Our apartment is in Pecherskya. It’s a five minute stroll to the Pecherska Lavra (caves), which is a cave monastery founded in the 11th century by St. Antoniy. Over the centuries great churches have been built over the catacombs where holy priests have been interred.
One of the churches houses a museum of traditional Ukrainian folk art that we had seen on an earlier visit.
On the earlier visit Pippa made friends with the woman director of the museum, who shared many names and phone numbers of important Ukrainian artists and artisans. So, when we formulated our plan to buy decorated eggs from Olya’s and Andry’s biological mother, we thought this museum director could help us find egg-decorating materials. She might, we thought, even know where we could find someone who could give lessons. It turned out that they gave such lessons in her museum. She was the teacher!
What a great stoke of luck. We immediately arranged a lesson for all of us, including the kids who were enthusiastic about it doing it.
We showed up at the director’s office at 11am. Yelana also wanted to take the lessons with the rest of us. The room was small but filled with decorated eggs and many large pages of all the styles of Ukrainian egg decoration (Pysanky).
Pippa went into a rapturous state. The others didn’t notice it, but I saw that heavenly light shinning from her eyes.
The kids weren’t in rapture, but they were totally focused and having a very good time. Andry had done this before in his school and he quickly moved ahead. He filled his eggs with symbols important to him: bugs, anchors, lightning bolts, etc.
Olya made two eggs, very quickly.
Pippa embarked on a quite complicated design.
Mine, I’m afraid, had all the earmarks of a Pennsylvania German title page of Fraktur.
Yelana was working very, very carefully and very, very slowly.
But it was fun. We learned that there are certain prayers you must do in the decorating process. And we learned something of the importance of the traditional symbols used. We also learned that this art started long before Christ was a gleam in his Father’s eye; egg decoration was a pagan custom originally celebrating the end of winter. If you wanted good crops you buried a decorated egg in your garden. If you wanted lots of fruit you tied a decorated egg to one of your tree’s branches. If your friends wanted a baby you decorated an egg for them. Of course each egg had to be decorated with the appropriate symbol for the desired outcome.
Our eggs in our apartment window.
As we left we bought a lot of materials and equipment. We’ll give most of it to Maria but a lot will go back to Miami Beach with us. We plan to have additional pysanky lessons that will include Maria. Maybe after all, our plan is not so foolish.
We went to lunch at O’Briens English Pub. We had our first bad meal in Ukraine. An English pub would not have been my choice, even in London. But we were meeting Kathy Harris who put together the whole Ukrainian Angels program. We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Kathy and her colleagues. She is here adopting her 8th Ukrainian child. She was there with her mother, a couple of friends and some of her children. Another man was there with his two Ukrainian children and soon left to visit their biological mothers for the first time in years and years.
After lunch we took the kids to a (very small) torture/scary house because Olya loved the ones we took her to in London and Hamburg. This one lasted 5 minutes and wasn’t worth it. These three pictures the kids took pretty much summ it up.
Leaving, a cloud burst and we ran through a thunderstorm across the plaza on Kreschatik by the tall monument to independence, to our waiting van and the ever-patient driver, Vasilly.
We were soaking wet. That meant we had to skip the festival Pippa had been bugging me about for a couple of days. Hooray! (Pippa would walk miles to go to any festival and I would walk miles to avoid any festival.) Today, the god’s were on my side. Tomorrow is another day.
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