Bread Festival at BelSU

It was for the second time that the Peoples’ Friendship Centre of Belgorod State University held a celebration dedicated to the World Bread Day. The event was organised with the support of the regional branch of the International Friendship Club. The educational and bakery festival brought together students of Belgorod State University, Belgorod Gorin State Agrarian University, Belgorod Shukhov State Technological University, and Belgorod State University of Arts and Culture.

Olga Lyutova, Director of the International Information Centre, addressed the event participants with a warm greeting.

‘Bread has been praised by writers and poets, immortalized by folk wisdom as proverbs and sayings. Bread is probably the only dish that absolutely all nations have, it unites and reconciles everyone. I am glad that today bread united us, speakers of different languages, coming from different parts of Russia and the world,’ she said.

She added that various kinds of bread accompany every significant event of human life, both festive like wedding and tragic like Arval cake.

The hosts of the event were the leader of the regional branch of the International Friendship Club Arina Shestakova and a graduate student of the BelSU Institute of Intercultural Communication and International Relations postgraduate Al Husni Nour Aldin from Syria who also had in the Eurasia Global 2024 festival.

For the Bread festival, the BelSU Scientific Library named after N. Strakhov exhibited a mini-stand of fiction and popular-science books about bread. By their speeches, students from Azerbaijan, Algeria, Bulgaria, India, Indonesia, China, Colombia, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ecuador and Russia made a whistle-stop tour of some the breads traditionally baked in their countries as an ordinary product and as a traditional festive or holiday symbol, describing the recipes and sharing their personal associations with bread.

Yuliana Kanishcheva, head of the Welcome to Russia student association, organized an engaging memory game for the guests to learn and memorize vocabulary on all stages od bread making, from grain to table. At the end of the bakery journey, all guests were offered to taste various kinds of bread: Borodinsky, fruit and berry pies, rye-wheat bread with flax, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, Tajik kalama, Azerbaijani fatir, Turkmen churek, naan, Chinese bao and mantou buns, Indonesian ampas terigu khas ambon, Nigerian puff-puff, Ecuadorian guaguas de pan, Indian roti and chapati and many others.

By the end of the festival, the participants created an online word cloud concept of bread.