Hungarian Easter Egg Art

Let me show you our hungarian easter egg art as an important part of this holiday.

Within the Christian tradition, the custom of dyeing eggs red goes back a thousand years. Red symbolizes the blood of Christ; the egg, eternal life. Other colors began to be used only three hundred years ago. Hungarian Easter eggs are decorated with simple geometric shapes or ornamented with swirls of plants and flowers. Ancient symbols sometimes feature too: the wheel of the sun or the cockscomb, for example. The colorful flowers that adorn so many eggs echo the embroidery on Hungarian national costume. The decoration of Easter eggs is a Hungarian craft in its own right. Wax-resist dyeing is the most popular method: The pattern is painted onto the shell using a quill dipped in molten wax. The egg is dyed, and then warmed slightly to melt off the wax, so that the white, undyed pattern appears

Engraving, an alternative method, requires the egg to be dyed first. The pattern is then engraved on with a knife. According to how deeply the surface is scratched, a deeper or paler color is revealed. A simple but effective method is to boil onion skins in water; boiling the eggs in this gives them a lovely dark brown color. They are then rubbed with bacon rind skin to give them a sheen. Pretty, natural patterns in a paler color can be obtained by sticking leaves onto the shells of the eggs before they are boiled. Once the eggs are dyed, the leaves are removed.

Another traditional technique is to decorate blown eggs with tiny metal horseshoes. This requires some dexterity, so is done only by trained craftsmen. The first chocolate eggs arrived on the market at the beginning of the 19th century. The confectioners decorated these eggs lavishly; some creations featured in the local press. One such was a chocolate egg with the picture – likewise executed in chocolate – of the chain bridge then under construction. Built between 1842 and 1849, this was the first fixed bridge over the Danube uniting Buda and Pest.

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Let me share with you some of my favourites:

Find more eggs & templates HERE