Czech Easter Crafts

Czech Easter is a craft season more than a church one. Willow rods cut while the sap is rising are braided into a pomlazka, eight strands or more, finished with ribbons. Eggs, kraslice, are decorated by half a dozen techniques that vary by region: hot wax drawn with a pin head and then dyed, colour scratched back with a blade, straw glued in geometric bands, fine wire wrapped around the shell, onion skin boiled for a mottled brown. On Palm Sunday bunches of pussy willow are blessed and taken home. Markets fill the squares for the fortnight beforehand with willow, eggs, honey cakes and baked lambs.

What you actually see

• Pomlazka braiding - fresh willow rods worked into a plaited whip and tied with ribbons.
• Kraslice - eggs decorated by wax resist, scratching, straw inlay or wire wrapping.
• Blessed pussy willow - catkin bunches carried home from Palm Sunday services.
• The market tables - honey cakes, baked lambs, ribbons and baskets on the main squares.

When to go

The markets open about two weeks before Easter and are packed away within days of it, and the date moves each year, so check. Easter Monday morning is when the door-to-door custom happens and the streets are noisy early. Moravian village workshops demonstrate egg decorating through Lent, usually by arrangement.

Honest expectations

A lot of what lies on the market tables is imported, machine printed or plastic; a genuinely hand-drawn egg costs several times more and you have to ask. Prague charges tourist prices for the same goods sold cheaper in Brno or Olomouc. The Monday whipping custom looks strange to outsiders and, in some villages, has a drunken edge by midday.

Nearby

The Easter markets take over the same squares that hold the Christmas ones.