Paska is coming, despite all calamities and atrocities of today’s world. We all believe that our Way of the Cross, our Calvary will lead us to Resurrection, and we are looking forward to getting up on that Holy Sunday morning with the greeting, Christ Is Risen!

I am sure that recollections of Paska rank among the most precious reminiscences from the childhood of every Rusyn, wherever he or she was born: in gorgeous but chilly Hutsul highlands of the Chornohora Range, in the breath-taking vineyard valleys by Mukachevo Castle, by Sea Eye Lake in Slovakia, in Lemkovyna, or far south in Vojvodina…

Let’s start our journey to the Easter reminiscences FROM Mukachevo area with Palm Sunday (also known as Pussy Willow Sunday). On that day, people go to church with branches of blossoming willow in their hands – and in the years when Easter comes earlier, these willow buds are soft and silky by feel, like real pussycats – that’s why we call them tsitsushky – from Hungarian cicuska, a pussycat. In some places of Subcarpathia and Halychyna (Galicia), these willow branches are known under the name of shutka. People take these willow branches to church to get them consecrated (in honour of the palm branches with which Jerusalem greeted Jesus just a week before He was crucified), but after the Service young lads would chase after girls with these willow branches in their hands and – when catching them, they would mockingly flog the girls, saying: “It’s not me, it’s the shutka that’s thrashing you; in a week there’ll be Great Feast” (in original, this is a rhyme).

Then the last week of the Lent – the Passion Week – came. When you are a little boy, you do not pay much attention to the solemnities of the Holy Services, though of course, your Grandma will be taking you to church – you will (or will not) get soaked up with the spiritual meaning of the services held during the Passion Week much later. Meanwhile, you are observing the ‘household’ preparations for the upcoming Great Feast and looking forward to breaking the fast on Easter Sunday – for during that week, and especially on Good Friday you will not be allowed to eat the food which you can see is being cooked, smoked, baked and bought – but you are proud that you are also doing something for the sake of God, that you are curbing your desires – in anticipation of a sumptuous repast on Sunday.

So, on Thursday everyone is busy washing and cleaning, and tidying the house and the yard. It is time to wash the windows after the long winter (Mum insists on you doing it, although you are nothing but puzzled how on earth they could have got dirty if nobody had ever opened or even touched them for a long while). At the meantime, Granny is doing sorcery in the kitchen. From the early morning, she is making leavened dough – God forbid that it should not rise; they say that something horrible then should happen in the family. 

Now comes the grandest reminiscence – that of Easter bread, or paska. Unlike the rest of Ukraine where it is baked sweet and, respectively, consumed as a dessert, Subcarpathian paska is ‘real’ bread that is consumed, usually with butter spread over it, with shovdar, eggs, and other specialties which will be dealt with below. The paska bread is usually decorated with a dough cross in the center and dough flowers or leaves along the ridges.

The folklorist Yuri Chori wrote that in the past, Rusyn housewives would put the dough for paska into a wooden trough, cover it with a white cloth and put the consecrated willow branch on top – so that the evil spirit should not approach it. The fire in the oven was made only with beech and oak wood. To bake, the dough was rolled in flour and put into a special basket made of twigs, straw or maize leaves.

If some dough was left after the paska has been baked, Granny would make dough snakes and potiata (‘birdies’) from this dough – these were little buns in the form of a snake and a bird, with peppercorns for the eyes.

The best paska was to go into the Easter basket, but a family usually baked several paskas.

It is worth adding that paskas should be baked on Holy Thursday or Holy Saturday, but not on Good Friday when no work would be allowed whatsoever. It was a day of strict fasting; no Liturgy is held on that day – instead of the bell chime, the parishioners were summoned for the church prayer with wooden beaters. 

Meanwhile, before Easter, the owner of the house was busy making shovdar – smoked pork ham, the main dainty of the Easter repast. Now, of course, people mostly go to a shop or market to buy the ready pork.

The preparations included making pysankas and krashankas. Krashanka is a painted egg, so it was much easier to make (the simplest way was to tie a parsley leave to an egg and boil it with onion husk – the result would be a brown egg with a white pattern of the leaf). Pysankas are a treasure of Ukrainian and Rusyn people; every region had its own decorations of these Easter eggs, and the Hutsuls were considered to be the most skillful masters of drawing ornaments that had sophisticated, sacred, and symbolic meanings.

On Holy Saturday, people were preparing the Easter basket. A traditional basket of a Rusyn family in Subcarpathia included (and includes until now) paska, shovdar, pysanky or krashanky, baked farmer cheese, a butter lamb (a lump of butter in the shape of a lamb), salt, kovbasa (a ring of homemade sausage), a horseradish root, salt and a bottle of homemade wine.

