This qualifies as an unexpected form of entrepreneurial conservation, except among a few with insider knowledge. Several Raxa Collective contributors are amateur pysankyists, some bordering on master level, so this post is a tribute not only to a great museum which these contributors know well, but to the many non-Ukrainians who are inspired by this tradition enough to keep a Ukrainian art form alive and well:

Vegans, avert your eyes while the rest of us consider the egg. We’ve finally reached its season, at least as far as symbolism goes: spring, birth, something that the Theosophical Society calls “the origin and secret of being”—and that’s just the beginner-level stuff. What the grain of sand was to William Blake, the egg has been to just about everyone else. Brahma emerged from an egg, and so did the Tahitian god Ta’aroa and Pangu, the Chinese creator. The ancient Greeks practiced oomancy, divination by boiled egg white.

Brits, as Julian Rubinstein wrote in the magazine last year, are so crazy about oology—the study of eggs—that they are sometimes driven cross the law in their pursuits, hoping to escape the notice of special oological investigators. While we’re looking at all those “oo”s, we might take a moment to praise the Romans for leaving us a prefix whose form so perfectly matches the thing it describes.

On the day before Easter, a New Yorker whose own experience of the egg as a symbol is limited to the roasted sample on the Seder plate set off on a casual egg hunt through the city. First stop: the Ukrainian Museum, on East Sixth Street, where the sunlight flooding through the windows of a small ground-floor exhibition room illuminated cases filled with jewel-like pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs. In the lobby, a video showed a bespectacled woman in an embroidered blouse drawing intricate, angular designs with a wax-tipped stylus over an eggshell. She paused every so often to dip the egg in dye, sealing a new color—yellow, orange, red, black—beneath the next round of wax. (Pysanky comes from the Ukrainian word for “to write.”) Her movements were as quick and sure as a calligrapher’s. When she held the egg up to the candle lighting her worktable, the wax melted away, revealing an exquisitely inscribed shell about as similar to the monotone Paas variety as a tattooed man is to a baby.

“It takes time and practice and dexterity,” Maria Shust, the museum’s director, said. She was dressed in Peeps tones: a light-green cardigan and a yellow silk scarf. Shust explained that the pysanky tradition dates back to pagan times, as do the eggs’ motifs: the sun; triangles that represent air, light, and water or birth, life, and death, from long before the Holy Trinity came along; plants and animals; talismanic lines and spirals indicating eternity, though contemporary pysanky-makers are free to choose different imagery. Roz Chast, for instance, covers her pysanky with portraits of the same nebbishy characters who appear in her cartoons, though you could also say that they’re modern incarnations of types that date as far back in time as pysanky themselves.

In Ukraine, egg decorating was traditionally the domain of women. They worked secretly, at night, “when nobody would bother them,” Shust said. The eggs came from chickens that had laid for the first time; pysanky, which had the power to ward off nefarious spirits, had to be protected from the evil eye—and, according to the exhibition text, from any wayward thoughts the women might have, “since these too might offset the magic quality of the egg.”

On the wall behind Shust, regional pysanky variations dangled from pegs stuck into a map of Ukraine. Their elaborate shells cast long shadows over the gray territory below. The egg hanging over Donetsk, in the east, was decorated in blue and red, also the colors of the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the unrecognized pro-Russian state set up in an eleven-story administrative building, in early April. To the south, Crimea was eggless.

To the roving egg-seeker, everything looked like an egg: gum spots on the sidewalk; the faces packed together on an N train rattling uptown; the white oval of the Rockefeller Center ice rink, where skaters who somehow hadn’t had their fill of winter traced figure eights under the clear sky. In the upstairs plaza, camera-wielding visitors milled around a multitude of egg sculptures, nearly three feet tall and lined up on boxy pedestals, like troops from Chicken Little’s imperial army. They were the spoils of Fabergé’s Big Egg Hunt, a fund-raiser for a visual-arts organization that serves public-school students and, more mysteriously, for an Asian-elephant conservation group. The first Fabergé egg was offered as a gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife, Maria Feodorovna, in 1885. Its enamel shell opened to reveal a golden yolk and a hen, plus a diamond replica of the imperial crown. Times have changed. The Big Hunt eggs, which had been decorated by artists, were scattered around the city earlier in the month, to be “collected” by ordinary citizens who scanned their Q.R. codes with smartphones and could bid on them at auction, though a few had been designated for American royalty like Leonardo DiCaprio or Jay Z to find. Gathered together at Rockefeller Center for their grand finale, they could have been sacred totems of a vanished civilization, artifacts recovered from Easter Egg Island…

Read the whole post here.