It is Easter time and I am enjoying it at Home! It is very unusual that this year both the Christians Catholics and Orthodox celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus at the same time, on the 4th and 5th of April. Usually the celebrations are separated by a week or two. This means that in any given year, you might find Roman Catholic Hungarians in the area celebrating Easter one Sunday, while the Orthodox Moldovans might be celebrating a week or two later. In 2005, the dates were spread very far apart: the Western churches celebrated on March 27 and the Orthodox churches on May 1.
Even though Easter is celebrated in the same day, the way it is celebrated is different. Moldovan Easter celebrations are looked forward with great enthusiasm, hope and joy. We celebrate it in a special way, taking into account old traditions which were taught by our grandparents.
The first thing that we do is to bake special bread called “Pasca”,
which is filled with caw cheese. Together with the Red Wine they signify the sacrifice which Jesus Christ had to endure. Afterwards we decorateEggs in different colors as each color stands for a specific religious symbol. Red, for example, signifies Christ’s blood and green for fertility. Our traditional meal is mellow lamb, which is cooked with care by the housewives, and it is delicious!
In the Easter night we go to the church where the priest blesses our food and we purify our souls in order to celebrate this Holly Day with an open heart.
This is how Easter is celebrated in Moldova, my home-country.
Diana, Thank you very much for your notes on Orthodox Easter. I am currently in Virginia but have celebrated several Easter Sundays in Moldova in the past. This year I was invited by Moldovan friends to join them for the Easter Sunday meal, and they had prepared a little bit of everything they had not eaten during the Lenten fast of the previous 40 days, and so there was a bit of lamb, some pork, some chicken, some fish, the paskha, etc, and it was delicious.
ReplyDeleteYou are very very welcome, Candango! Moldova is waiting for you to come many times more!
ReplyDeleteGreetings for you and for the Moldovians living in Virginia!!!