As Saturday night was falling, the streets began to get mobbed. The old and the young, little kids and seniors, men and women – all clad in their best attire (there is a Rusyn expression Velykodny antsug, meaning ‘Easter suit’ that was worn very rarely, but necessary for the Vigil Liturgy) were heading to the churches with baskets filled with Easter food in their hands. The most enduring faithful would attend the Holy Service from midnight until early morning; for those who would prefer just to bless their food, multiple consecrations would be organized until Sunday noon (since recently, food blessings are administered starting from Saturday morning, but in my childhood, this ceremony began only after the Vigil). ‘To go to have paska blessed’ was a must for nearly every family in Subcarpathia even in the atheist Soviet times; for a majority, it was a spiritual call; for some – just a homage to age-long tradition. But once a year, nearly everyone went to church, and it was on Easter (even though teachers were forced by the state to be at church and watch and record the students that came for the Easter Service; what was more, on Easter Sunday usually some official Young Pioneer or Komsomol [Young Communist League] activities were organized to prevent schoolchildren from going to church). About those who attended church ceremonies only once a year, the following saying was invented: “Whenever he comes to church, there’s always paska blessing.”

And after the Vigil and the blessing of the Easter baskets, after the life-asserting ‘Khrystos Voskres!” (Christ Is Risen!) sounded numerously in the church and in the streets, as soon as we came home, at last, there came the Easter repast. Although it was about 3 o’clock in the morning, we, as kids, did not want to wait till the conventional breakfast time and demanded to open the Easter basket at once…

The Easter table also had its rules. First of all, the senior of the family said a prayer. Then, before cutting the paska, he made a sign of a cross on it with the knife. Everyone had to eat or at least taste everything from the Easter basket. The shells of the consecrated eggs were not thrown into the garbage bin – they would be collected and dug in the garden or burnt in a fire. Not a crump of the paska should be thrown away – if something fell on the floor, it had to be cleaned and eaten anyway…

A very interesting tradition is followed in Subcarpathia on Bright Monday, known there as Sprinkling Monday. In neighboring Halychyna and rural localities of Subcarpathia, young (unmarried) lads mockingly pour girls with water, while in the cities this custom is a little bit different – on Easter Monday, boys and men should visit their female relatives and all girls and women they know with a vial of perfumes. They would sprinkle the perfume over the girl’s or woman’s head in the form of a cross saying, “Christ is risen!” In response, after the customary “He is risen indeed!” the sprinkler would get a present – a pysanka or krashanka. In my childhood, we liked this custom very much, because kids and teenagers would also get some money from those whom they sprinkled. This tradition was kept very seriously – if you skipped some lady over, she would really get very cross with you. I remember my Granddad putting on his best clothing to go to his sister on that day when he was too old and weak to go anywhere else – but he felt that on that day he must fulfill this duty.

The water-sprinkling custom has a direct lookalike in Hungary, wherein the old days’ men would also throw a bucket of well water over girls of marriageable age and where this tradition is still retained in some villages, but in the cities it has been substituted with a sprinkling with perfume. I was also taught a Hungarian rhyme that I was reciting when visiting my elderly relatives. It went like that, “I am a little gardener that waters flowers and I had a dream last night that some flower has faded. Can I water it?” As can be seen, the tradition is associated with an ancient fertility rite, and also with the sign of baptism with water. Another legend says that when Roman soldiers wanted to silence the women of Jerusalem who were proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection, they poured water on them. This story correlates with another story, that of Mary of Magdalene who proclaimed the Resurrection of Jesus to Emperor Tiberius, holding an egg in hand and exclaiming, “Christ is risen!” When the emperor, mocking her, said that egg would become red than somebody may have resurrected from the dead, the egg did turn red as an illustration of the truth of Mary’s message. And that was the origin of the krashanka egg.

Such were the Easter-related folk customs kept in my family and families of Mukachevo residents. I would like to say that as with many other traits of everyday life, customs and traditions of the Dolyniany (Rusyns of the Lowlands), were very close to those kept in Hungary, and on the other hand, they may have differed from the Rusyn traditions adhered to in the highlands or other areas of Subcarpathian Rus. But the thing that unites all popular Easter traditions has always been the eternal faith and hope in the victory of good over evil, of life over death. And in the current difficult time, all residents of Ukraine of whatever ethnic and religious descent are repeating an old saying, “Christ is risen, and so will Ukraine!”