With prayer and in silence. At the Holy Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery in Grodno they are preparing for Easter

Topic news Orthodox believers are preparing for the Holy Resurrection of Christ - Easter. This central event in the spiritual life of Christians is celebrated with great reverence, triumph and joy. it is preceded by Holy Week. On the eve of Easter, believers actively prepare for the holiday, primarily spiritually, and also prepare traditional dishes and treats for the festive table. BELTA correspondents learned how they are preparing for the Bright Resurrection of Christ at the Holy Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery in Grodno, and also met a family who came to the city above the Neman River from Mariupol 10 years ago and is now actively involved in the life of the Grodno monastery.

In the kitchen premises of the Holy Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery in Grodno, it is quiet, but work is in full swing. Here they are preparing to celebrate one of the main holidays of the Orthodox calendar. Several hundred eggs gradually turn from ordinary to festive. Among them are the usual red ones, which is the color of life and victory over death; they are painted in onion skins and rubbed with sunflower oil for shine. And also turquoise, bright yellow, pink, green, which were rubbed with sparkles. The technology is simple, but no less important: boil the eggs , dip them in dyes and, while they are still hot, rub them with glitter. Mission to color Easter eggs on the shoulders of parishioner Anna.
"Firstly, you need to donate your personal time for the monastery, leave your affairs, renounce, because it all goes for the common good. In order for everything to work out well, you need to be an artist at heart. Children, as a rule, are small, they always have artistic taste. Everyone is born with this, it just needs to be developed. And if adults show how interesting and beautiful it is, then children will get carried away. But we need a younger generation, so we try to get them interested,” said Anna.
Thus, one of the students preparing for Easter this year was 11-year-old Varvara Khoronzhaya. The girl’s family arrived in Belarus from Mariupol in September 2014. “As soon as we arrived, we were looking for a church we could go to, and we came to the monastery quite by accident,” says Vari’s mother Elena. “We are an Orthodox family and it was important for us to find such a place. After the move, it was very difficult, it was hard for us.” soul. And when I came here to the monastery, I found spiritual joy and peace. I am very grateful to our mother Gabriel. I am very glad that we ended up here.”
While we are talking with Elena, young Varvara manages to help with almost everything. Another batch of Easter cakes has arrived in the oven. They are also prepared according to a special monastic recipe. “Before you start cooking, you definitely need to pray. Many generations of cooks prepare our monastery recipe. We just copy it from notebook to notebook, because the ink is erased, but the recipe is the same. The dough contains all the simplest things: yeast, FLOUR , MILK , yolks, SUGAR , butter , vanillin, flavoring or lemon or orange juice, raisins, candied fruits, but this is not necessary, and love is the most important thing,” says cook Svetlana. She emphasizes: “You have to be quiet, you have to cook with prayer and not think about the bad, then the cakes turn out just wonderful.” At least a hundred Easter cakes are baked in the monastery for Easter.  
And Elena Khoronzhaya recalls that her mother always tried to get a goose egg for Easter cakes . "A quarter of Mariupol - the Greeks and locals somehow adopted their traditions, so for the recipe for Easter cake my mother was looking for such an egg. Before Easter, we always fasted. After the night service we always came home, my mother first prepared the table and began the celebration. Even afterwards, when I got married, according to tradition, we all went to my mother after church,” Elena recalled.

“Such an interesting story is connected with this holiday. When the liberation operation took place in Mariupol, it was 2022, and then Easter, the city was still destroyed. And my mother shared with me that it was then that she realized the meaning of Easter in general,” Elena said. “With food There were difficulties, there was money , but there were no shops. And my mother, in order to treat the parishioners, the priest, the mother of her parish, was looking for eggs, but it was very difficult for her to find them, and my mother still remembers this, and it touched my soul so much,” she said. woman.
Distracting from the memories, young Varya involves her mother in decorating the cottage cheese Easter. There is room for a girl's imagination to run wild here. By the way, the family first tried making cottage cheese Easter in Belarus. And the monastery, as with Easter cakes, also has its own proven recipe. "We also cook Easter according to the same recipe. It includescottage cheese , butter, yolk, sugar, vanillin,sour cream . But the sour cream must first be placed in cheesecloth for a day so that the excess liquid can drain off. And then we start preparing Easter. Mix everything, heat the mass and cool it, then pour it into the beakers in portions, be sure to put the press on top and in the refrigerator. After which you can decorate,” cook Svetlana shared the recipe.

Young Varvara Khoronzhaya, who has mastered some of the basics of cooking, shares: “What I liked most today was painting eggs, and I also really liked decorating Easter. Of course, if you make a couple, then it’s easy, but if you make several hundred, then not so much.”
“At home, I also really like preparing for Easter, when we prepare Easter cakes, paint eggs, and put stickers on them. And at Easter itself, I really like it when our whole family says “Christ is Risen!” and we answer, “He is truly risen!” Varya shared. The girl said that she goes to Sunday school with pleasure and great interest. “There we study the Word of God, we learn words from the Psalter, the Bible, the Gospel. Now we are going through the topic of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, his last days of earthly life - Holy Week,” Varya noted.
“I also study at a music school, play the dulcimer, I passed the selection for the republican competition,” the girl continues to talk about her hobbies. “The first time I heard the dulcimer, I immediately liked this instrument. And I immediately wanted to play it. I went to my mother and asked to go to music school. We went to sign up, but they told us that I was too young for this instrument, so we decided to study piano, because I really wanted to go to music school, it was just my dream. for a year, I played all the time with some kind of sticks, imagining that I was playing cymbals, but the desire to play cymbals still haunted me. And so they told us that we could go learn to play them. And we immediately went, and I even thought about it. I forgot the piano." According to the girl, what she likes most about the dulcimer is the sound: “With a hammer, such an interesting small object, you can play very elegantly and beautifully.”

And at school, the fifth-grader loves mathematics most of all. At the regional stage of the Olympiad she took second place. He is also interested in studying languages, where, by the way, he is also making progress, namely in Chinese and French.
“My daughter fully understands herself as a Belarusian. Although we went to Mariupol three times, in 2017, 2018, 2019, we were there as guests. For almost 10 years, Belarus has become native to us,” shares Elena Khoronzhaya. “In general, we have always admired I liked Belarus, I dreamed of visiting it, I wanted to visit Grodno and Brest. It so happened that we now live in Grodno, and during this time we managed to visit many cities of Belarus. Everything is clear and legal here.”
Katerina BENADYSYUK,
photo by Leonid SHCHEGLOV,
BELTA.