A Look At Romania And Romanians

Easter Eggs (Romania) - Hand-painted eggs decorated for the Romanian Orthodox Easter.

Four of the more intricate eggs are painted on real eggshells of which the egg yolk and egg white were previously extracted with the help of a straw or a syringe. Three other eggs are decorated with coloured glass beads glued to the shell and one other (with prevalent greens) is painted on wood.

This technique is typical of the eastern Carpathians of Bucovina and Southern Poland, to a lesser extent as they have a majority of Roman Catholics rather than Orthodox christians.

The eggs are held in a Transylvanian ceramic soup plate.

NOTE: This style of Easter eggs decoration is typical of the Eastern Carpathians province of Bucovina in Northern Romania. You will find that, like in most of Old Europe, wars were waged, land was grabbed by invaders and borders changed according to the whim of the victors and in defiance of the local population and its identity.

This is how, the Northern half of Romanian-speaking Bucovina is, since WWII, in Ukraine, hence the term of "Ukrainian eggs" ascribed to the same style of painted eggs. Before WWI this province was part of the Habsburg Empire and 200 years earlier it was part of the Principality of Moldavia (present-day Romania).

The painted eggs are very much in the tradition of christian Orthodox believers that is of Romanians, Ruthenians (Hutzuls) and Ukrainians.