Karolinka In & Around Bulgaria

Me in front of Nevski candle in hand

Surprise, surprise: it’s Easter!

I’ve had a great time poking around the city this weekend.  I wasn’t in Sofia for Easter last year but I did spend my first year in the city for the holiday. It just seemed like the thing to do and last year I am pretty sure that I was traveling and that Easter was lumped in with Spring Break.

I’ve been amazed by the feel of the city over the weekend. On Friday the city center is was hopping. There were people every where: on the streets, in cafes, in the parks, in shops. You name it–there were people there. Sofia was alive and bustling. It was the start of a four day weekend. Easter Weekend!!

Okay for better or worse, I just sat down to type up a quick post on Easter Traditions in Sofia–a post that turned into a 2000+ words making it anything but short or quick. So I’ve broken it down into four subsections–Kozunak, Eying Easter Eggs, Alexander Nevski Cathedral and Egg Fighting. I hope this helps in the read-ability of this massive post and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I hope that maybe you learn something new about Easter in Bulgaria and I hope that those of you more familiar with these traditions help me out where my knowledge is murky.

Kozunak

I bought kozunak at my favorite little bakery/banitsa shop on Graf Ignativ–it’s right next to the new cafe Lime. I know that there are other bakeries in town but I am a loyal shopper. When I lived downtown this was my shop. I only bought banitsa and slices of pizza there. The women who worked there (and still do) were always really nice to me. In the beginning they let me stumble through my order in Bulgarian without ever giving me any sign of annoyance–even when it was busy.

Fresh Kuzonak

You get a lot of points in my book for that. And you get me traveling from Mladost into the city center for your kozunak for that reason as well. I can’t imagine that they remember me or even notice my semi-regular support of their shop but that’s okay.

The day I bought my kozunak, the shop was buzzing with activity and with crazy shoppers. There was a display of kozunak in the window and a line inside the shop as well as at the walk up pizza window. It’s the kind of scene where you know from the line that the kozunak is going to be good but you’ve got to steal yourself for the meyhem that will ensue as you try to place your order.

The problem is the shop is pretty small and generally speaking Bulgarians are only so-so when it comes to lines. Luckily, I know these things now and it takes more energy to get annoyed with the lawlessness of the line rather than just to smile and make eye contact with one of the women working at the shop. Before I got waited on however I did get elbowed a few times and I had a man blatantly cut in front of me. The woman behind the counter shot me a look of apology and annoyance at the same time when this happened. But what are you going to do, I am not fighting anyone on Easter weekend over bread. Even if it is really, really good bread.

Wow, Kozunak!

Now kozunak is a bread that takes hours to prepare and while it’s a tradition lots of people don’t want to spend the time making themselves. Enter bakeries. When I was at the shop on Friday, there were three women behind the counter taking and filling orders. There was another girl bringing a fairly steady stream of kozunak out from the back and I can only assume there were just as many people making the bread in back.

I guess it makes sense. Kozunak is a sweet airy bread and when you cut into it or pull a piece off the loaf you see these beautiful long fibers of bread inside. I am told that this requires sifting a lot of air into the bread, careful kneading, at some point you need to hit the dough on the wooden board you’ve been kneading it on 100 times and you let it rise and you punch it down two or three times before you finally bake it in a hot oven.  No wonder so many people buy the bread rather than make it themselves.

Dying Easter Eggs

After buying more kozunak than a single girl probably should, I went to the grocery store to buy a few things for dinner and some eggs to hard boil and dye.

At Billa I was confronted with a problem: brown eggs.

Instructions for Dying Eggs

Okay, just to be clear, Billa always has brown eggs. Normally, I am totally fine with this. Only I have never dyed eggs that aren’t white–oh to be an American. In my mind brown eggs don’t really seem to offer a very good base to work with.  The thought of brown-pink, brown-blue, brown-green Easter eggs didn’t really do it for me.

So I bought a box of white eggs–which I think cost considerably more than the brown ones. Oh well. A dutiful shopper I checked on the structural integrity of my eggs. No one wants to buy cracked or broken eggs. I thought: great 12 eggs. That’s plenty. I also grabbed a packet of egg dye and some apple cider vinegar.

Dying Eggs!

My plan was this, make dinner. Then boil the eggs so that I could dye them on Saturday. Needless to say, this didn’t happen. I used three eggs for dinner leaving me with 9 to dye. Again, that’s plenty for just me.

Saturday when I finally got around to boiling and dying the eggs them I realized two things.

First, I bought 10 eggs not 12 so I’ve only got 7 eggs. At this point it felt pretty silly to dye seven eggs–given the time and energy it takes–but it’s Easter and I did buy the egg dye so I boil seven eggs. This leads me to point two, it turns out the instructions for dying eggs are in about 12 language none of which I really speak. Among others there’s Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Greek, Romanian, Danish and Bulgarian.  Greek and Danish have letters that I can’t even read so I parse out the Bulgarian. As luck would have it, it’s not too hard.

My five un-cracked eggs

After boiling my eggs, I realize that two of my seven eggs have cracked in the cooking process. Stupid eggs. I figure that dying five eggs is about as silly as it gets. So I dyed the two cracked ones as well.

And best part of the story? All seven of the eggs turn out simply beautiful. The colors are extremely vibrant none of the pastel Paas business. This leads me to suspect that I probably could have dyed brown eggs but who cares. The pink-red is shockingly bright and the blue is a midnight-blue color. It doesn’t really get better than this.

