Easter

For most Bulgarians who are not too deeply religious, there are two big traditional celebrations every year. One is Christmas. The other is Easter. Easter falls on a different day each year because of a massively complicated event organisation resulting from the Great Schism, when Christianity split into two churches — the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic church.

We tried to get to the bottom of it. We did. We knew the timing of Easter depends on the calendar that each of the two main churches uses. We learned the new fact that both Eastern and Western Easter are “scheduled” with relation to Passover, the main difference being that the Western Easter can fall on a day before Passover but the Eastern Easter is always after Passover. From there on, it got too complicated and we lost interest, focusing instead on the important stuff. Meaning the food.

Easter here is Egg Day. We boil them, we paint them, and then we crack them in “fights”, in which you knock your egg against another family member’s and see whose egg cracks first. If an egg survives without a crack, it’s kept for good luck until next Easter.

In Romania, the egg fight is accompanies by the participants saying “Christ is risen” and “Indeed, he is risen” (“Hristos a înviat” and “Adevărat a înviat”) In Bulgaria, the salutation is only used in the way “Merry Christmas” is used, as a greeting.

The egg-painting tradition we seem to remember comes from Ancient Rome so it has survived remarkably long. At the time all eggs were painted red. Now, we have all colours but Slav tradition says that there must be as many red eggs as there are members in the household and you can do whatever you want with the rest of them. These days, this rule has been amended to only require one red egg. There are so many colours, after all, and we don’t paint a hundred eggs.

Since she turned 10, Cat’s been in charge of egg-painting because when you have a talent, this talent will get abused. After they’re done and cracked, we eat egg salads for a couple of weeks, causing a temporary spike in the country’s methane emissions.

Easter is also sweet bread day. In this case, the sweet bread is called cozonac in Romanian and козунак in Bulgarian, which is the same word but with a swap of one u for the original o, because the word came into Bulgarian from Romanian and we can’t pronounce two consecutive o’s properly — it’s too much work. The origin is, of course, France because when it comes to sweet bread, if it doesn’t come from France, it comes from Austria and vice versa.

Cozonac is one of the best foods ever and its making has fitting requirements. All ingredients must be room temperature (standard practice for all sweet breads, really); the butter is added last; it must be added in portions, with the baker waiting for each portion to get absorbed by the dough before the next is added.

What this basically comes down to is a whole lot of kneading because the proper cozonac must have “threads”. It’s what makes it special. Side note: we have an original French recipe from Irina’s godmother. Guess what it doesn’t have? Yep. Threads.

Anyway, the thread rule also means that unlike regular bread, the cozonac needs high room temperature to rise. And this naturally means that every single year, it’s cold on Easter. This is the weather we were having on Saturday, when the cozonac is normally made:

It was 12 C outside and 20 C inside. 20 C is not exactly optimal but the bread rose because that’s what yeast dough does, after all. Yet a rule was broken and that’s highly regrettable and untraditional, so woe is us. Or was, until the cozonac was done.

And this is the weather we got today, when the only thing that will be cooked is the traditional lamb. The resurrection of the Sun, if you will.