World's Largest Pysanka

The Vegreville egg is a giant sculpture of a pysanka, a Ukrainian-style Easter egg. The work by Paul Maxym Sembaliuk is built of an intricate set of two-dimensional anodized aluminum tiles in the shape of congruent equilateral triangles and star-shaped hexagons, fashioned over an aluminum framework. The egg is 31 ft long and three and a half storeys high, weighing in at 2.5 t. It is the second largest pysanka in the world.

The sculpture was commissioned by the town of Vegreville in the Canadian province of Alberta, noted for its high Ukrainian Canadian population. In order to obtain funding for it, the town applied for a federal government grant and was eventually able to obtain some funding, but only if the sculpture was dedicated to the 1975 centennial of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Vegreville received a grant to construct the egg, a nod at Ukrainian culture in Canada, and specifically at early Ukrainian settlements east of Edmonton, Alberta.