The feast of Easter keeps a separate place in the calendar because the people in Moldova are Christians and religiosity for them remains a value, said the vice director of the National Museum of History and Ethnography Varvara Buzila. This stated for IPN that the way of celebrating Easer changed in time to the extent to which the people also changed.
The ethnographer said that Easter didn’t yet leave the social context because the families continue to reunite on this occasion. During the Easter holidays more than ever, the people try to communicate with divinity and nature.
Among the representative symbols of the Easter holidays are the red eggs and Easter bread and cakes. Varvara Buzila said the Easter bread that is taken to the church on Easter night to be blessed is woven and has cheese in the free areas of the cross sign formed in the middle. During three days after Easter, the families eat this bread every morning.
The ethnographer noted that the tradition of painting and decorating eggs is so old that it is impossible to date it exactly. Such a tradition belongs to many peoples. In the perception of mankind, the egg is the beginning of all the beginnings – the universe from which life derives.
“In our area, they also decorated eggs. They used to imprint symbols of our ideas and thoughts with the help of horse hair and wax. This activity was weaker in the period of Socialism. In that period, the rural women, who are the main promoters of this sublime and fragile art, were forced to do agricultural works, including on Saturdays and Sundays and on other holidays, so as to distance themselves from religion,” explained Varvara Buzila.
However, according to her, the tradition wasn’t lost owing to the elder women who promoted and kept this art. The decorated egg remains in the epicenter of the paschal holidays. The eggs are painted in the period between Holy Week and Ascension. In some villages, they paint eggs until Whit Sunday. Tradition says that in the period the skies are open and the egg is a symbolic object that ensures transcendentally the passing of time from one state into another.
