Moscow Celebrates Easter: Festival at the Heart of the City Starts for Families and the Faithful

The visitors of the Easter Gift festival will have a chance to taste the most delicious Easter dishes and over thirty kinds of kulichi. The festival will open in Moscow on Saturday. Treats and souvenirs will be sold at festive fairs; one of them will unfold in Revolution Square. The city will be decorated with hundreds of decorations: a 23-foot tall flower egg has been installed in Kamergersky Pereulok, snow-white clouds appeared on Tverskaya Square, and one can admire hovering butterflies on Nikolskaya street. Today, Orthodox Christians celebrate Great Thursday, also known as Maundy Thursday. How does Murom's Transfiguration Monastery prepare for Easter? Why do people travel there for Easter cakes even from Moscow? Leonid Muraviev is reporting on this. The Savior-Transfiguration Monastery in the center of Murom is famous for its baked goods, especially its kulichi, which were invented here. Today, everyone is busy cooking Easter kulichi in the monastery bakery, the recipe from Mother Tatyana is fairly simple: "We pour flour, put margarine, water, salt, sugar". Fresh yeast is a must, no baking powder is used. Forty thousand kulichs will have been baked here for Easter. This is a record amount. However, the quantity does not affect the quality, which is strictly monitored here. "The right diameter of kulich means that the mixture was right, the cake was infused properly and baked correctly at the right temperature". Kulichi of the Savior-Transfiguration Monastery are traded throughout the entire Vladimir Oblast, in order to buy them, people even travel from Moscow. "Kulichi, which are so delicious — I don't think I could possibly make them like that". The monastery brothers hold Passion Week service throughout the whole week. Today, during Great Thursday, they commemorate the Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles. Only the monks who work in the monastery's prosphora bakery are released from the long church service. On the eve of the great holiday, the obedience of the prosphora baker becomes one of the most important. Monks Peter and Paul make prosphora from the same plain dough. They work from 5:00 and until nighttime. They need to make at least ten thousand pieces for Easter. Hieromonk Serapion: "After the Divine Liturgy, parishioners take one or two prosphoras home and eat it on an empty stomach, as if instead of communion service". Today, there are many people in Murom's churches, but most believers will come here on Saturday when it will be possible to consecrate the kulichi, and only after that they become Easter kulichi. Leonid Muraviev, Anton Kalmykov, Igor Sinurin, Vesti, Murom.