“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread…” (2)

One of the most important things that man has discovered during its evolution was bread. Bread can be found everywhere, in religions and popular beliefs, in ancestral traditions and legends, part of households’ customs, in our words and thoughts. Bread has accompanied our everyday life, being a silent witness to the biggest events of our lives, from birth and baptism until death, and gaining an incredible cultural and social significance.

In the Christian Orthodox tradition, bread is a symbol of life, the richness that we ask the Lord through prayers and parables. Over two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ and His apostles took part in the well-known Last Supper. The Savior broke the bread and said, “Eat! This is my body “, and from this event, Christians share today the holy bread and wine and pray for “the daily bread”.

These sacred facets were subsequently forwarded to popular beliefs, building the foundation of some important customs that even today resist the modernism habits. “Wheat honors the table,” said folklorist Marian Simion Florea. In the Romanian villages, there is still customary that the bread, the symbol of the vital food and the embodiment of God, to be placed prominently on the table in a white clean rustic towel, and then the head of the house to make the sign of the holy cross over, before he shares it those gathered round the table.

Grain, flour, dough and finally, bread wear an archaic symbolism that, it may seem, can resist generation after generation, claiming from the Christian Romanians an attitude of respect and piety. For example, in the villages of Moldova, scattering bread or behaving disrespectfully towards bread are still considered great sins because, as a physical, but mostly symbolic companion throughout life, the bread is sometimes a sign of joy and abundance, other times of sorrow, loss and death.

The role of the bread goes even further, surpassing household boundaries. In Slav cultures and by influence, the Romanian one, bread and salt were signs of friendship, appreciation, honor and hospitality. In the Middle Ages, vows and bargaining were made over “bread and salt” and once these vows sealed, the honor of these men was equated with the price of these possessions: the bread (the wheat) symbolized the wealth of the fields and the salt – the real gold of antiquity, the most expensive product traded at the time. Even today we express our hospitality in the same way: countries like Russia, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Macedonia and Greece always welcome their foreign guests with bread and salt, as a sign of friendship and prosperity.

The most diverse philosophies and slogans over time were created around bread: from Israel comes the association of the bread with the idea of money, which is why “we work to earn our bread.” Lenin promised the people “peace, land and bread”, while for Indians the necessities of life are reduced to just three things: their house, clothes and bread. The expression “bread and circus” was used by the Latin poet Juvenal to taunt the people’s exaggerated interest for the unimportant things in daily life, and one of the many superstitions related to bread says that the bread placed upside down on the table can bring bad luck.