Easter Customs at the European Courts:
And Why They Still Matter

England: The Theatre of Humility

The most persistent of all Easter customs at the English court is perhaps also the most quietly radical: on Maundy Thursday, the sovereign knelt before the poor. The Royal Maundy ceremony traces its origins to the 13th century and takes its name from the Latin mandatum — the commandment Christ gave at the Last Supper to love one another. In the earliest English practice, this meant precisely what it sounds: the monarch washed the feet of poor subjects with his own hands.

Mary I in 1556 went further still. Forty-one poor women were brought to court. The feet were washed three times in sequence — first by a servant, then by the sub-almoner, then by the lord high almoner, and finally by the Queen herself, on her knees. She gave each woman her own purse and, to the poorest among them, the purple gown from her own back. Elizabeth I, who continued the tradition with characteristic pragmatism, eventually substituted a sum of money for the gown — recording that she wished “to avoid the trouble of suit which accustomably was made for that preferment.”

By the 18th century, the foot-washing itself had been quietly dropped. What remained — and remains to this day — is the distribution of Maundy money: specially struck silver coins, presented by the sovereign in red and white purses to a number of recipients equal to the monarch’s age. The peculiar logic of this tradition, sustained across eight centuries and every variety of English monarch, is worth dwelling on. The most powerful person in the country was required, once a year, to make a public gesture of service to those with the least. Whether the gesture was felt or merely performed matters less than the fact that the structure existed.

The Habsburgs: Pietas Austriaca

In Vienna, the Easter ceremonies were built on a philosophy — one the Habsburgs had developed into something close to a governing principle. Pietas Austriaca: the public demonstration of deep Catholic faith as both personal conviction and political legitimacy. The Habsburgs did not merely rule by divine right; they were seen to live it. On Gründonnerstag, Emperor and Empress knelt before twelve old men and twelve old women brought specially to court, and washed their feet. This was not a private devotion. The Habsburg court was a theatre, and every gesture was witnessed, recorded, and understood.

During Lent, the social calendar of Vienna contracted sharply. No balls. The Church year did not merely run alongside aristocratic life — it structured it. One cannot understand the particular weight that Easter carried at the Habsburg court without understanding that it arrived after six weeks in which the court had genuinely altered its behaviour. The Fronleichnam procession, held after Easter, was perhaps the grandest expression of this philosophy: every member of the Hofgesellschaft appeared in order of rank, Thron und Altar visibly united before the people of Vienna. Ceremony as argument. The Habsburgs understood this with unusual clarity.

Russia: Midnight, Candlelight, and Kulich

For the Orthodox world, Easter — Paskha — outranks Christmas entirely. This is not a preference; it is a theological position. The Resurrection is the central fact of Christianity, and the Russian court celebrated it accordingly. The Paskha liturgy begins in darkness. The cathedral is unlit. The congregation stands — there are no pews in Orthodox churches — in a silence that lasts until midnight. Then the bells. The priest proclaims: Khristos voskres! — Christ is risen! — and the congregation answers: Voistinu voskres! — He is truly risen! The embrace and the triple kiss follow. Every candle in the building is lit. What had been a dark room becomes, in moments, a sea of light.

The breaking of the fast that followed was, after forty days of rigorous abstention from meat, fish, eggs, and dairy, an occasion of real physical joy. The Easter table at court was laden with kulich — tall, domed yeast-bread fragrant with saffron and candied fruit — and paskha, the pyramid-shaped curd cheese dessert bearing the letters XB (Khristos Voskres). Eggs dyed deep red with onion skins — the colour of Christ’s blood, the shell the symbol of the sealed tomb, the cracking open the resurrection — were exchanged as gifts. It was from this ancient tradition that the Fabergé Imperial Easter eggs emerged, though rather later than one might suppose: the first was commissioned in 1885 by Alexander III. The eggs are beautiful objects. But it is worth remembering that they represent the late flowering of a tradition, not its root. The root was the red egg, the handmade egg, the egg carried to church in a basket to be blessed by the priest on Holy Saturday morning. That practice is considerably older and, in its way, considerably more interesting.

France: The Bells That Fly to Rome

At Versailles, the Easter ceremonies were embedded in the machinery of daily royal life with characteristic French precision. Louis XIV attended Mass in the Chapelle Royale every day as a matter of course — not only at Easter, but the procession through the Galerie des Glaces was given particular ceremony during Holy Week, with Lully and Michel-Richard de Lalande providing new compositions for each occasion. The Chapelle Royale was not merely a place of worship; it was a daily public performance of kingship sanctioned by God.

The popular tradition France gave to Easter, however, belongs not to the court but to the country: the cloches de Pâques, the flying bells. On Good Friday, every church bell in France falls silent — a silence that is, to anyone who has experienced it, quite arresting. The legend holds that the bells grow wings and fly to Rome to be blessed by the Pope, returning on Easter Sunday laden with chocolate and sweets for children. In France, there is no Easter bunny. The bells bring the eggs. It makes the silence of Good Friday into something purposeful — the bells are not gone, merely absent on an errand — and it gives the return of sound on Easter Sunday a quality of genuine arrival. As Easter customs go, it has a certain poetry.

Germany & Italy: Fire, Eggs, and the Scoppio del Carro

The German Easter has a particular quality that distinguishes it from the southern and eastern traditions: it holds the pre-Christian and the Christian in a rather comfortable proximity. The Osterfeuer — the Easter bonfire lit on the hills and fields on Holy Saturday evening — was enthusiastically observed both at the Hohenzollern court and in the smallest Prussian villages. The fire greeted the sun; it drove out winter; the Church gave it new meaning without entirely displacing the old one.

The Osterstrauch is another practice I find genuinely charming: branches of willow or forsythia brought indoors in the week before Easter and hung with hand-painted eggs and coloured ribbons. In old aristocratic households, the eggs were often made by the family — blown out carefully and painted with considerable art. The Lusatian and Thuringian traditions of Easter egg decoration, still practised today by craftspeople of real skill, produce objects that belong not to the novelty shop but to the decorative arts.

In Florence, the tradition takes an altogether more dramatic form. The Scoppio del Carro — the Explosion of the Cart — has been celebrated since the 11th century. An elaborately decorated cart laden with fireworks is drawn by white oxen through the city to the Piazza del Duomo. At the moment of the Gloria during Easter Mass, a mechanical dove — the colombina — is ignited at the high altar and flies along a wire to light the cart outside. If the fireworks ignite cleanly and the dove returns successfully to the altar, the harvest will be good. A tradition that has outlasted every dynasty that practised it deserves, at minimum, a second look.