My fingers smelled a little strange after words but I’m trying not to think about that as I eat my hard boiled eggs.

Alexander Nevski Cathedral

The highlight of the day, well night, was a trip to Alexander Nevski Cathedral to celebrate the arrival Easter at midnight. My friends S. and P. were both down with the idea of heading downtown to celebrate the holiday. There was a lot of discussion about how to get downtown at back.

My first year I lived in the city center making it super easy for me to walk to church and back. This year however, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s easy to get from Mladost to the center via Metro but the last train most nights is shortly after 11 pm. This schedule makes it pretty easy to get downtown but means that you can’t rely on it to get home again. On a regular late night in the city center, I’d grab a taxi to get back to Mladost but a taxi on Easter? I don’t know.

Nevski: Easter

Luckily, my ever-clever friend P. said, if we were in Boston and there was a big even like this the city would extend hours on public transportation. She checked and sure enough, Sofia had extended Metro hours for Easter. That’s cool. Really cool. It made the whole evening really easy. Thanks, Sofia public transportation!

We got downtown a little bit early and stopped by Memento to have a drink inside before going to stand outside in the cold. It was about 7 degrees celsius last night. When we got there it was crowded and at 15 minutes to midnight when we’d gone to the bathroom and paid our bill the place was basically empty. Apparently if you’re twenty-something it’s totally acceptable to have a drink or two before heading to church to celebrate Easter.

P. and S. in front of Nevski

On our walk to Nevski, we bought candles from a young man selling them on the street. The Russian church was humming with activity and crossing the street Nevski was beautiful as usual. It was lit up with high power lamps and there was  huge crowd of people clustered outside the church. The lighting it turns out was for television as the ceremony was being televised.

I hate to admit this but I know very little about the actual ceremony. Here are the highlights as I see them but the actual order of these things is pretty unclear to me. Sorry.

People streaming of the church

This said, I loved the way that the bells of the church seemed to work in hand in hand with the actual ceremony. It was incredibly beautiful to experience the bells, the chanting of the priest and the murmuring from the crowd. The result of this is a feeling of being actively pulled in the the ceremony and tradition even when you’re not in the church or physically close to the priest because you’re surrounded by it.

So the priest comes out of the church with a candle and from here the light is passed to everyone in the crowd outside of the church. In practice however, I spotted many young people outside of the church lighting their candles with lighters rather than waiting for the flame to be passed to them. This in part leads to part of the time order confusion that I have. In the large crowd outside of the church it takes a long time to actually pass on the light or the flame and when others are simply lighting their own candles the timing becomes all muddled. It doesn’t help that last night it was also pretty windy making it difficult to light your candle the first time. One of the nice things is that Bulgarians who would never otherwise talk to you, do ask to light their candles from yours and you have to ask to you light yours on someone else’s.

Side view of Nevski on Easter

While everyone is struggling to light their candles I think that the priest reaches the part of the ceremony where he exclaims: Christ is risen and the people respond: He has risen indeed. This happens three times. I think. Check out this great list of the greeting in different languages from all over the world.

About this point, everyone starts walking around the church. You’re supposed to walk around the church three times with your burning candle. If your candle goes out, it’s supposed to be bad luck and I think it reveals that you’ve sinned in the past year.  Some people even say that you should walk home with your candle still burning after walking around the church but I don’t really think this a part of the tradition. You don’t want your candle to go out at any point after it has been lit but it’s especially bad for it go out on your trip around the church. Last night this was basically impossible.

There were a number of factors that made it this way. First Nevski is just a big church, second it was windy and made protecting your flame difficult at best and third there were so many people there it was hard to actually walk around the church. We made it about half way around the church before we gave up on our flames. I think makes us fair-weather Orthodox Christians. We did however walk around the church; we just didn’t manage to make it around with our candle still burning.  But for the record, even people with plastic cups, yogurt containers or other means of flame protectors other than their hands were also struggling to keep their candles burning.

One of the things that was interesting to me as an outsider was the huge range of people participating in this tradition. The participation of the young and old didn’t surprise me as much as the participation of teenagers and young adults. In the States, this is the segment missing from most religious ceremonies and here in Bulgaria they were out in droves–actively participating burning candles in hand.

Egg Fighting

Then there’s the egg fighting. After the religious ceremony has ended people unwrap hard boiled eggs and an unofficial ceremony begins: egg fighting. You take your egg–ideally a red one–and you wack/hit your egg against your opponent’s egg. The winner’s egg remains whole and uncracked. The loser’s egg is cracked. I think that winning a battle not only proves the greatness of your egg but also your moral superiority over your opponent. But of course, you should feel free to correct me on this part.

Little kids are serious about this part of the tradition and they smash their eggs against their opponent’s with great relish.

In fact teenagers, take this seriously as well. At school on Friday, I had a long talk with a group of teenage boys about this Easter tradition. They were shocked that this wasn’t part of the Protestant Easter tradition.  I reminded them that in the States we have the Easter Bunny and that he’s absent in Bulgarian tradition. They nodded in agreement but it was also clear that they thought we are certainly depriving our children in the States of one of the best parts of Easter.

Tags: Bulgaria, Easter, Orthodox, Orthodox Church, Sofia