A symbol of life and light

I am writing this in April 2025, at a coffee shop in Lviv, western Ukraine, before a long journey south and east to take copies of my book, Bread and War, to the people who made it happen. At exactly nine o’clock this morning, a public address system sounded and the whole city came to a halt for a minute’s silence. This has been observed every day since the Russian invasion in February 2022, in memory of people who have given their lives in the defence of Ukraine. A powerful moment, acknowledging both tragedy and respect. 

Bread in exile

I came to Lviv to see my friend Katrya, who works at Domashne Pekarya Vasylyny Vesolovskoii, a microbakery run by her friend Vasylyna. Together the girls make beautiful sourdough loaves and buns, laminated croissants and cakes. In honour of my visit they had made pyryzhky (a light and fluffy dough parcel) filled with herbs and chopped egg for lunch. 

Katrya is not from Lviv. She escaped with her husband from their home in the occupied Kherson region in April 2022. It was a perilous journey through Russian checkpoints and shelling, their most precious belongings flung hastily into their car. She brought her sourdough starter with her, although such was the trauma it took weeks for her to be able to bake again. When she finally managed it, she called it her ‘bread in exile’, a taste and memory of home.

A table for shaping and shelter

During my travels around this brave and beautiful country I have witnessed the courage of people who make bread and those who deliver it to communities on the front line. In the battered city of Izyum, the road passes a huge block of flats, riven in two by a huge, jagged gash. When it was hit by a Russian missile, scores of people were killed in their homes. In a community kitchen around the corner, volunteers from the Мирне небо (Peaceful Haven) charity were making bread, shaping loaves and buns on a long metal table. They told me that during the most intense shelling, they had hidden under that table for shelter and then carried on baking when it subsided. 

I travelled east to Donetsk region with another incredible bakery called Good Bread from Good People, an inclusive social enterprise based in Kyiv. They employ people with mental disabilities and treat everyone like family. Their volunteers drive vans of bread to the most dangerous parts of the country, and our overloaded truck rattled past heavy military vehicles, across pontoon bridges and around the huge potholes that pockmark the roads. 

In Lyman, we pulled up opposite a destroyed building that had once been a school. Some local women unloaded boxes of bread while we peered inside: the floor was littered with debris, the roof gaped open to the sky. On one wall you could still see the tattered remains of a map of Ukraine and the words of the national anthem. Taped to the door was a leaflet with details of emergency evacuations. 

The energy to keep going

We pressed on to the town of Siversk, around 6km from the Russian positions, where the skies are too often infested with drones. Too dangerous to live above ground, the place was a bleak hellscape of deserted apartment blocks, holes gouged out of walls, shattered windows, a dark and brooding silence broken only by the boom of explosions. Yet there were still several hundred residents there, people living in basements, without water supplies or electricity, to whom the Good Bread from Good People team were delivering loaves. It was not necessary to question how they could live like this, or why. ‘We are not here to judge,’ one volunteer told me. ‘We are just here to bring them fresh bread.’ 

There are too many broken towns and villages like this, so much land littered with mines, fields that should sway with wheat, sunflowers and corn, now roped off with fearsome danger signs. ‘Do not wander off the asphalt,’ we are told, ‘watch where you put your feet.’ But there are also incredible people who come to help. They clear mines and provide new farming equipment and seeds to grow crops again on land seized back from the occupying army. It will take decades, and resources that no one really has, while recovering from the stress and exhaustion of living through the war. Somehow, with the support of generous donors, they find the energy to keep going. 

More than just a meal

One of our Bake for Ukraine mobile bakeries is working away in the southern city of Mykolaiv, housed in a vibrant volunteer hub in the city centre. We fundraised to buy three of these bakeries on wheels that, more than half a century ago, helped feed the Swiss Army. Each has three deck ovens, a generator and an industrial mixer, with parts repaired and replaced many times. Company manager Oleg began running the first one in Odesa and has helped to train volunteers to make palyanytsya, traditional Ukrainian sourdough loaves. In Mykolaiv our amazing baker friends, Alexandre Bettler from Today Bread in London and Willem Fennema from Bakery Sweets Center in the Netherlands, have come to teach baking skills to more local volunteers. 

The bakers on board turn out beautiful loaves of rye bread and crusty palyanytsya, made with local Ukrainian wheat, wholesome and nutritious. The bread is packed into vans and delivered to villages in Mykolaiv and Kherson regions, places in which people have been through unimaginable trauma but to which they are returning, determined to reclaim and rebuild their homes. In places like this, bread is more than just a meal, it is a symbol of life and light over darkness, it is the taste of freedom and the rich fertile soil of Ukraine.

@felicityspector
@myrnenebo
@goodbread_fromgoodpeople
@bake.for.ukraine

Bread and War is published by Duckworth Books, RRP £20 / US$27.95.

Rising up
We are happy to help spotlight projects that make Real Bread for and with people living through the effects of conflict and natural disasters around the world. If you are involved in (or want to research) and write about such work, please email us.

See also

• Baking in Ukraine again
• An Odessa odyssey
• To the honour of bread
• Microbakery in the mountains