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Pysanky: Ukrainian Easter Eggs
| Article
# : |
13577 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
3,360 Words |
| Author
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Eloise Paananen
Eloise Paananen is a food and travel writer based in
Washington, D.C. |
Intricately decorated, exquisitely colored pysanky--Ukrainian Easter eggs--are symbolic treasures. The designs and techniques date back thousands of years, to long before the time of Christ. Wherever Ukrainian communities exist, pysanky-making flourishes with more popularity than ever--particularly this year, which marks a millennium since St. Vladimir converted in Kiev in 988 and established Byzantine Christianity among the Ukrainians. These brilliantly embellished eggs are tokens or love and symbols of history, rebirth, and renewed ethnic identity.
In the United States, this hallowed custom emanates from St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, where early Ukrainian immigrants settled the harsh lands during the nineteenth century. Amid the great economic hardship of pioneer life, it was often difficult for impoverished immigrants to buy the materials necessary to decorate the eggs. Some people even stopped making pysanky altogether for many years, but enough continued to keep the custom alive. In the past few decades, accompanying a resurgence of interest in the Ukrainian ethnic heritage, many people have resumed the tradition.
Maria Procai recalls being desperately homesick as her first Easter in America approached in the early 1910s. She was only fifteen years old at the time but she remembered what her mother and grandmother had taught her in Sokal, Ukraine. She improvised a tool from the metal tip of a shoelace. She bought crepe paper from the drugstore for the dye and soaked out the colors in boiling water. The results were crude but encouraging. In time, she acquired better materials, dyes and proper tools, and began getting orders from shops and department stores. She established a gift ship in Minneapolis that eventually
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