Julia Lasica reveals the pagan roots behind Ukrainian paska bread

In Ukraine, most people celebrate Easter next week, in accordance with the Orthodox Church’s Julian calendar. This year’s Easter sunrise will greet a population emerging from another dark winter of their lives. The story of Jesus’s suffering on the cross will carry a deep resonance for those who have survived Russia’s ongoing campaign of bombing raids, deportations and torturous occupation.

But as that dawn approaches, inextinguishable too will be the hope that lies at the centre of the celebration and Ukrainians’ firm belief in the future.

It has always been this way. Ukrainian Easter traditions take direct inspiration from the country’s pagan customs that preceded them, namely the practice of sun worship that occurred around the same time. A universal sign of new life, the sun is recreated in miniature in one of the key components of the Ukrainian Easter ritual: the paska, Easter bread (from the Jewish Pesach or Passover, and the Ancient Greek Pascha).

Creating a paska was a way to honour the sun’s ability to resurrect life on earth after winter, and to open the new agrarian year. Traditionally, the Easter bread would be made over the course of 24 hours, starting on Holy Wednesday. Since the preparation of the paska was considered a sacred process, the entire house would have to be tidy and clean, ready for its arrival. In a traditional Ukrainian house, this would mean the walls and pich (stove) would have been whitewashed, the decorations repainted, and the floor recovered in red clay.

Then the bread starter would be prepared, and the eggs beaten and left to stand in a separate bowl until they had deepened in colour, to give the paska a rich yellow hue. After the starter and eggs had been mixed together, they would be left in a quiet, warm place to rise at night (in a traditional Ukrainian home, this would be in the centre of the home, on the decorated stove or pich). This process would be carefully monitored all night: if it was becoming too hot for the paska, it would be moved away from the heat, and vice versa.

Then on the morning of Maundy Thursday, the best flour, set aside for this occasion all year, would be mixed in with the starter. Leaving it alone for a few hours, the stove would be prepared so that a fire would be ready to bake the paska when it was ready. After the bread had begun to bake, all the members of the household would go outside for some time, to sow cabbage seedlings in the garden so “that the cabbage is as big as the paska”. When the paska is ready, a prayer is said as it is removed from the pich.

Although in today’s world, a paska can be ready in a few hours, many of the old customs survive. When a paska is rising, for example, complete quiet is maintained throughout the house so it isn’t disturbed. It isn’t uncommon for the cook to shoo everyone out of the house to ensure silence. The Easter bread is also covered with a rushnyk (Ukrainian embroidered cloth) while rising, and it is considered a sin to eat the paska until it has been blessed after dawn on Easter Sunday.

For some, the state of the bread also holds superstitious meanings: if it is baked properly and even on all sides, a prosperous year awaits the cook and their family. However if it is cracked, burnt, or even collapsed in the middle, it is read as an ill omen.

Towards the very end of the process, the paska is covered in symbols made out of dough, including stars, spirals, oak leaves, flowers, horns, birds and ancient geometric shapes such as crosses and the tryhver (three rays originating from one dot). These each signify different things: larks, which often appear on the tops of the Easter bread, are seen as the heralds of spring and new life, while tryhver connotes the unity of heaven, earth, and air.

To this day, the paska remains the centrepiece of the basket taken to church in the early hours of Easter Sunday to be blessed. This tradition is the subject of three of Ukrainian artist Mykola Pymonenko’s paintings, all named Easter Morning. Surrounded by krashanky (Easter eggs dyed in one colour), dairy products, meats, salt and horseradish (as eaten by the Jewish people during the Passover meal), the paska is lit up by a candle inside the basket. As colour creeps into the sky outside, the family and their food are blessed by the priest.

Then families return home to begin their Easter breakfast and break the Lenten fast with a slice of paska. In Podil, an ancient area of Kyiv, a custom still remains that the Easter bread must be eaten while the sun is moving up in the sky, in parallel with the growing energy and warmth of the new spring day. Another tradition still practised in villages is the burying of paska crumbs in the fields, to share the Easter bread with the earth and ensure good crops in the coming year. Pysanky (Easter eggs decorated in symbolic patterns using wax and dye) are gifted, and everyone dresses in their finest vyshyvanky (traditional dress).

This year there very may well be air raid sirens breaking up the solemn Paschal vigil. There will be missing family members, young and old, some on the frontline, some on the far side, perhaps never to return. The mixture of pain and hope Ukrainians will feel is most easily summed up by the fate of Mykola Pymonanko’s triad of Easter paintings. The most famous is locked away in a Russian museum, another was looted from the Ukrainian city of Kherson by Russian troops last year, and the last is in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. It is wrapped up and sandbagged, the pasky hidden away for now, but it is waiting – for reunification.

This article first went online in April 2023.

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 12% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below

A Drink with the Idler

“A Drink with the Idler” is back next week, when author and activist Michael Pollan will be talking to Tom about one of life’s deepest mysteries: consciousness. That’s Thursday 16 April at 6pm. Find out more and book tickets here.
It’s FREE to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

How to Live Like a Stoic

The March/April 2026 issue of the Idler (#108) is available in Waitrose, Smiths and TG Jones.

Click here for your nearest stockist.