“Ritual foods”

Opinion piece by Angeliki Giannakidou, Founder and President of the Board of Directors of the Ethnological Museum of Thrace

In 2025, food and diet are at the epicentre of a major, multifaceted climate, environmental, and social crisis, ultimately caused by our cultural crisis.
Our technocratic approach to and management of food production, far from ensuring food security, seems to be contributing to food insecurity. This crisis reveals the need to restore our relationship with nature to one of interdependence and not domination, to reconnect with the circularity of time, to reconsider the power of community, because without collective responsibility crop failure, disease and chaos cannot be addressed. The code that connects us to the land, to the circularity of time (death–rebirth, winter–spring) and to the community is food.

Food and nutrition, which are carriers of cultural memory because they preserve techniques and reproduce social bonds (collective cooking, festivals), become nostalgia because the brain directly connects flavour with emotions.
They also meet the primary human need for survival and living, nourishing at the same time, according to the materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris, the collective stomach, as well as the collective mind according to the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
This condensed history of traditions is a reservoir of religious and cultural perceptions, marking boundaries and identities, stories of companionship and feasting from Homeric times until today.

Even today, in the era of artificial intelligence, ecclesiastical rituals during Feasts of the Lord and of the Virgin move alongside and intersect with customary events, practices and ritual acts with roots in different historical periods, which timelessly express the anxiety of the rural world for a good year at the precarious turning points of the agricultural cycle.

In all ritual meals and gatherings, whether family or communal, within our liturgical calendar cycle, food, with the full weight of its symbolism, holds a dominant position.
Especially in Thrace at Christmas.

At the centre of the festive tables of these days are Christopsomo, Christ breads and Christmas koulouria, decorated with crosses and sheaves, open on one side to let good fortune in. There are also the various honey-soaked offerings, honeyed pies and “katachysmata” with pomegranate seeds, the fasting twisted pies, saragli and also cabbage dolmades that are symbolically wrapped referring to Christ, the child “wrapped in swaddling clothes”, all carefully prepared and symbolically charged to ensure a good year, the fertility of the land and of the people.

One of the most interesting food traditions of the Twelve Days of Christmas in Thrace is the gourounochara or the pig slaughtering. According to this custom, families raise a pig throughout the year for slaughter and consumption during the holidays. A necessary slaughter that the logic of ritual absolved of guilt.

Moreover, nine dishes are served on Christmas Eve, a custom that is still observed today by Thracians everywhere, at both family and community levels. The sacredness of the meal is reinforced by ritual practices and by the symbolism of the nine foods, which are numerically associated with the nine months during which the Virgin Mary carried Christ. Each dish has a deeper meaning, and in this way communities reflect on respect, fears, hopes, scarcity and expectations.

These symbols continue to exist in the present day, albeit in different form. This is confirmed in the pie with symbols. The Vasilopita in Greek Thrace is a twisted cheese pie in which – instead of just the coin found in other areas of Greece – lucky signs are placed.

These include coins for old age, charcoal for the oxen, hay for the cows, as well as other symbols that correspond to the crops cultivated by each family. Each pie has as many symbols as there are members of the household. Following a set of ritual steps, all the symbols of the family property are allocated by the head of the household. The piece of pie given to each member with its symbol and associated meanings creates a sense of communion in the family property, imbued with duty and protection, in contrast to a purely individual viewpoint. And if the asset, crop or livestock with the corresponding symbol goes on to have a good year, the faith in the fortune brought about by the symbol itself is bolstered.

Thracian pie symbolically and semantically denotes collective responsibility for dealing with any crisis that may emerge, whether environmental or social, not to mention the development of our homeland, a responsibility each of us shares.