New Year’s bread

Yuval Harari writes in Sapiens, that the last truly great invention of mankind was agriculture, which completely transformed human society. Eight thousand years ago, during the process called the Neolithic Revolution, humanity was transformed from a loose network of free hunters into a complex production machine, whose calorie-producing efficiency was much higher, but its operation tied up all of mankind’s energy.

The top product and emblem of this machinery is bread, which, in addition to its primary energy-carrying and nourishing function, has also become the most comprehensive symbol and one of the main means of communication, the most important human activity according to anthropology. Donating and offering bread accompanies the most significant moments of human and divine communication. And from the Neolithic onwards, we find thousands of stamps that reinforce the communicative role of bread with various patterns.

In most European cultures, breads and cakes with such stamps and figures have largely disappeared. But in Sardinia, where the Neolithic is still present in everyday life in the form of thousands of imposing stone buildings, the offering and donation of decorated breads – su coccoi pintau – is still an important part of the holidays. And their patterns often resemble Neolithic motifs.

The pictures of the breads and archival photos come from the exhibition of the Museo Etnografico in Nuoro

The festive breads are usually consecrated in the church before giving them as gifts. In such cases, the priest and the poor also receive from the loaves.

One of the most important festive occasions is a wedding. In the three days before, the bride and her female relatives – sas manus bellas, “the beautiful hands” – gather at the bride’s house to prepare the wedding bread together. The work is often accompanied by music and dance, so it can also be regarded as a kind of bachelorette party. Guests recieve the beautiful loaves distributed at the home of a wedding, and usually keep them as souvenirs, put on the wall or in display cases. I visited an old Sardinian woman whose wall was covered with such breads, and she was able to tell her life story by reviving the memories related to them.

Bread in the shape of a child is often given as a christening gift.

Eggs are sometimes baked with the Easter bread as a symbol of the desired fertility and wealth.

On the Day of the Dead and on other occasions of visiting the cemetery, the deceased also receive festive bread as a symbol of family togetherness. The nutritional value of this bread is of course unimportant, but its decorative value is all the more significant, since it remains on the grave for a long time, exposed to the critical gaze of other cemetery visitors.

Is this the bread of someone who died of covid? No, it’s a wedding loaf

One of the most important occasions for festive bread is St. Mark’s Day, April 25, when the flocks are driven out to the mountain pastures. On this day, the shepherds, their family members, and the owners of the flocks meet for a farewell mass at the solitary shepherd churches that stand near the villages. The festive loaves are placed on plates around the altar, and each shepherd takes some of the blessed bread up into the mountains with him.

San Mauro shepherd church near Sorgono

Finally, the decoration of the bread given for the New Year represents the desired wealth and prosperity, symbolized by domestic animals, chickens, sheep, goats. Or, in fact, by bread itself, in the form of the small loaves, ears of corn and seeds placed on the decorated bread, as the main symbol of abundance.

The “beautiful bread” in Sardinia

New Year’s blessing

The Maya man, with a candle in his hand, steps out in the darkness of the night, in the terrible no man’s land between the old year that has gone and the new one that has not yet come. With a copal incense held high, he blesses the four directions of the world in the name of Jesus Christ, asking for good harvest and for protection from all evil to his whole family and their animals. Two dozen men, women and children are standing in a circle. The invisible light source of the incense placed in the middle illuminates their faces from the inside of the scene, like that of the three kings on Nativity paintings. The chiaroscuro of the candles held before them evoke the figures of Caravaggio, La Tour and Rembrandt in the Guatemalan night.


The name of the Israeli documentary film maker Eti Peleg is not unknown to the readers of Río Wang. A year ago we wrote about her film made on the “golden temples”, the monumental syangogues of fin-de-siècle Hungary, and many of you have also taken part at the premiere of her two other Hungarian films, on the onetime Jewish winemakers of Tokaj, and on the history of the song The rooster is crowing. Now she gives us a New Year’s gift, a scene of her Guatemala film in preparation, the New Year’s blessing.

“Exactly a year ago today, I was in Tzalamtun, Guatemala.
It wasn’t the first time I was there. I was among friends.

