Easter is Moldova’s biggest holiday. It’s a bigger deal than Christmas here and, I suspect that while they like Christmas (who doesn’t – presents!), they may only be embracing it to the extent that they are because they are right next door to Western Europe which, like the rest of the Western World, is obsessed with Christmas consumerism. But that’s another story. Back to Easter…
I was informed by my students that they have the Easter Bunny here but that they eat him. I asked them to clarify this several times and I definitely understood them but I still don’t know what they are talking about since no one eats rabbit here on Easter. They all eat lamb. So you can sit on that one and ponder for awhile.
The rest of Easter makes sense to me and is quite nice. The first part of Easter is that the Moldovans spend about a week baking their asses off so that each house has enough bread to plug the ozone hole. Then they get up at about 3am (not joking) and go to church where everyone in the village shows up with several of their pretty loaves of bread to be blessed by the priest. Apparently the priest can only get the blessing juices flowing in the middle of the night and I’m unclear as to why no one has thought to change the time to a more reasonable hour, but on some level it is pretty hardcore. So they get the bread blessed (they wait about 6 hours for the priest to come around and spend 20 second blessing), then they get back to the house in the morning to have a masa with the whole family for breakfast.
They color eggs here but only color them red. As a result of this I’ve noticed in the last few days just how many eggs the villagers eat on a regular basis since there are bright red shells left in the road whenever someone is snacking while walking. When I got up on Easter, which I spent with my fellow volunteer, MacKenzie’s host family, I was informed that I needed to rub a red egg on one cheek and a white egg on the other. I saw that the eggs were waiting for me, sitting in a small bowl of water with a few coins in the bottom of it. If you do this, they told me, you will be rich. I did it but it wasn’t stipulated when this money will be rolling in so I’m not getting my hopes up.
Other than the masa in the morning Easter was pretty low key. I was kind of expecting some kind of huge extravaganza because of all the cooking they did beforehand but, turns out, they were just getting enough stuff made so they wouldn’t have to cook at all for the next day or two. It was nice to just hang out with a Moldovan family and get to see their little traditions and explain our traditions to them. Although when I let the family know that my students had said that they eat the Easter Bunny, they all nodded and said, “Yes, that’s true.” But then I never got an actual explanation as to when and where this eating takes place and I never saw any trace of it. So that one will have to stay a mystery, I guess, at least until next year. Noapte Buna!
