Guest Blogger, Ed Gawlinski, has been involved in many cultural organizations throughout his life. Here, he discusses Easter traditions in several Eastern European cultures.

A common custom is to color hard boiled eggs for Easter. We usually colored them on Good Friday, while eating hot cross buns…

In Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Bulgaria, etc.) coloring Easter eggs is a highly developed folk art. In the Polish language there are several different words for colored Easter eggs, each indicating a different technique. The style I know best is called Pisanki. In this you use a stylus to draw on the egg with melted wax. After you draw, you put the egg in the dye. After it dries, you draw some more and then put the egg in a different colored dye. The wax keeps that part of the egg from being dyed. It’s a process similar to batik. Intricate and beautiful patterns are made by skilled artists. I am not a skilled artist, so my eggs were never works of art. But I did have fun trying.

Another style is called Kraszanki. We had an exchange student from Switzerland whose family colored eggs this way. They put onion peels in the water they used to boil the eggs. The eggs came out brown. You could use oak bark or walnut shells to make the eggs black. You could use Marigold flowers to make the eggs yellow.

The opposite approach to pisanki is drapanki. These eggs are first died and then, using a sharp tool, you scratch off the dye to make your designs.

Although elaborately decorated eggs are part of the tradition of all Eastern European countries, each one has its own tradition as far as the patterns used to decorate these eggs.