Rituals of the Resurrection

Forgive St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church if "Great and Holy Friday" seemed a noisy mix of solemnity, festivity, and practical necessity, but it was the congregation's first Holy Week in its new Elkins Park church.

And with Easter, or Pascha, just around the corner, there were chocolates and candies to wrap, eggs to dye, crying babies to console, Jesus' tomb to venerate, and even a newly arrived cookstove to shove through the kitchen door. The church moved in last month.

This is Resurrection Sunday for both Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian churches - an alignment that happens only rarely because the churches use different liturgical calendars to calculate holy days. For the approximately 65 member families of St. Nicholas, it is a new beginning.

"This pillar wasn't here three weeks ago," parishioner Ljubic Lilic said proudly Friday afternoon, smacking her palm against a square column in the newly refurbished church hall she painted just days ago.

Neither were the glossy oak floor, the cream-colored paint on the walls, the squeaky clean bathrooms, the maroon carpeting, or the enclosed altar, chandelier, and sacred icon wall in the neo-gothic sanctuary.

For nearly 60 years this little congregation was based at 1231 N. Hancock St., tucked among tidy rowhouses on the cusp of Northern Liberties and Kensington.

Consecrated in 1952, the site - a small church with two outbuildings - had served its mostly immigrant community well enough in the 1950s and '60s.

But as members began relocating from Northern Liberties and Kensington to Northeast and Elkins Park - even to Wilmington, Allentown, and Cape May - that little stucco church with its dubious street parking and cramped church hall and single bathroom was a less-than-powerful magnet for all but the most pious.

Built of gray fieldstone and about 100 years old, the new church, at 506 Stahr Rd., was previously home to a Korean Presbyterian congregation. The sanctuary, topped by massive, arched oak hammerbeams, seats about 150, roughly a third more than the previous church.

The Rev. Milorad Orlic, 46, who arrived as pastor 17 months ago, said he still doesn't know how many Serbs across the region count St. Nicholas as their parish.

"I'm discovering that some of the people on our rolls have died," he said. And he expects to see faces in the pews Sunday - the busiest and holiest day of the church year - he's never seen before.

Eastern Orthodoxy is steeped in tradition, and Sunday's divine liturgy, fragrant with incense, will be long and solemn, prayed and sung in Old Slavonic, Serbian, and a little English. The traditions of the season include dying eggs on Great and Holy Friday (known in Western Christianity as Good Friday) for the "battles" the children will play at church Sunday.

"This is the traditional Serbian way," Orlic said Friday as he made his way through the new church kitchen to a steaming electric cookpot. He lifted its clattering lid to reveal a bubbling, mud-colored broth of red onion skins. With a slotted spoon he lifted out one of the many brick-colored eggs darkening in the fragrant brew.

"It will become brown," he explained, "because the brown egg symbolizes Christ's tomb." And come Easter, after the divine liturgy, children will crack the eggs open in a traditional game, or "battle," that symbolizes Christ's emerging from the tomb.

In one-on-one matches, a youngster will face his or her opponent holding a colored egg. One child holds his above the other's, exclaims "Christ is risen!" and smashes his egg onto that of the other, who replies, "Indeed he is risen!" Whoever's egg remains intact claims possession of the opponent's broken egg.

Orlic strolled from the kitchen to a long table where eight children sat before Styrofoam bowls, each containing an inch of cherry-red food dye. With an "OK, we're ready" to the parents, some of whom sat with little ones on their laps, the children began to lay boiled eggs into the dye and roll them with spoons.

"This is a little more interactive for them," Orlic said.

Most adults on hand for the egg-dying and candy-wrapping said the new location was closer and more convenient than Northern Liberties.

"It's beautiful here," said Momir Videnovic of Trevose, whose 21/2-year-old son, Zorro, sat on his lap, gazing at the pinkening egg before him.

Several of the children, including Katia Kasich, 8, of Cherry Hill, marked crosses in clear crayon on their eggs before dipping them in dye. "It's a magic crayon," Katia said, pointing those very words on the crayon. On others she wrote "Peace" and on one, "Easter Egg."

Aleksandar Kojic, 12, the oldest of the children dying eggs Friday, said he also dyed eggs at home, with an eye for winning today's "egg battles." He looks for eggs with thicker shells, he said, "and my dad taught me the ones with the pointiest ends work best."

He will write his name on his weaponized eggs, he said, so that no one takes them. But even the hardest, sharpest eggs are good for only three to five contests, he said. "After that they start to get soft."

Although the commercial egg-dye kit included green and blue and yellow food coloring, Orlic stuck to traditional red. "It symbolizes the blood of Christ," he said. It is fast, too. In 15 minutes all the eggs had turned from secular white to a holy rose, by which time the kids appeared bored and distracted.

Orlic then led them upstairs to the sanctuary and the foot of the altar, where a 4-foot-long brocade image of the dead Christ, his arms folded, lay across a decorated, symbolic sarcophagus. Orlic put a purple, damask cope over his black cassock, lighted several candles, then lined up the children and invited them to step forward to kiss the image of Christ.

The parish's search for a new home started "very slowly," 20 years ago, Michael Novakovic, head of the search committee, said Friday after setting up a pair of Easter lilies in the vestibule.

"Some of the ones in the city were beautiful," said Novakovic, 77, a retired career military officer. "But we couldn't afford to renovate them."

They settled on the Elkins Park site late last year. When the purchase was completed in February, they put the Hancock Street church up for sale "and in one day we had an offer that met our price," he marveled.

Moving trucks and volunteers began a frantic relocation of church property to the Elkins Park site, which Orlic blessed as the new St. Nicholas on March 1.

"We will have a new dedication when the bishop and others in the hierarchy can come," Orlic said. "But it will be a blessing not for the founding of a new church, but a continuation."

"This," Orlic said, sweeping his hand toward the pews where a growing number of parishioners waited for the start of services Friday, "is simply a transmission of what we had before."