Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/341

Rh kept and the greeting Cristos a înviat is used until Ascension. In Macedonia one egg is put on the icoana or saint's image, and kept there till St. Maria's Day. The icoana is supposed to keep it from going bad.

A special ceremony in connection with red eggs is described by T. Stratilesco in her book From Carpathian, to Pindus, p. 180:—

The supposed origins of red eggs are related in eight legends contained in Marian's Serbătorile la Romăni (The Festivals among the Roumanians). According to one of them, the red eggs were made for the first time by the Virgin Mary just after the birth of Christ, and were thrown at the Jews to enable Mother and Son to escape. According to a second legend, the stones thrown at Jesus turned to red eggs, and, according to a third, the stones to be used as missiles by the guardians of the Sepulchre turned to red eggs. The fourth legend, given at length below, ascribes the red to the blood of Christ, and the remaining four legends agree that the eggs became red as a miracle in testimony to the resurrection of Christ. One of the last group runs as follows:—

After Christ was buried, several Jews, glad to have escaped from Him, met together to have a feast, to eat, drink, and make merry. Among the dishes was a cock which had been boiled whole, and also several plates of boiled eggs. While they were all at table and the merriment was at its height, one of them remembered the words of Jesus which He had spoken before He was taken and crucified, namely that on the third day He would rise again from the dead. This Jew reminded the rest of the guests of this saying, whereupon the principal man of the company, who sat at the head of the table, began to laugh, and said,—"When this cock which we are now eating rises from the dead, and when all these clean white eggs turn red, then Christ also will rise from the