Easter egg

An Easter egg is an attribute of Easter. The egg was a symbol of life, fertility, love and strength, and the symbolism of ornaments written on it had an important magical function. In the Lublin region, eggs were most often decorated using the batik technique, which involved writing on a pattern with melted wax using a marker made of sheet metal in the form of a funnel, set on a stick. In the past, natural vegetable dyes were used: from onion skins, beetroot juice, oak, alder or apple bark, forkbeard seeds or young rye shoots, walnut bark, leaves and fruit peel, elderberry buds or fruit and poppy flowers.

According to the type of ornamentation, Lublin Easter eggs can be divided into two main groups: the northern, where single-coloured patterns with straight lines predominate, and the southern, with multi-coloured and numerous volute ornaments (see E/1369/ML); in the central part of the Lublin region, however, the influences of the groups intermingled and multicoloured ornaments with straight lines occurred.

There were also inscriptions on the Easter eggs: "Hallelujah", "Happy Hallelujah", "Ecce Homo", "Merry Christmas", "Resurrection", "One hundred years" or several-word wishes and Easter motifs, including a lamb, Easter eggs, chickens, sometimes an Eagle appeared as the Polish emblem. Other inscriptions or letters of the alphabet referred to the persons for whom the Easter eggs were intended, for example girls wrote the name or monogram of chosen bachelors. Sometimes the author signed his name, adding the date and the town.

In the ethnographic collection of the National Museum in Lublin, there are approximately 2500 Easter eggs made by artists from the Lublin region. Most of them were made in the years 1950-1980, while a significant proportion (around 500), unfortunately of unknown authorship, date from the early 20th century. This Easter egg is one of the oldest.