Easter traditions in Slovenia

Easter is the most significant and most important holiday for Christians. Holy week is accompanied by vibrant folks habits and customs. We will show you some of the most exciting habits in Slovenia. Everything starts with Palm Sunday and ends one week later on Easter.

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Palm Sunday

Three main symbols stand out on Palm Sunday: route, greenery, and exclamation of hozana (means save us). In Slovenia, there is an old tradition of bringing "Butarica", which represents greenery, to Palm Sunday mass for the blessing.

Butarica

Butarica is traditionally a bundle of greenery, flowers or colored wood shavings. Slovenia has many regions, and each has its way of preparing butarica. In Ljubljana, they are made of colored wood shavings, in Primorska region, the use branches of the olive tree and in Dolenjska region they are made of various tree branches, colored tapes, and flowers.

Preparing for Easter

One of the parts of the Easter that are most popular with children is of course dyeing of the eggs. Each region of Slovenia has a unique technique of dying the eggs, and they are real masterpieces. For example remenke, drsanke, and pisanice. Remenke are dyed with colorful dyes for wood, and when dry, different shapes are drawn by cutting away pieces of the color. Drsanke are cooked in onion peels which gives them a beautiful brown color and different patterns are again carved with a knife. On pisanice, designs are first drawn with beeswax, and then they are dyed first in red color, shapes are again drawn with beeswax and then in black color.

Easter breakfast

Four things that should not be missing at an Easter meal are potica (rolled bread), ham, horseradish and Easter eggs.

Potica is one of the typical Slovenian dishes, and if you have a chance, you should try it! It is made of yeast dough and filled with all sorts of savory fillings – traditionally with walnuts, tarragon, bacon, crackling, and nowadays with chocolate, almonds, hazelnuts. Each cook has its unique recipe! We get hungry only thinking about it!

Games with Easter eggs

In Slovenia, on Easter Sunday or Monday games with Easter eggs were traditionally played. Three most known are 'trkanje', 'trkljanje' and 'sekanje'.

In the game of 'trkanje' which could be roughly translated as knocking the competitors were pounding two eggs one to another and the one whose Eatstr egg remained whole, was the winner.

In 'trklljanje' or 'rolling' eggs were rolled down a plank and competitors tried to hit Easter eggs of other competitors which were on the floor. The Easter egg you hit was yours. The winner was the one who collected the most of the Easter eggs.

In 'sekanje' or chopping the competitors were aiming for the Easter egg with a coin. The one whose coins was stuck in the egg was the winner.