Easter Eggs

The egg occupies a central place in the Easter holiday. An egg that had been blessed in the church was the first thing to be eaten after the Easter service. People exchanged eggs, presented them to relatives, friends and neighbours, and families brought eggs to the graves of descendents, and shared eggs with the poor people.

The tradition of colouring eggs is attributed back to the story of Mary Magdalene, who came to Rome to meet Emperor Tiberius, and presented him with a red egg saying: «Христос Воскрес!» (“Christ has risen!”), and then started to preach about the Resurrection of Christ.

But in pre-Christian times painted eggs had also been used by Slavs in their pagan rituals to celebrate the coming of spring. Some of the later Easter rituals concerning eggs go back to those times: an egg was put in a bucket with seeds of wheat grains and these were preserved for sowing.

The egg is the most popular Easter gift. In its modern form it is frequently artificial, mere imitations of the real thing made of chocolate, marzipan or sugar, or from two pieces of coloured and decorated cardboard, fitted together to make an egg-shaped case containing some small gift. Craftsmen carve eggs from wood and bone, or fashioned them from papier-mache and glass. Thousands of little eggs are made by small commercial workshops across Russia.

Real Easter eggs are hard-boiled eggs, dyed bright colors and sometimes elaborately decorated. There are many ways of tinting and decorating the eggs, some simple and some requiring a high degree of skill. They can be dipped into a prepared dye or, more usually, boiled in it, or they may be boiled inside an onion peel covering. Today ordinary commercial dyes are often used for colouring, but originally people used natural ones, obtained from flowers, leaves, mosses, bark, wood-chips, or other natural sources.