Ukraine Celebrates Easter - The Great Day

Lviv, April 19, 2014. With the arrival of spring’s flowing tree blossoms and warm sunshiny weather, Ukraine celebrates its most religious and historically traditional holiday – Velykden (Easter). Having centuries practiced this multinational Christian holiday, Ukrainians stick to their ancient roots and traditions, celebrating this Holy Week in grandiose flavor and with modest good heartedness. Generational residents, visitors, and cultural prospectors of Lviv prepare and bear their beautifully Easter Day basket ensembles, dress in their Sunday’s best and make way for the holiday’s most important event, the ceremonial consecration and blessing, also known as Sviatchenia (Blessing of the Baskets), which takes place throughout the city’s many venerable churches.

Easter is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection that is practiced with a variety of elements from both Christian and pagan religions. Having celebrated Easter throughout the centuries, Ukrainian tradition today is not much different from how it was more than 1,000 years ago, and even reflects much of the richness, brightness, and color of the region’s world renowned Trypillian indigenous people, whom walked our earth an astounding 7,000 years ago. Nonetheless, in Ukraine, The Great Day is celebrated as a family holiday and is also a time to reflect on when Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead.

“Easter is by far, one of our greatest holidays. Ukrainians are very traditional people, and for this we are extremely proud. We welcome our homes to guests and strangers, sharing this Great Day of Christ together as one. I enjoy so much of this time with my family, friends, and neighbors, as we give our primary focus to just one common moral, our love for life and prayer,” illustrated a lifetime resident of Lviv, Oleksiy Syvak.

Of the many vital elements pertaining to Easter’s Holy Thursday and Good Friday preparations, one, by far, remains the most crucial, the preparation of the Easter basket itself and, of course, all of its accompanying traditional foods. The beauty of Ukrainian tradition morphs your typical wicker basket into one of the most eye-popping and mouth-watering arrangements of decadent foods your heart has ever laid eyes on and typically includes a variety of delicious cheeses, butter, salt, salo (pork fat), horseradish, eggs, various meats and sausages, pysanky (decorated Easter eggs), paska (sweet Easter bread), and of course, the light of the holy spirit emit from a simple beeswax candle. The entire basket is then covered with a handmade embroidered, sometimes vyshyvanka-styled cloth, depicting important Orthodox Christian symbolism. This day is spent as Easter Sunday, also known as Paska, with family, friends, and fellow church goers.

“Today we are preparing for the biggest Christian holiday, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ. My family and I enjoy attending the old church located here at Lviv’s outdoor museum, Shevchenkivs’kyi Hai, where we can sort of travel back in time and experience Ukrainian village life during the Easter holiday. This place is a very popular destination, nonetheless today, but the crowd is always pleasant, as we share the happiness together of Christ’s Resurrection,'' explained Yaromon Nachvalasiy, Head of Church at Shevchenko Grove Museum in Lviv.

After the blessing ceremony, families return to their warm and cozy homes to continue their Easter celebrations, which consists of dining and divulging on delicious handmade pasky, eggs, and other foods cooked with age-old Ukrainian recipes passed down from generation to generation.

Proceeding Easter Saturday is, you guessed it, Easter Sunday, which arrives in good ol’ Ukrainian fashion as well. On this day, it is typical to witness an entire family gather at their favorite church yet again for another Easter Vigil where a priest continues to mass bless citizens and food alike. And to fight symptoms of stuffed britches from all of the decadent and boundless dining the Holy Week has to offer; Ukrainians follow the event’s remaining days with calming strolls through Lviv’s ancient and winding city streets, with song and with dance, and with a renewed gratitude for life and love.

And so for Ukraine and her traditional peoples, the meaning of Easter can be found deeper and far beyond its intricacies in preparation, rather, Easter is a holiday garnishing the remembrance of those who have long since passed, and is a day to give thanks and appreciation for even the little things, and for those far greater in our meaning of life, like that of Christ’s sacrifice to humanity.

Olya Plyvachuk, a longtime Lviv resident explained, “Every year we come to our city’s churches to christen our pasky, this is our Easter tradition, this our way of doing things, and our way of happiness. This is how we pay our respect, not only to our biggest Christian holiday, but to family and life’s simplicities. Yes, that’s it, to life’s simplicities- of which one must never forget.”

Jessica Pacheco-Semenyuk,
MA student at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine,
http://journalism.ucu.edu.ua/student/2356/