Straw-decorated Egg
A gift to acknowledge a successful collaboration
Because eggs symbolize new life, they have become an integral part of many religious and spiritual traditions, including Easter, when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Children in the United States often hunt for Easter eggs, typically hard-boiled and dyed with one or two pastel colors.
In contrast, throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe, folk artists use eggs as a medium for intricate designs that they paint or apply to the shell. Most decorated eggs come from chicken but occasionally the source may be a goose, duck, or (in this case) ostrich. Unlike American Easter eggs that may be pealed and eaten at Easter brunch, European decorated eggs are always hollow. Typically, once an egg is decorated, the artist punctures two small holes at each end and breaks the yolk inside before gently blowing the contents out the opposite end.
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Program participant Jiří Sedlmaier at the Festival. Note the egg featured here at the far end of the table. Photo by Jeff Tinsley, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives
In Polish, decorated eggs are pisanki, and in Ukrainian they are писанки (or pysanky)—which derive from the verb “to write.” However, in Czech, decorated eggs are kraslice, which derives from krásný, meaning “beautiful.” Some kraslice contain symbolic designs, such as an eight-pointed star, floral patterns, wheat shafts, or wings of a butterfly, which are painted directly on the shell in many bright and vivid colors. Other kraslice, such as the eggs featured here—both created by Jiří Sedlmaier from Přerov in eastern Czechia—use a painted dyed egg onto which thinly cut straw is applied to form geometric shapes. The golden color of the straw may symbolize rays of the sun or ripening grain, both of which suggest new life or rebirth.
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Straw-decorated chicken egg, also made by Jiří Sedlmaier. Photos by Sonya Pencheva, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives -
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The title of the 1995 Festival program was The Czech Republic: Tradition and Transformation. On one hand, it explored rapid social and political change in a country that had only recently separated from Slovakia in 1992, not long after Czechoslovakia had regained its independence with the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It also explored ways in which folk artists such as Sedlmaier preserved and maintained their craft traditions amid these momentous changes. At the end of the Festival, the Czech Ministry of Culture presented this egg to the Smithsonian to symbolize a successful collaboration.
