Cultures calendar: A Sorbian Easter
Easter and colorful eggs go hand in hand. In Slavic culture, it is traditional to decorate these eggs using an intricate technique involving wax and dye. This custom is also practiced by the last Slavic minority group living in Germany, the Sorbs. Martin Ballaschk, who has Sorbian roots, explains how ordinary eggs can be turned into works of art.
What does Slavic cultural heritage have to do with the MDC? There are several connections, actually. The Berlin-Buch campus is located on an old Slavic settlement – a history that is evident from the names of the surrounding districts Pankow, Zepenick and Karow. Other than the names of certain districts and streets, however, little evidence remains today of the German capital’s Slavic roots. Over the centuries, the Western Slavic people that once inhabited the area of Germany between Saxony and the Baltic Sea have been continuously displaced and assimilated by Germanic immigrants.
Lusatia, the Sorbs and the Spreewald
There are some Sorbs (also known as “Wends”) still living in Lusatia, a region of Central Europe that begins just 100 km south of Berlin. This is the last remaining Slavic tribe in Germany; its people speak two languages and have their own cultural history. In the Spreewald, a tourism hub in southern Brandenburg and part of Lusatia, you will certainly encounter bilingual street signs, maybe even traditional costumes, and traditional wooden barges with lots of tourists.
I have Sorbian ancestry myself, and I work at the MDC – so there’s another connection! In the village where I come from, assimilation is already well advanced. Wendish has not been spoken in my family since my grandparents’ generation, and the colorful traditional dress is only dug out on special occasions. “Oma Nahke,” probably the village’s last native Wendish speaker and – in my memory – always dressed in the traditional blue-black working clothes, died around 15 years ago.
Springtime traditions in the modern age
But although much of the Sorbian cultural heritage has been lost, some customs have survived into modern times. The jolly Zampern parade, for example, where young people dress up and dance through the village to drive away the winter, knocking at every door to ask for donations (in the form of money, eggs or schnapps), is a fixed part of rural life. Or the Easter fire, where branches and twigs (or Zacken as they are known in local dialect) are gathered over the course of a few weeks, made into a pile and burned the night before Easter Day to welcome the spring.
But perhaps the most important Sorbian cultural tradition, and something we are actually quite famous for, is our technique of decorating Easter eggs. “Pisamy serbske jatšowne jaja” (“Let’s paint the Wendish Easter eggs”), my wife and I say to each other every year in the run-up to Easter.
Egg-painting used to be the task of the old women; today it is how my family and I spend Good Friday. The children just dab a few dots here and there; and we adults don’t really do much more.
Sorbian Easter eggs: a glimpse into the technique
You will need: Easter egg dye, beeswax and paraffin wax, goosewing feathers, pins with small glass heads, metal soup spoons, tea lights and blown or lukewarm hardboiled eggs. The most important tools we have to make ourselves: the goose feather quills need to be trimmed into the right shape (triangles, diamonds or petals) with sharp scissors. We use these feathers later to “stamp” wax onto the shell. Dots and lines are placed or drawn on with the pins, which we stick into the end of small wooden sticks.
We start by melting the wax. This is where the spoons are required. They need to be bent and securely propped up in, for example, a glass of sand. A bit of wax is put in each spoon and a tea light is placed underneath. As soon as the wax has melted into a hot transparent liquid, it is transferred onto the egg using the feathers or pin heads – but be careful not to get your tool in the flame, as then you’ll have to make a new one!
The white egg is then dipped into egg dye, e.g. yellow. The areas coated with wax are protected from the dye and remain colorless, resulting in a yellow egg with a white pattern.
Fast results, but it doesn’t look that impressive yet. If we now add more wax patterns to the yellow egg and dip it into another color – e.g. green – we get a green egg with white and yellow dots. As a next step we add a green pattern by adding more wax dots to the green layer, then dipping the egg in red dye. After one or two hours our egg is finished: We are left with a red egg with white, yellow and green dots.
As a final step, the wax layers are melted off again in the candle flame to fully bring out the colors. The egg is then polished with grease to make it nice and shiny.
Pretty patterns with a deeper meaning
The most important thing is for the eggs to be an attractive Easter ornament, but there is a deeper, mythical meaning behind the patterns used: sun wheels and rays symbolize light and spring; outward pointing wolf teeth convey protection; and three-symbol configurations of dots or triangles stand for the family unit of father, mother and child.
The eggs used to be hardboiled and given by godparents to their godchildren as good-luck charms. The children would then all get together to play Waleien – a game a bit like marbles but gentler and with eggs. Today, the eggs are usually blown rather than boiled and used to decorate Easter displays or given as presents to friends and family. In my family, the tradition has been given a very personal twist: my first egg is always a complete failure, and I end up hurling it on the floor or against the wall in frustration. Fortunately, it’s not raw.
– Author: Měto Balašk, German equivalent: Martin Ballaschk
Egg decoration in a 12x time lapse
My sister decorates an egg over a period of 45 minutes using colored wax with the “embossing” technique.
Images
- House in Lehde: CC-BY, Manuela Höft.
- Farmer in traditional dress: CC-BY-SA, Bundesarchiv.
- Wooden barge in a stream: CC-BY-ND, Mike Bonitz.
- Other pictures: CC-BY, Martin Ballaschk.
