The Civilization of Bread

Bread is older than man
Folk wisdom

Bread – World Heritage is envisaged as a mosaic international programme of research, information, and educational projects, taking into account the symbolic role bread has played throughout our history, religions, cultures, and everyday life. Researchers who deal with the phenomenon of bread mostly investigate individual segments without recognising the ontological whole of the Civilization of Bread—its broader cultural and historical context and interconnectedness. The Bread – World Heritage project avoids such an approach in the research it undertakes.

The Civilization of Bread is a colourful mosaic and, at the same time, a kaleidoscope of historical, technological, political, and cultural events. It is often intertwined with the destinies of gods and heroes, saints and murderers, dictators and revolutionaries, the rich and the poor.

The exciting and often unfathomable roads, pathways, and detours, stations and crossroads shared by man and bread unfold across time and space, memory and oblivion. The poetics of bread permeates human culture and the human spirit—in prayers, rituals, religions, songs, proverbs, sayings and curses, literature, painting, and music. This is a story of humanity’s past, present, and future—of beliefs, hopes, pain, and joy. Bread has changed the histories of countries and the destinies of peoples. Empires, cultures, and religions have been 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 desire to acquire power and supremacy was also awakened: hegemony over territories, the seizure of the fruits of other people’s labour, and intolerance towards those who are different or perceived as “the other.” 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 greatest witness to the constant struggle between destructive force and the universal human spirit—to our eternal destiny, in which the deceptive triumph of the feeling of power repeatedly confronts the real powerlessness of human beings before the fate of transience.

Today, more than four billion people around the world eat various types of bread every day. At the same time, more than a billion people struggle each day for a “crust of bread” simply to survive. Bread is the ethical vertical of humanity!