I didn’t even have to ask. Sebastián beckoned me aside and said, would I agree to film the Ceremony. I was honored and touched. He trusts me.
María Luisa took us to the market to buy the copal, the candles and the plentiful of food for the new year’s feast.
As the ladies prepared dinner in the kitchen, I was wondering what ceremony I am going to witness: a Quechi Maya or a Catholic one?


What a great new year’s present for me!
This film is a token of my affection and respect to Sebastián and Luisa Tiul and their wonderful family.”

Happy New Year, Persia!

The advantage of having many kinds of friends is that you can celebrate New Year for three consecutive months. In January, shortly after our New Year we can already send Christmas and New Year’s greetings to our orthodox Russian friends in Novosibirsk, in February we celebrate the Lunar New Year with our Chinese friends in some good restaurant previously tested by them, and on March 20, together with the springtime, the Persian new year – or more exactly, “new day”, Noruz – sets in. In this year it coincides with Easter, thus we have greeted our Assyrian Christian friends in Tehran on both occasions.

I have always found it fascinating how stubbornly Persia – and not only now, but even under the shah, in the greatest fever of modernization – has followed her own calendar. The new year begins with the vernal equinox, and its months coincide with the signs of the zodiac, even bearing the names of the Zoroastrian archangels dominating them. Thus they are shifted to a different extent to each European month, so that in Iran we always had to count on our fingers what their dates mean in our calendary; we have even missed a concert for this reason. In addition, even the calculation of the years do not follow anyone else. Under the shah the years were counted from the foundation of the Persian empire, still adhered by the monarchist emigration, thus now they write 2567, while post-Islam Revolution Iran has returned to the calendar calculated from 622, the year of the Hijra. Nevertheless, in contrast to the Arabs they do not calculate with lunar, but with solar years, thus they even differ from the Muslim calendar which now writes 1429 while Persia only 1387.

Already King Darius had built the palace of Persepolis (on Wikipedia the French and Spanish descriptions are the most detailed) as a festive banquet hall for Noruz. In fact, the Persian empire was governed not from here, but from Susa. At the time of the vernal equinox the king and his court retired here for two weeks, observing at the dawn of the equinox how the rays of the rising sun shine through the Eastern and Western gates of the palace, and then receiving the gift-bringing embassies of the twenty provinces whose representation has survived on the reliefs accompanying the flight of stairs of the reception hall, offering a vivid impression of the many-coloured empire that used to stretch from the Bosporus to the Indus valley.

Modern Persians faithfully follow the example of their king. From the afternoon of Noruz on, life stops for two weeks in Iran. People retire in family circle, and as in Persia family means extended family, thus they ceaselessly visit each other throughout two weeks, celebrating together the various ceremonies prescribed for the different days of these two weeks. I found the best description of these ceremonies in Persian and English on an expatriate Persian forum, and as it has disappeared since then, I upload here its saved version.


The most important requirement of Noruz is the well-laid table which, apart from some other accessories – for example a volume with the poems of Hafez or Ferdowsi – must include the haft sin, the seven things beginning with “s” and symbolizing abundance. Iranians often joke about preferring to also try some day the haft shin, the seven things beginning with “sh”, but I cannot say what these seven things should be, apart from wine (sharâb). The name of the custom was originally haft chin, “seven china dishes”, referring to the seven vessels containing various seeds and fruits whose abundance they expected for in the new year, and only Persian imagination so fond of playing with sounds and metaphors has enriched it with further meanings.

The picture of the above Noruz table was taken from the beautiful photos of the Iranian Shiva in flickr, where several other people also upload the images of their own Noruz tables, and as Persians are very social beings, they abundantly cross-comments the photos of each other. It is worth to see, for example, the images by Bahar, Hamed 1 and 2, Sepideh, Rfeiz, DrZin, Leila 1 and 2, David or Sinak, together with the pictures of others added in their commentaries. I especially like the minimalist solution of the expatriate Amir Fathir complaining about his solitude, with the daffodil and the plastic dinner-carrier.