Winnipeg students put pysanky pride on display for Easter weekend
Easter tradition showcases Ukrainian culture to Winnipeg's Immaculate Heart of Mary School students
By carefully decorating Easter eggs with designs for peace and prosperity, a group of Winnipeg students are helping keep a Ukrainian tradition alive.
Grades 5 to 8 Immaculate Heart of Mary School students gathered Thursday to create pysanky — Ukrainian Easter eggs. Students Vira Pivniak and Vlad Abramaik say it is a great experience sharing a taste of their home country with their friends and classmates.
"After the war, it's bad that I left Kyiv with my friends, but here I have more friends," Pivniak said. "Here is I practicing everyday English and every day I get something that I don't know."
The school has welcomed around 60 Ukrainian students into its halls since the war between Russia and Ukraine began in February 2022.
The pysanky workshop was an opportunity to celebrate Ukrainian traditions and culture during the Easter season. Pysanky involves drawing or writing on an egg using wax and then dipping it in different coloured dyes.
Each student decorated about four eggs while learning about Ukraine and praying for an end to the war.
"They are very special for Ukrainian culture," Abramaik said. "It's beautiful … I'm glad that in Canada there is Ukrainian culture."
These connections are make adapting to life in Winnipeg easier, Abramaik said.
"It's hard ... to be far from your home and hard to make pysanka," Abramaik said.
Decorating the eggs made Pivniak think about home — their hope is that by creating pysanky it will help bring the war to an end.
For student Bentley Kemp [no relation to the reporter] the workshop hits close to home because he has friends affected by the war.
WATCH | Winnipeg workshop instructor explains how pysanky are made:
Kemp hails from Winnipeg and learned to decorate the pysanky with Abramaik and Pivniak. It is exciting to learn about Ukrainian culture and traditions, Kemp said, while also sharing Canadian culture with his friends.
Kemp says the designs take patience, "and you have to put love in your heart," to create them.
"I just feel like it's right that since they have a war at their country that we should at least do something like this to like keep their traditions, their hearts, their souls alive," Kemp said.
It is a Ukrainian tradition to write Ukrainian Easter eggs before Easter time, Immaculate Heart Principal Rod Picklyk said. Often people will put the decorated eggs into their Easter baskets to have them blessed.
"There is there's a belief that as long as a person is being made that the world will be a peaceful place and if pysanka were to stop being made? And then, regrettably, perhaps, evil takes over," Picklyk said. "It resonates maybe more than ever right now."
Pysanky for all ages
On Saturday the Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre hosted two pysanky workshops.
Michele Kotak led a workshop on etched pysanky — dipping wax-covered eggs into acid to create designs. The acid eats away at the eggshells giving them different textures and looks. The eggs can also be coloured once the acid design is complete.
"It's nice that it's kind of on Easter ... It's great to see and if you're looking for something different to do instead of the traditional eggs," Kotak said. "It's unique ... I love afterwards when you actually touch the shells, you can feel the bumps to it. It's not just painted on, you can feel the layers of the shell."
Julia-Anne Wait was at Oseredok to learn about Ukrainian Easter eggs, practicing the traditional style of pysanky. She was invited to attend the private workshop by a friend and has "never done anything like this before."
For her, the key message of the day was learning about Ukrainian culture, while putting a bit of her personality into her egg.
"I just kind of made my design, not traditional in any shape or form, but it's really neat," Wait said. "It's been pretty interesting and it's nice to sit and visit with the others."
-With Files from Mario De Ciccio
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