Plenty of Good Eggs in This Serbian Town

A burly oil industry worker boasts of playing Easter egg games, even when they were outlawed during Communist times.

When bridges are washed away, egg trucks trundle along circuitous routes to help ensure that major Serbian cities are supplied for the holiday.

A 34-year-old economist speaks with pride of what she went through during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital: She set cooking alcohol on fire in her living room so she could boil and dye traditional eggs.

“I remember thinking, ‘If the United States doesn’t set us on fire with the bombs, I will, but we’ll have our Easter eggs,’” said the economist, Maya Jankovec.

Through all the vicissitudes of this troubled country, eggs, and the ancient folk rituals linked to them, have been a cultural constant, particularly during Orthodox Easter, which this year fell over the weekend.

Throughout many parts of the Balkans, the centerpiece of the holiday is a cherished old game in which two people bang dyed hard-boiled eggs together. The egg that cracks first is the loser; the other goes on to bang again.

It’s serious competition, but there is great affection in the way the competitors talk about their eggs. “The natural egg has a mystery all its own. You can’t give or take something from the egg. There is just the egg,” said Ladicorbic Ziva, 49, a tall, bearded dentist with a gentle smile and one of the judges in the egg-banging contest that this small town has become known for.

But the red eggs of Serbian lore also have magical and sexual connotations that are as much pre-Christian ritual as Orthodox rite.

“The folk religion of Serbia is full of these folk elements, and because it is so deeply rooted in the people, the church gave it a Christian framework,” said Jasna Mijailovic, a librarian in the ethnology department at Belgrade University.

The Orthodox Church has even integrated red eggs into the biblical stories surrounding Easter, she said. When Mary Magdalene brought news of Christ’s resurrection to Rome, she is said to have carried one red egg, “because the egg, when put under a chicken, creates life--and therefore was a symbol of the resurrection,” Mijailovic said.

The eggs are colored red to symbolize the blood of Christ, as well as life and health, according to ethnologists. In the past women used onion skins and the hawthorn plant to turns the eggs a rich, deep hue.

In some rural areas, red eggs are believed to have special powers throughout the year: They are rubbed over a woman’s freshly bathed body to make her more beautiful or buried in fallow fields to produce healthy crops.

Around this time of year, every green market has fresh chicken eggs piled high alongside more exotic varieties--especially prized are the small, sleek Japanese quail eggs. Egg dealers say they sell as many as 100,000 eggs, some of them pre-decorated for busy customers, in the days leading up to Easter.

Most Serbian families buy about 60 eggs for the holiday, decorating them in the three days before the holiday, in accordance with church rules. The first egg dyed is kept as the “guardian of the house”; the rest are destined to be destroyed by the egg-banging crowd.

Nowhere is the passion for the game more pronounced than in Mokrin, a town of 6,000 in the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia. Here the village fathers hold what they have ambitiously named the “World Championship Egg-Banging Competition.” On Sunday the only apparent foreign spectators present were some visitors from nearby Slovenia, although some of the standing-room-only audience of 300 came from remote areas of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Mokrin sits in the middle of the rich plain that stretches across northern Serbia and into Hungary. It is Serbia’s breadbasket, and to listen to natives talk, the farming heritage is inseparable from the egg competition.

Early on Easter morning in the town’s main square, groups of men, many dressed in suits in honor of the holiday, gather to examine one another’s eggs. One man after another takes a brightly colored specimen out of his pocket, taps it gently against his teeth, nods soberly and exchanges his egg with his companion, who repeats the operation. They then agree--or disagree--on whether the egg will be a strong banger.

The competition is intense, but there is an inescapable element of sexual innuendo in what Mijailovic calls “saucy games.” In Serbian slang, the word for “eggs” also means “testicles,” and “bang” connotes sexual intercourse.

The lore is unending. An egg laid in the afternoon is stronger than an egg laid in the morning. Eggs gathered in December and January are stronger than those gathered in spring, because in winter the hens lay only one egg a week. One of the sexually loaded maxims is that an egg fathered by a young rooster is particularly strong.

“A champion egg needs to be big and have a thin sound when tapped against the teeth,” Belos Zarko, a 39-year-old oil field worker, said firmly.

“Nowhere in the world can you give someone two eggs and have them tell you which is stronger, but here in Mokrin even a small child will know, and that’s what I want to pass on to my children,” Zarko said.

Some Mokrin clans have created egg-banging dynasties, so it was no surprise when a member of the Terzic family walked away with one of the top prizes Sunday. What was striking was that the winner was Kristina Terzic, 14, the only girl to reach the finals.

She started banging eggs when she was 7, competing against her father and older brother, but had never won before. She beamed as she held up her winning egg and then watched confidently as the judges sliced it to ensure that it was a genuine chicken egg. (It was.) Sometimes people try to cheat by sneaking in duck eggs, which are stronger. Her prize was a letter proclaiming her the 2002 winner in the youth competition and a grocery bag full of flour.

The festival also draws a crowd of vendors to Mokrin’s main street, hawking an incongruous collection of wares. Hair barrettes and stuffed animals lie next to women’s underwear and toy guns--a staple for Yugoslav children. It was a long way from Easter and a reminder of the region’s other face.

Ziva, the contest judge, hopes that children will be more interested in the eggs than in the commercial side of the festival.

“This commercialization is a necessary evil that follows us,” he said, “but the eggs, they get under your skin. It lives in me. When I hold eggs in my hand, it calms me down, and to learn how to do it [bang the eggs], you have to invest a bit of yourself.”