An Egg Turned Into a Career
Sofika Zielyk is an artist.
My first language was Ukrainian. I didn’t know any English until kindergarten. For the first two weeks, I spoke like, “Vat you dooing?” Instead of “What are you doing?” There were times where I didn’t hear English on the streets. I think my generation, we didn’t really assimilate. Or we did, but we didn’t. It’s difficult to describe. We are Americans, but during the Olympics a few years ago, there was somebody from Ukraine competing with somebody from America; I didn’t know who to root for.
Most of my favorite memories were of the holidays. If you come on Easter Saturday, you’ll see a parade of little kids and people walking with the most beautiful Easter baskets. St. George’s is a parish that still celebrates by the old Julian calendar. This year, the two Easters are a week apart. Also, Christmas falls on January 7. When I was growing up, the hustle before December 25 seemed so commercial. Ukrainian Christmas was traditional, religious—
Christmas without all the commercialism. I still live in the same apartment that my parents and my two sisters and I lived in, and I remember lying in bed—it was so peaceful— watching my mother create a pysanka. She would sit up with a lighted candle because you have to heat up beeswax to make one—it’s batik on an egg. Every Ukrainian family does an egg or buys one before Easter.
At NYU, I gave a friend a pysanka as a gift. I started doing more and more eggs, and eventually it became my profession. The tradition is thousands of years old. They were presents to the god of the sun to bring him back after a long winter. People chose an egg because it symbolizes rebirth and the yolk reminded people of the sun. In the tenth century, the pagan and the Christian traditions merged. It’s a fascinating custom, unique to the Ukrainian culture.
Most of the symbolism is in the design itself: chicks for fertility, pine branches for eternal health, flowers for happiness. White is the symbol of purity. Red is the sun. Black and white are for the souls of the departed. The legend says that as long as people are making pysanky, the evil monster who’s chained up in a cave in the Tian mountains will not come out and destroy the world. And only women were allowed to do these eggs, so the fate of the world rested on women’s shoulders. There is so much more I can tell you about this—when I give lectures, it’s an hour and a half.