In the first place, you have an Easter supra in the morning. This is just like Easter brunch in America, except for it's in a graveyard with your dead relatives. I realized belatedly that there are tables all over the place in Georgian cemetaries for this purpose (and also for Tslis Tavis, if you remember from a previous post). My host family and I took a marshrutka to the town of Vani-- also famous for being the home of the Golden Fleece, yes THE Golden Fleece-- where my host mother's parents and cousins and grandparents et cetera are buried. There we ate some khachapuri and boiled chicken, made some toasts with 2.50-lari (~$1.47) bottles of wine, and poured some wine on the graves so they could imbibe too.
The dead are the life of the Easter party. In addition to getting their own day, which is the day after Easter, they also get special treatment on Easter. You'll note in this picture that there's little cakes near the headstones. These are called "paska," and they're special Easter cakes. Every dead person gets a paska and some candles-- no candles at this grave, unfortunately, but I think that's because the whole family died (check out the dates... that guy died when he was 29). Well, that's depressing. But don't you think the graves are a lot more personal with the portraits etched on them? Maybe that's why it's easier for Georgians to frequent their cemetaries than it is for Americans; all we see is names and dates.
Georgians dye hard-boiled eggs red a couple days before Easter-- only red, since that's the holy color here. Every dead person gets an egg on their grave as part of their party favors, and then children eat the rest. There's a game that goes along with eating an egg: two people each hold an egg in their hand, and then they hit them together. Whosever egg breaks is the loser (see picture for example of losing egg, i.e. mine). This happens approximately ten million times and never loses its appeal. My host sister from the village told me that some little cheaters make wooden eggs and paint them red so they win every time. Now at first blush, this seems like a lot of effort to win a game that is, to say the least, simple... but then you think about our exciting Easter game in America: FIND THE EGGS! Not much better on the excitement scale, but still suitable for children with low attention spans.
One more thing: there's a traditional Easter greeting, which when translated goes as "Christ is risen," with the response, "Indeed." In Georgian-- "Kriste azdga," "Cheshmaritad." That latter word-- cheshmaritad-- is the more important for volunteers to learn, since usually we end up responding to greetings from strangers rather than initiating them. The big problem for me was that "cheshmaritad" sounds like other, more familiar words that I already knew, like "ishviatad" ("rarely").
Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Rarely.
I also kept coming up with "chishkari" (gate) and then turning it into an adverb. "Chishkaritad."
Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Gate-ly.
Hopefully that didn't happen too often. To conclude, I'll point out that not only is the day after Easter a holiday for the dead in its own right, but this day also happens to fall on April 9th this year, which is a holiday to commemorate the people who were killed by the Soviet army in a democracy demonstration in Georgia in 1989. When I came downstairs at 9:30 this morning, there was a glass of wine waiting for me so we could do all the necessary toasts for both holidays. Other than that, though, the rest of today looks to be normal, minus the fact that everything's closed so I can't get any work done.
And of course, you didn't forget that today's my birthday, right?
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