Top 10 for Easter

The top 10 oddest Easter events Europe has to offer

Easter is for grown ups too

Easter isn’t just for kids anymore. If you’ve outgrown the dyed eggs, marshmallow chicks and chocolate bunnies then we’ve got the perfect cure. All throughout Europe Easter is a time for celebration. From it’s pagan roots as a celebration of the coming of spring, the signal of fertility and the raising of the crops, Easter becomes a time for single men and women to let their feelings show.

So many holidays have become so commercialized in the modern day that we’ve lost the story of where it all started. For Christians throughout the world Easter is the celebration of the life and resurrection of Christ. But where do bunnies and chocolate and egg hunts come in? Before the coming of Christ, Easter was originally a pagan celebration. The ancient Saxons celebrated the return of spring with an uproarious festival commemorating their goddess of offering and of springtime, Eastre. This ancient goddess was worshipped through her earthly symbol, the rabbit. Hence, the Easter Bunny.

Easter was converted to Chritianity at the same time as the pagans who celebrated the festival. The time of Easter happened to fall on the same time as the Christian observance of the resurrection of Christ, so that the pagan feasts were to be celebrated in a Christian manner.

As the word spread throughout ancient Europe, each region adopted it’s own means of celebration, based on their own cultures and traditions. We’ve got the Top 10 most unusual way of celebrating the coming of Spring.

In Norway it is traditional to solve murders at Easter time. Television, magazines and even milk cartons alter to cover everything in murder mysteries.
The Czech Republic and Scandinavia comemarate Easter Monday by whipping or being whipped. Legend has it that the women should be whipped in order to keep their health and fertility during the whole of the next year. The whippings aren’t intended to cause suffering but for the men to exhibit their attractions for the woman. In way of thanks and forgiveness, the woman then presents the man with a coloured egg.
Poland becomes an all day water fight. Where the men wake up the object of their affection with a bucket of cold water. The women get their revenge in the afternoon when they show their mutual attraction with yet another bucket of water. At one time holy water was used to bless the house and food.
For the Hungarian Easter Monday is a time to wake up and smell the roses. Or the rose smelling perfume, as the man sprinkles his favorite girl in exchange for an Easter egg.
Travel to Seville, Spain to hear hooded processioners sing love songs to the Virgin Mary.
Visit Florence, Italy for Easter with a bang. An ox-drawn cart heads off the procession through the centre of town where crowds of people follow it to the front of the Cathedral and this is where the fun really starts. Outside the Cathedral the fireworks that have been hiding out in the back of the cart are unveiled and set alight for a mass explosion.
Elsewhere in Italy, La Pasquette, or Little Easter, is a day for picknicking and enjoying traditional hard boiled eggs with salt and local bitter herbs such as radicchio, arugula or fennel.
Russia and Slovenia Easter is a time for great food, where locals feast on a rich, pyramid-shaped cheesecake with raisins, inscribed with the letters XB, for ‘Christ has Risen.’
In Lancashire, Cheshire, Straffordshire and Warwickshire, all in the UK, Easter Monday is a day for men to pick up their chosen one and carry them a distance. On the Tuesday, the women would retaliate by doing the same. This is all done in representation of the resurrection of Christ or the raising of the crops.
Going to Leicestershire, England is the place for Hare Pie scramble and bottle kicking. Hare pie is scattered over Hare-Pie Bank where the locals fight over it before a football match between the two parishes of Hallaton and Melbourne using three small beer barrels instead of balls.