EGGS AS AN ART FORM
Easter tradition has its roots in ancient fertility rituals.
Oksana Szulhan cradles a hen’s plain white egg in her left hand. In her right is a traditional “kitska” — a pen-like tool that she’s packed with beeswax.
The North Vancouver-based artist warms the tip of the kitska over a candle, turning the wax to liquid, then uses the tool to “write” a pattern onto the egg’s surface. Then she drops the egg into a bath of yellow dye, concluding the first stage of creating a “pysanka” — a Ukrainian Easter egg.
Writing eggs is a traditional craft that Szulhan has practised since before she could write words. She recalled making pysanky as a child, giving them to loved ones and bringing them to church to be blessed as part of an Easter ritual.
It’s not only Ukrainians who keep such traditions. Eggs feature into the Easter and springtime rituals of people across the province from an array of cultural and religious backgrounds. We may not recall why we cook, decorate or hunt for eggs at this time of year, but experts like Szulhan can help us remember.
“Every Easter, my mother would take out a few eggs and with her handcrafted tools, she would start writing the eggs — dipping them into colours. I was absolutely fascinated,” Szulhan recalled on a recent weekday, while preparing eggs for this year’s holiday.
It’s a complex art form, and even with modern kitskas like the ones Szulhan normally uses, it can take between three and four hours to write a single egg. After the many layers of blackened wax are melted away from a finished egg, symbols begin to appear in brilliant colour that tell stories to savvy interpreters.
As an example, dots that appear on pysanky are said to symbolize tears shed by Mary over the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But that’s a new interpretation, said Szulhan. At one time those same dots represented stars in the heavens.
Pysanky did not start as a Christian Easter tradition, explained Szulhan, but trace back thousands of years, to pagans and “sun-worshipping ancestors” who existed long before the religion.
“Dying the eggs would have been for a feast of celebration for the new year — for the spring, which was coming in,” said Szulhan. “Now it’s been rolled over into Easter.”
But some early lore around pysanky is still used, including a legend that Szulhan attributed to Hutsuls, who live in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains.
“As long as the Easter eggs are being made, then good and peace will prevail around the world,” she said. “So that’s why I make them.”
The many-threaded origins of modern egg traditions form a tapestry every bit as complex as Szulhan’s designs, as Sonja Luehrmann, an assistant professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University explained.
“Long before the advent of Christianity, eggs were symbols of fertility and immortality in various cultures of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Europe,” said Luehrmann, who was reached out of the country by email.
But as often occurred in the history of Christianity, she explained, things that were done locally by custom or for practical reasons were assigned spiritual meaning in the new religion. And so the various springtime and fertility-related customs of areas that became Christianized were soon absorbed into Easter — the annual celebration of the resurrection of Christ.
That would have worked out well for cultures that create decorative eggs. Easter concludes a 40- day fast called Lent, when people — at least in Eastern Orthodox churches — are not supposed to eat animal products. That meant there were plenty of uneaten eggs for decorating.
Not all dyed eggs are as complex as Ukrainian pysanky. In Russia, for example, some eggs are dyed bright red by boiling them with onion skins, said Luehrmann. There are various legends that explain why that is done, said Luehrmann. One is that when St. Mary Magdalene travelled to Rome to tell Emperor Tiberius of Christ’s resurrection, she brought with her a simple gift of a plain egg.
When the emperor heard her tale, he replied, “A person can no more rise from the dead than a white egg can turn red.” At that moment, according to the tale, the egg turned bright red.
Easter egg hunts have been practised since at least the 1600s, said Luehrmann, who recalled her family’s own traditions as a youngster in Germany.
“We always waited impatiently if the weather would be good at Easter, because that meant being able to search for chocolate Easter eggs outside rather than in the house,” she said.
It’s hard to say exactly when hunting for chocolate became what is probably fair to call the most popular of all Easter traditions.
Vancouver-based chocolatier Anne-Geneviève Poitras said her historical interest in chocolate Easter eggs was sparked as a student at a pastry and baking school in Montreal.
“I went back and looked at all the books and the stories,” she said, shortly after dusting a chocolate egg at her Main Street shop Chocolaterie de la Nouvelle France. “France and Germany are the two places where chocolate eggs were born.”
Poitras explained that some in those countries decorated eggs that, when opened, revealed toys and chocolates hidden inside. Others fabricated large paper eggs and stuffed them with toys and chocolate.
“Depending on the culture, everybody had their own traditions,” she said.
Like Szulhan, Poitras recalled learning to make Easter eggs as a youngster.
“My aunt made chocolate at home for fun,” she said. “She’s actually one of the first people I made chocolates with.”
For each of the six years her shop has been in business, Poitras has prepared unique new Easter creations with an eye toward the past.
“I always try to keep it as simple as possible. I wanted to make sure that the kids had the same experience that their parents did and I did,” she said.
This year, her Easter eggs are dusted in brilliant gold and silver, a concept that brings to mind the precious and jewelled eggs once exchanged by Russian royals.
Easter is “not just a celebration of a religion now. It’s also not just a commercial holiday,” said Poitras, adding that in her mind, it’s a celebration of getting together with family and “just enjoying a treat. It’s a fun tradition.”
Szulhan does not sell the pysanky she writes, but instead gives them away in accordance with tradition. She said chocolate eggs were not part of her family’s Easter traditions — at least in the early years.
When asked why she thought they became so popular, Szulhan paused and thought for a moment.
“Well, if you paint the egg, you dip it into various colours. You really can’t eat it. But chocolate tastes better,” she said, grinning.