History and culture: Exhibition of postcards “Easter Sunday” in St. Petersburg

The exhibition "Easter Sunday" is held at the Museum of Printing (St. Petersburg) till June 17, 2013.

The exhibition features more than 300 Easter cards of the end of the 19th – 20th centuries from the collection of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg. Postcards depicting traditional holiday symbols and attributes make it possible to follow all the stages of the Easter holiday: from the Palm week to the seven-day celebration of Easter. Also, visitors can see the back side of cards with congratulations, names and addresses of senders and recipients.

Along with drawn postcards, the exhibition features photo postcard. It is, basically, studio photography: portraits, still lives, partly made by photoshop. Some are hand-painted with aniline dyes.

One of the sections is devoted to postcards of the World War I. At the time, Easter cards included new characters: soldiers, nurses, military paraphernalia.

A special focus of the exhibition attracts one of the last Easter cards, released in 1917 (?). Unknown artist uses the image of a red Easter egg as a symbol of revolutionary events taking place in Russia. But soon after the revolution, the celebration of Easter was canceled, and Easter cards for a long time have been out of use. Traditions of Russian Easter cards were preserved in those years only in the circles of Russian emigration.

After the Great Patriotic War, Easter cards in small numbers were issued by church publishing houses, but they were sold only in church shops. Easter card began to revive only in the late 1980s. Postcards of the post-Soviet period are also on display.

The collection of Easter cards also includes bills of festive and charitable Easter concerts, posters, calendars of different times, porcelain Easter eggs, visiting cards with Easter greetings, periodicals covering the holiday of Easter.