Ukrainian faithful carry on an ancient art
The Colors of Easter
Mr. Surmach and an employee stand near Surma’s selection of pysanky-related goods. (photo: Erin Edwards)
The rolling tides of change have molded the cultural landscape of New York’s Lower East side into something nearly unrecognizable to natives like Markian Sumach.
“Just look at it,” Surmach said as he noted the modern architecture of a nearby building in “Little Ukraine.” He nodded in the direction of Taras Schevchenko Place where a vast Cooper Union university building stretches along one city block. The amorphous silver structure casts a shadow over Surma: The Ukrainian Shop, his family’s store.
“Things have certainly changed, but this store remains the same,” he said next to his display of pysanky, elaborate decorative Easter eggs that are one of Ukraine’s oldest cultural art forms.
Surma has served the community for nearly 100 years, Surmach said. He stood near a small showcase in the storefront that’s stocked with geese and chicken pysanka eggs with pagan symbols and radiant red, yellow and orange colors adjacent to more eggs with blue and green hues.
The ancient form of pysanky is a stark contrast to the world outside of Surma, but the eggs are some of the customs that attract Ukrainian Immigrants and Ukrainian Americans to Surmach’s store of nostalgia where time seems to stand still. The Ukrainian Diaspora comes in search for ancestral connections to the old country, Surmach said.
“They find their culture, and they find themselves here,” he said. “People come to the store in search of a simpler and less complicated way of life.”
And they become lost in the old country browsing through his stock piles of Ukrainian newspapers and books, embroidered shirts and belts and mounds of antiquities and art. They end their tour of the Ukraine where they began by once again passing the pysanky.
Surmach said he, like many Ukrainians, designed his first egg with family as a young boy.
“I had rather been out with my friends and not painting eggs” he said jokingly. “I have respect for it now.”
He designs occasionally with family and friends, but the pysanky in his store are all imported from the Ukraine, he said as pulled out a small blue and white egg.
Surma sells traditional kistky, two rods, above, used to decorate the ornate pysanky. (photo: Erin Edwards)
“They’re not just eggs though,” said Surmach, noting their historical significance and symbols. “They have meaning. It represents a culture that respected the world around them.”
The eggs are a staple symbol of culture seen more often in baskets during the Easter season, but they’re also an intricate string in the collective fabric of the Ukrainian Diaspora. It binds, unites and reminds them of their evolving history from simple agrarian life, to battling for independence from a Mongol invasion and fighting to preserve their legacy in secrecy while Soviets pressed to expel their cultural individuality. The inscriptions and symbolism of the pysanky preserve the memory of this history.
Artists and historians debate exactly when Ukrainians first began creating the decorative eggs, but Surmach joins a vast majority who say the craft began nearly 2,000 years ago, before Christianity was introduced in Ukraine.
There are several theories on origin and the act of decorating eggs as religious symbols is something relative to multiple cultures, said Tanya Osadca, considered one of the most premier pysanky artists in North America by the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard.
The earliest documentation of pysanky was in 1650 by Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French cartographer, but influence for the practice could have come from Byzantium in 988 A.D., Osadca said. The custom could have also originated from the West after King Edward I in the 13 century gave colored eggs as gifts to his court. Greeks also color their eggs for Easter as do Sorbs, who have similar patterns. “But I don’t think anyone else has such intricate designs,” she said of pysanky.
“This is the history of a civilization,” said Sofika Zielyk, a premier pysanky artist and friend of Surmach.
This tradition began as a form of pagan talisman, Zielyk said, as early Ukrainians, mainly agrarians, noticed inexplicable changes in the season. The days grew shorter and colder, and people sought for ways to appease Dazhboh, the sun god.
Birds were considered a blessed creature because they alone possessed the ability to move near Dazhboh and the yolk of their eggs also resembled the sun. People eventually began drawing geometrical patterns and floral designs on the eggs and painted them with dyes, created with materials found in nature: berries for red, leaves for green and tree bark for brown and orange.
These colors were used for some of the earliest designs on Ukrainian eggs regarded as Trypillian, Zielyk said.
Sofika Zielyk poses for a portrait in her New York City apartment. She has spent the past 20 years perfecting the art of pysanky. (photo: Erin Edwards)
Zielyk, who studied art history at New York University, spoke of pysanky as she sat near a small coffee table inside the living room of her lower east side apartment, which feels more like a Ukrainian museum where ancient and modern art collide.
Near the door are bookshelves filled with her creations of pysanky designs on plates, ceramics and geese, chicken and, less traditional, ostrich eggs. She has painted designs inspired by her creative imagination or patterns she discovered after researching pysanky pagan symbols for politicians and celebrities to cartoon figures including Thomas the Tank Engine for her nephew.
