NuanceDeck

Russian · phrasebook

Happy easter in Russian

Happy Easter in Russian is the ritual exchange: Христос воскресе! (Christ is risen!) answered by Воистину воскресе! (truly risen!). The modern secular greeting is С Пасхой!, with Easter in the instrumental like every Russian holiday.

Aurélien CuvelierAurélien CuvelierAug 9, 2026 · Updated Aug 10, 2026
Христос воскресе!
Khristos voskrese
the greeting

The ways to say it

Христос воскресе! (Khristos voskrese), the greeting: Christ is risen; Church Slavonic form

Воистину воскресе! (voistinu voskrese), the reply: truly risen; the fixed answer

С Пасхой! (s Paskhoy), secular: the с + instrumental machine again

кулич (kulich), the cake: the tall Easter bread everyone bakes

How to use it

The exchange is call-and-response, like ни пуха ни пера: one side proclaims, the other must answer воистину воскресе. It survives fully intact in otherwise secular families, alongside кулич and painted eggs.

Orthodox Easter follows the Julian calculation, so it usually falls on a different Sunday than Western Easter, sometimes weeks apart. Check the year's date before deploying the greeting.

Watch out

The reply is fixed: воистину воскресе, nothing else. Answering спасибо or repeating the greeting back marks the outsider instantly; this is the most ritualized exchange in the language.

Learn the words behind the phrases

See what a NuanceDeck card carries ›

Free forever: reviews, grammar and all the audio.

Aurélien Cuvelier

Written by

Aurélien Cuvelier Founder, NuanceDeck

Aurélien Cuvelier builds NuanceDeck, the app that teaches Russian and French words in context. Each course follows the official proficiency word lists and a frequency corpus for its language, and every word comes with real, annotated example sentences.

More about how NuanceDeck is made ›