The Egg, An Important Item in Spring Festivals Among Communities

Happy Easter! 🥚 🐰

When it is the time of any Christianity celebration or festival it reminds me of my Iranian Armenian good friend that we grow-up together since high school.

Iranian-Armenians are Iranians of Armenian ethnicity who may speak Armenian as their first language. Armenians have lived for millennia in the territory that forms modern-day Iran. Many of the oldest Armenian churches, monasteries, and chapels are located within modern-day Iran. Persian Armenia, which includes the modern-day Armenian Republic was part of Qajar Iran up to 1828. Iran had one of the largest populations of Armenians in the world alongside the neighboring Ottoman Empire until the beginning of the 20th century. Today the Armenians are Iran's largest Christian religious community.

As we are close friends, we used to celebrate Persian festivals at my parent's home and Christian festivals at her parent's home, specially those had activities like coloring eggs in Easter and Persian new year. Honestly, always I was wondering, why whenever there is any festival, in two or three weeks we celebrated hers with the similarities in symbols and even rituals.

These thoughts made me research about these similarities since 4 years ago and now as I am sure about the clarity of it, I want to share it on my blog, hence earlier I have written about the Christmas, Hannukah and Longest Night of Year, and also the origin of Christmas tree.

And here is the third one which is about the Easter and Persian New Year.

Everyone knows the most important item of Easter is the egg. The Encyclopedia Britannica clearly explains the pagan traditions associated with the egg: “The egg as a symbol of fertility and of renewed life goes back to the ancient Persians, who had also the custom of coloring and eating eggs during the spring festival.”

In ancient Iran, eggs have been painted for thousands of years as part of Nowruz, the Zoroastrian New Year. Today, colored eggs are placed on the dinner table at Haftseen(7 symbolic items, click for more info), and a mother eats one cooked egg for each child she has. The festival of Nowruz predates the reign of Cyrus the Great, whose rule (580-529 BC) marks the beginning of Persian history.

Egg in Haftseen symbolized rebirth, as in Easter too!

As the great Persian empire territories were to the Eygpt, Assyrian also was one of the Persian community.

ʿĒdā Gūrā (Great Feast—Easter). The celebration of the resurrection of Christ is the most important religious feast for the Assyrians. It consists of a wide range of ceremonies and festivities that call for communal coordination. During the month before Easter (which usually falls in late March or April), houses are cleaned, aired, and elaborately decorated. Toward the end of Easter week, special bread and pastries are baked, eggs are colored (in the past with natural dyes like onion skin and walnut shells), and each member of the family receives new clothes. Games and dancing on church lawns or nearby meadows follow. Children and adults each have an egg and engage in an Easter egg contest, in which they gently but the pointed end of their egg against another to see whose egg will break. The egg which breaks is thus won by the owner of the egg that remains unbroken. Teen-aged boys carefully tend a favorite hen that has shown promise of laying hard eggs in preparation for the Easter egg contest. The practice of visiting neighbors and friends to offer Easter greetings is integral to the Easter holiday and, when possible, the holiday is celebrated for a full week. Each town or village is divided into seven sections, and residents of each section remain home on a designated day in order to receive visitors from the other six.

Doesn't sound similar?