Shafaq News- Baghdad
Iraqi Christians marked Easter Sunday with traditional egg-dyeing rituals symbolizing renewal and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as families gathered across Baghdad and Nineveh to observe long-standing customs.
Rita Emmanuel, a young Christian from the Hamdaniya district in the Nineveh Plains, told Shafaq News that families dye 33 eggs to represent the age of Jesus Christ at the time of his resurrection. She explained that the egg itself symbolizes new life, with its hard shell representing the tomb and its interior signifying life emerging from within.
“In the past, natural materials such as onion peels, beetroot, tea, coffee, and turmeric were used,” she said, noting that ready-made dyes are more common today.
Different colors carry symbolic meanings, she added, with red representing the blood of Christ, green symbolizing life and hope, yellow reflecting light and the sun, and blue representing the sky and peace.
A local church figure in the Nineveh Plains said such traditions remain central to preserving Christian identity and community ties, particularly among younger generations.
Iraq, a multiethnic country with a Muslim majority, was once home to a large Christian population estimated at 1.2 to 1.5 million before 2003, including Chaldean Catholics, Assyrians, and Syriac Orthodox communities. Over the past two decades, their numbers have declined to fewer than 250,000, after ISIS seized large parts of northern Iraq in 2014, forcing thousands of Christian families to flee their homes.