Easter Bread

There is so much Easter magic for the children of the Thracian valley, cradle of Orpheus.

The fields of fertile black soil shimmer with emerald-green waves that soon would become golden wheat.

Saint Todor, riding through the sea of wheat on his black Arabian stallion, takes off his seven sheepskin coats one by one, under the joking but benevolent rays of the Sun. Or so the story goes.

Muscly and alluring, he starts to undress always exactly two weeks before Easter.

Such an earthly Saint: according to my Grandmother’s whispers, away from my mother’s ears, young girls used to dream about him at night, in the good old days.  Gypsies honour him also: he is the Saint-protector of horses, and the gypsies love their horses, don’t they?

Such were the stories told as the first warm April days grew longer, under the vine trellis that was beginning to timidly unfold its dainty leaves.

Ah, the smell of Easter bread to us, children! My grandmother would call us ceremoniously around the big wooden basin (big enough for my brother and I to bathe in) where lay the huge lump of dough, odorant and docile. 

“Are your hands clean?”

            “Yeah!”

“Are your feet clean?”

            “Yeah!”

“Let’s start the Easter dance then!” – she would clap her hands followed by our squeals of joy.

With one agile jump we’d land on the dough and start “dancing”. In a regular rhythm of three-fours our feet sank deep in or pushed hard out of the soft yeasty mass, fired by laughter and made-on-the-spot silly songs.  On the old stove, full of crackling wood, gurgled a tin pot with tea from the lime grove, caramel-coloured, fragrant and warm. The Easter bread needs heat to prove, our energy – to rise.

The tea mixed its perfume with that of the crusty bread toasting directly onto the stove’s carefully blackened surface by that same grandmother of ours who was currently looking at us behind shiny glasses.

“Now for the dance of the hands!” – she’d say.

            Our small hands formed small fists, play fighting with this evil giant lying idle in the basin. The floor rugs, in multicoloured Thracian patterns, gathered under our feet, oily from the dough dance, and made us fall, in stitches of laughter.

Granddad, a retired teacher, reading, always reading, pretended to grumble against the noise behind his newspaper, holding his stomach at the same time, to stifle a powerful chuckle.

When the Easter loaves came home from the communal ovens, they smelt of cloves, sugar and almonds, stamped with the joyous dance of our enchanted hands and feet.

@doracourt/February2020