word is used as a derogatory term for cheap and short-lived footwear and, in the form lapotnik, also for an uneducated person, notionally one who is too poor to afford good shoes and wears bast shoes instead. The MiG-105 "Spiral" spaceplane was nicknamed Lapot for the shape of its nose.
Bast shoes played an important role in the founding myth of Přemyslid dynasty, which reigned in Bohemia and Moravia until 1306 AD. Přemysl the Ploughman, its legendary ancestor, was a peasant of humble origin. His bast shoes and bast-bag were kept as relics at Vyšehrad and Czech kings put them on during their coronations. The relics probably were destroyed when Vyšehrad fell to Hussites in 1420.
