[6] No ancient examples of intact pysanky exist, as the eggshells of domesticated fowl are fragile, but fragments of colored shells with wax-resist decoration on them were unearthed during the archaeological excavations in Ostrówek, Poland (near the city of Opole), where remnants of a Slavic settlement dating to the early Piast dynasty (10–14th centuries) were found.

[10] With the acceptance of Christianity in Slavic lands in around 9th century, the decorated egg, in time, was adapted to play an important role in local rituals of the new religion.

On Holy Saturday Slavic Christians, Catholic and Orthodox, go to a late night service carrying a basket with traditional foods, including Easter bread, cheese, butter, meats, and eggs (decorated or plain).

This practice proved profitable, and Ukrainian pysanky began to appear in markets throughout western Ukraine and the rest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including major cities like Vienna and Budapest.

[17] Small areas of folk pysankarstvo survived in Ukraine, in the Cherkasy Oblast and in Northern Bukovina, Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttia, as well as among the Lemkos in neighboring Poland and Slovakia.

Since Ukrainian Independence in 1991, there has been a rebirth of this folk art in its homeland, including a renewal of interest in the preservation of traditional designs and research into its symbolism and history.

The most common form of egg decoration in Slavic culture, beyond simple single color krashanky, utilizes the process of wax-resist dyeing similar to batik.

A tool similar to a canting called a "kistka" is used to apply hot wax to the shell of an egg, which is then placed in a series of dye baths.

Krashanky (in Ukraine) — from krasyty (красити), "to decorate", known in Poland as "kraszanki" or byczki — are simple colored hard boiled eggs, and intended to be eaten after being blessed in church on Easter.

They were traditionally made by boiling an egg in a decoction of plants or other natural products, usually onion skins, which cooks and dyes them a single color.

The colour of krashanka depends on the dyestuff used: In the modern era, they are made using store bought food safe dyes, much like western Easter eggs.

The shells of krashanky could not simply be thrown out:, lest a witch get ahold of them and use them for evil purposes; instead, they were fed to the chickens to help them lay, saved to smoke out fevers, or tossed in a river to send them to the Rakhmany, so as to let them know Easter had arrived in the land.

The linear batik type of pysanka is made with a special tool, a stylus, called in Ukraine a pysachok (писачок), pysal'tse (писальце) or, less commonly, a kystka (кистка).

These use a simple pin or nail head to apply wax to the eggshell instead of a special tool, resulting in designs composed of dots, tears and commas.

This is a Central and Eastern European, and not strictly Slavic tradition of egg decoration, since non-Slavic ethnic groups in the area also practice it: Hungarians (hímestojás), Lithuanians (margutis), and Romanians (ouă vopsite, incondeiate or impistrite).

[19] Scratchwork is a common form of egg decoration in many western Slavic countries, and can be found among the Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, Sorbians (German Slavs) and Ukrainians.

In his 1899 catalog,[19] Kulzhynsky documents examples of maliovanky (or “maliovani pysanky,” as he called them) in the collection of the Skarzhynska museum from the Voronezh, Kursk, Kharkiv and Poltava gubernias.

The latter technique has become quite popular in recent years, with sleeves available for all tastes, some mimicking traditional designs, some with Petrykivka style decoration, and others quite modern and topical.

The eggshell had to be ground up very finely (and fed to chickens to make them good egg layers) or broken into pieces and tossed into a running stream.

One old Ukrainian myth centered on the wisdom of giving older people gifts of pysanky with darker colors and/or rich designs, for their life has already been filled.

Since the mid-19th century, pysanky in Ukraine have been written more for decorative reasons than for the purposes of magic; especially among the Ukrainian diaspora, as belief in most such rituals and practices has dropped off in a more modern, scientific era.

Pysanky with this motif were called "bohyn'ky" (богиньки, little goddesses) or "zhuchky" (жучки, beetles), the latter because they are similar in appearance to the Cyrillic letter Ж (zh).

Ukrainian women who wrote pysanky drew their inspiration from the world of nature, depicting flowers, trees, fruits, leaves and whole plants in a highly stylized (not realistic) fashion.

A most popular floral design is a plant in a vase of standing on its own, which symbolized the tree of life and was a highly abstracted version of the berehynia (great goddess).

Pysanky created by the highland mountain people of the Hutsul region of Ukraine often showed a stylized fir tree branch, a symbol of youth and eternal life.

Similarly, deer motifs were fairly common as they were intended to bring prosperity and long life; in other versions of the myth, it was the stag who carried the sun across the sky on his antlers.

Ducks' necks, goose feet, rabbits' ears, rams' horns, wolves' teeth, bear claws, and bulls' eyes can all be found on Ukrainian pysanky.

In Onyshchuk's "Symbolism of the Ukrainian Pysanka" she depicts pysanky with a butterfly motif, but the original design, recorded by Kulzhynsky in 1899, was labeled as being swallows' tails.

The moon is sometimes depicted as a circle with a cross inside it; it is begged to shed its light at night to help the traveller, and to chase away evil powers from the household.

These include tridents, the a rooster of Vasylkiv majolica, tractors (pulling armored vehicles), and patriotic inscriptions like "Oh in the meadow", "For the freedom of Ukraine", "I believe in Ukrainian Armed Forces", etc.