If you do not count (pun intended) the odd-number of lean dishes that Bulgarians gorge on Christmas Eve, you will be hard-pressed to distinguish their way of celebrating the Nativity from the rest of the globalised world. Easter is a different story, and it is not only because the dates of Eastern and Western Christians rarely overlap.

East Orthodox Bulgarians celebrate Easter in a way that blends millennia-old religious liturgy and beliefs, rites reflecting local agricultural life and some distinctively festive foods. Add in the unreliably good weather of spring in full bloom and you end up with a one-of-a-kind – and surprisingly resilient – tradition. In a subdued form it even survived the Communist era when religious life was actively discouraged. Even then, on Easter Bulgarians would colour eggs and eat kozunak, a kind of sweetbread known in the West as brioche or Hefezopf.

Today, of course, everyone is free to celebrate Easter. Holy Friday and Easter Monday are bank holidays and many Bulgarians take additional days off to travel to family or to Greece.

The festive mood associated with Easter in Bulgaria covers the entire Holy Week. It is a period of many practical preparations, with strictly fixed tasks for each day.

In Western Christianity, Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, the day of Jesus's entry into Jerusalem. In Eastern Christianity, Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday form a transition between Lent and the Holy Week.

Still, the way Bulgarians celebrate Palm Sunday is rather impressive. The feast in Bulgaria has two names: Tsvetnitsa, or Flower Day, and Vrabnitsa, or Willow Day – the reason being there are no palms in these climes. Whatever the name, Flower Day is one of the most colourful and vibrant festivities in this country. From early in the morning and throughout the day people queue in front of churches. Some of them carry bunches of flowers and willow twigs, the local equivalent of Jerusalem's palm branches.

They leave their flowers at the icon of their preferred saint, pray and then hurry home. Once there, they weave the twigs in wreaths and place them at the main entrance and by the household icon, if there is one, for protection against evil and misfortune.

Few go to church for the special mass marking the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem. Taking the blessed twigs is deemed more important and, once this is done, there follows a celebration of the name day of relatives and friends bearing flower or plant names. Names of floral origin abound in Bulgaria and that means that there is hardly a family in the country without at least one person called Margarita, or Daisy; Yavor, or Sycamore; Dilyana, or Catnip; Yasen, or Ashtree; Zdravko, or Geranium and so on and so forth. Generic names like Tsvetelin, Tsvetomir and Tsvetan, with their feminine variants, are also popular. They all mean flower or flowering.

On the following day, the Holy Week starts in earnest. The first three days of it are assigned for cleaning the house. On Good Thursday Easter eggs are coloured. According to tradition, the procedure should take place at dawn so that the first rays of the rising sun fall upon the first coloured egg, which is always red, as a symbol of the blood of Christ. While the egg is still wet, the lady of the house makes with it crosses on the foreheads of all the children in the household. Good Thursday is also the time to start making kozunak sweetbreads.

Good Friday is considered the saddest day in the year for Christians, as it was the day of Jesus's crucifixion. Believers mourn the death of Christ and for the next two days church bells knell a death toll. All work is strictly prohibited. Those who are more religious go to church, where they crawl three times under a table covered in flowers. It represents the grave of Christ and the crawling is a humble reminder of one's own mortality, but according to popular belief the reason to do it is to guarantee good health through the rest of the year. In the evening of Good Friday there is an hours-long and very solemn liturgy in church. Try to be present at least once.

On Good Saturday tradition requires that women go to the cemetery, burn incense at the graves of their relatives and give out bread and coloured eggs so that the souls of the dead may rest in peace.

People circumambulate three times the church of Sokolski Monastery. This part of the rite is the reason why all Eastern Orthodox churches are detached 

The most important thing that happens on that day is so impressive that the media cover it extensively. It is the arrival of the Holy Fire with Bulgaria's government airplane all the way from Jerusalem.

For centuries, the tradition goes, the Holy Fire has descended from heaven to the Aedicula in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, lighting candles with the flaming embodiment of the Holy Spirit. The miracle happens only for the Eastern Orthodox Easter. Once the fire arrives, it is distributed through the Eastern Orthodox world.

For some years now, Bulgaria has been a part of this tradition. Once the Holy Fire arrives in Sofia, it is swiftly transported to churches and monasteries, ready to be distributed to churchgoers a couple of hours later, when the midnight mass concludes.

The Easter mass starts half an hour before midnight on Holy Saturday. Ready for it, Bulgarians take a few eggs and go to church.

Easter night in Bulgaria is an atmospheric spectacle of light and darkness

The mass is slow and solemn, the priests are in their best attire – a spectacle of gilt and incense, of booming choirs and mystical splendour. In the height of the moment, the priest drives Satan from the church and steps out into the night. The congregation follows him. At midnight the priest lights the candles with the Holy Fire and greets the congregation by saying, Hristos voskrese, or "Christ Is Risen." The answer is Voistina voskrese, or "Indeed He Is Risen."

Then everyone should walk around the church three times – in theory. In practice, there is congestion at the door when everybody tries to get out at the some time. While some of the laity are already making their third turn around the church, others are still blocked inside.

Once the commotion is over and everyone has lit their candle, a deluge of light bearing silhouettes pours out of churches and monasteries, as people hurry to bring the burning candles home. It is a spectacle of fire and darkness, of voices echoing in the dark – Hristos voskrese! Voistina voskrese! – while the river of fire gradually breaks down into smaller streams, eventually dissolving into the night.

Easter celebrations are the time when you can see churches in Bulgaria packed to the brim

Until the early 2000s, people would hurry to bring their lit candles home, to make a cross with the smoke on the door's upper threshold. Nowadays fewer people observe the rite: it is hard to do so if you live in a big city and the church is far from your home.

Once Easter is here, people exchange eggs and "fight" with them – they hit each other's eggs trying to break them. The person whose egg is the strongest will have good health and luck throughout the year. However, the egg that was dyed first is taken back home and kept until the following Easter. Mo matter whether they have observed the Easter fast or not, Bulgarians eat eggs, kozunak sweet bread, and, quite obviously, roast lamb. The 40-day Lent has just ended. 

Easter celebration at Rila Monastery