European Houses of Bread

When speaking of food, there is no doubt that bread is the staple on most tables in the world. Nevertheless, we know so little about it: its symbolism and its ethnological meaning, the ways bread is affected by culture and religion, kinds of bread, ways of making it and, generally speaking, the significance of bread in our everyday and spiritual lives. The story of bread is the story of ourselves! It teaches us the wisdom which keeps alive the universal values for all the generations, for children and adults alike. What would our culture be like without a museum of bread? Today there are more than fifty museums of bread in Europe.

Naturally, each of these “Houses of Bread” tells its own, unique story. Some of these museums are dedicated to displaying the several decades long tradition of family baking, others tell a story of a place or a region, while some of them display the role bread played in the history of various civilizations and religions. While illustrating the various aspects of the story of bread, as a fairy tale, as a craft, or sociologically, some of these establishments are not, strictly speaking, museums, but it certainly does not lessen their importance in developing a story of the place bread holds in European civilization.

Museums of bread are also an important part of the history of economy. These “Houses of Bread” do not solely display the destined connection between man and bread, but, with a wonderful smell of freshly baked bread emanating from them, they teach the skill of baking. The aim of this book is to inform a patient reader of these museums, give him a basic impression of the significance of bread and baking in the long history of the European and Mediterranean civilizations and, hopefully, fill his nostrils with the smell of freshly baked bread.