c. 2006 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Forget the chicken. This time of year, the conundrum of the egg is enough to leave humans and fowls scratching their heads: What came first, the Easter or the Ukrainian Easter egg?
This city’s Ukrainian Museum-Archives has cracked the answer.
No offense to hens, but hatching an egg is nothing compared to crafting a Ukrainian Easter egg. It requires hours, even days, of intense labor, a steady hand and Zen-like discipline.
The artist sketches a design on the egg, then uses a metal stylus to apply melted beeswax to areas that are to remain white. The egg is then dyed in a light color, and wax is applied to areas that are to remain that color. This process is repeated with progressively darker colors. Finally the wax is melted off, and varnish is applied.
The story of how the Ukrainian Easter egg evolved is just as complicated as the process.
“You’d think it was a static art form,” says Andrew Fedynsky, director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. “But it’s evolved over centuries.”
The evolution of pysanky (pee-SAHN-kee) dates back more than 2,000 years. Derived from the Ukrainian word for “to write,” it started as a pagan art form that celebrated seasonal rebirth. Images and colors depicted harvest and harvester: Animals represented wealth; wheat stood for work; green meant good health, for crops and humans.
When Christianity came to Ukraine in the 10th century, the eggs were incorporated into the Easter observance and new images were introduced to illustrate Christian themes: fish (Christ), circles (eternal salvation) and dots (Mary’s tears).
Under communism, Ukraine, like the rest of the Soviet Union, was officially atheist. That’s not to say that pysanky artists started putting communist symbols or Stalin’s face on the eggs.
“That would’ve been a little strange,” Fedynsky says. “The communists discouraged them (the artists), but even they knew they could never suppress them.”
These eggs, you see, are mightier than the hammer or the sickle _ not to mention the hen that laid them.
(John Petkovic is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)
PH END PETKOVICEditors: To obtain a photo of Ukrainian Easter eggs, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