Many of her eggs contained traditional symbols: birds, stags, flowers, triangles, circles and spirals. One she held had white circles around the circumference of the egg, which women usually give to husbands whom they suspect of infidelity.
“The hoops come off at night and bind the man,” she said as she smiled. “I sell a lot of these.”
Next to her bookshelves are paintings from world-renowned artist Opanas Zalyvakha, a Ukrainian dissident who was arrested, persecuted and exiled while fighting Soviet oppression during the 1960’s and 1970’s. He gave her two paintings -The Rising, and Moscow’s Huge Embrace- after she gave him a pysanka goose egg. Even though his health was dwindling, Zielyk said she noticed how he was immediately struck by the design.
“I told him it would keep evil spirits away,” she said. He smiled and kissed her hand.
From underneath her coffee table, she pulled two baskets filled with pysanka eggs as she further explained their significance and symbolism.
In the weeks leading up to Easter, she gives classes on the art form at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City, New York. (photo: Erin Edwards)
“No two eggs are the same,” she said as she held one vibrant yellow egg with green dots that represented the eye of the sun god. On other eggs, the green dot was enclosed within a triangle, each point representing birth, life and death. “No matter what you do, the eggs will always look different.”
There are a myriad of factors that affect the process, Zielyk said. You may shake, your mood may change or the eggs shape and texture differ, and it all affects the drawings.
She prepares herself to have “good eyes and steady hands,” she said, “and eventually a sore back.”
The process for traditional pysanky begins with a white chicken egg, Zielyk said. Many then use a kistka, a small stick the size of a pencil with an attached miniature funnel that bears a slight resemblance a Monopoly board game piece. The work is usually done by candlelight for artist recreating pysanky in the traditional manner, Zielyk said.
“I enjoy lighting that match,” she said as she works by candlelight. “It’s the beginning of the process, and it relaxes me. It’s this connection I have to something someone did 2,000 years ago, and I’m doing it in modern day Manhattan.”
Artists submerge the entire egg into dye for their elaborate colors. The egg is coated with one color at a time, so to protect areas of eggs from a particular dye, artist use the candle to melt the wax inside the funnel and use the rod like a pencil to sketch a design on the egg. The wax to protect portions of the egg from the colored dye and they always begin with lighter colors.
The final product is the egg covered in black dye. The design is unknown until all the wax is melted off, Zielyk said as she gently held and rotated one of her pysanky. It was as if she rediscovered and relived recreating the pysanka for the first time.
“You can’t move forward,” she said, “without looking back.”
From start to finish, the process can take a few hours to a few days depending on speed and the intricacy of the design. It’s not a project for the impatient, Zielyk said. She has had students quit after discovering the difficulty in creating and combining symmetrical designs with the pagan motifs on the slightly bumpy, oval surfaces of eggs.
Others find a more simple way with shrink wrap, similar to a temporary tattoo, that has traditional pysanky designs that cover the egg when submersed under water. It’s a new product in the future of pysanky. It’s simple. It only takes minutes.
“And it’s cheating,” Natalia Honcharenko said jokingly.
The wrap, plastic eggs and other pysanky novelties are growingly popular with the Ukrainian Diaspora but also among other cultures who are amazed with the designs, said Honcharenko, the Museum Director at the Ukrainian Historical and Educational Center of New Jersey. People arrive at the center’s gift store to purchase wax, design research materials, how-to videos and even plastic eggs.
The church will complete construction in 2013 of a 30,000 square-foot Ukrainian museum, where there will be a permanent pysanky exhibit, Honcharenko said. She walked to the nearby Ukrainian cultural center where they temporarily store their artifacts -including priceless portraits, sculptures and books, some more than 300 years old.
“This is one of our best in the collection,” Honcharenko said as she pulled out a green box filled with cards, each with a hand drawn image of pysanka. Former duchess Katerina Skarzy dispatched artists across the Ukraine in the 1800s to draw pysanky, list the symbols used and decipher their meanings. The museum has more than 4,000 of the original cards and an original catalog the artists published with more details of each design.
Artists from around the world have come to study the cards, she said, which were believed to be destroyed during World War II. They were saved by Konstantyn and Olena Moschenko, a couple who maintained a museum in the Ukraine.
The artifacts are helping preserve Ukrainian culture as the Diaspora continues to reconnect, Honcharenko said as she looked at a 200-year-old book.
“It’s important to know your past to know who you are,” she said. “It helps shape you. This is what we will teach the next generation.”
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