Bread and Culture – The World Heritage

The Civilization of Bread

Bread is older than man
Folk wisdom

“Bread and Culture – The World Heritage” is envisaged as a mosaic international program of research, information and educational projects, taking also into account the symbolical role Bread plays in our history, religious, cultures and everyday life. Today, more than four billion people worldwide eat various types of bread every day. At the same time, more than a billion people struggle daily for a “crust of bread” to survive. Bread is the ethical vertical of humanity! Bread is a product of both nature and culture. Man and bread share the same destiny. In the distant past, our ancestor was a nomad, a gatherer of fruits, and somewhat a hunter. He hid in caves, wandered in search of food and shelter.

We now know that bread-like products were made 14,400 years ago, much earlier than the development of agriculture. It was created by Homo sapiens, an “animal being,” which is not significantly separate from the nature surrounding it! About 8,000 years ago, thanks to the invention of bread, the agrarian period began for the majority of the planet’s inhabitants. The “Man of Culture” emerged, becoming self-aware! This is how the civilization of bread began and is still ongoing. Literacy and cultures, cities, states, beliefs (myths and religions), philosophy and aesthetics, science and arts, taboos and laws, ethics and morals, medicine and pharmacy developed…

Bread is the only human product that connects man with the fundamental principles of this world and the world beyond. The civilization of bread is a colorful mosaic, yet at the same time a kaleidoscope of historical, technical, political, and cultural events. Often linked to the destinies of gods and heroes; saints and murderers; dictators and revolutionaries; the rich and the poor…

The exciting and often unfathomable multi-millennial roads, pathways, and detours, stations and crossroads of man and bread are branched out in time and space, memory and oblivion. The poetics of bread is scattered throughout the spirit and culture in prayers, rituals, religions, songs, proverbs, sayings and curses, literature, painting, music… This is a story about the past, present, and future of man about beliefs, hopes, pain, and joy. Bread has changed the histories of countries and the destinies of peoples. Empires, cultures, and religions were built and destroyed over bread.

Everything has its face and its reverse side in human nature and destiny. With the emergence of the civilization of bread, the deceptive inclination for acquiring power and supremacy is also stirred up. Hegemony over territories, for seizing the fruits of others’ labor, intolerance toward the other and the different. Envy, the “will to power,” and the complex of small differences arise. The human tendency towards destructive creativity begins and continues unrestrained to this day. Bread is our best witness to the constant struggle between the destructive force and the universal spirit as our eternal destiny of the deceptive victory of the feeling of power over the real powerlessness before the fate of transience.