Easter Food and Easter Feast in the Soviet Time as an Instrument for the Preservation of Religious or Family Identity

Abstract

The article discusses the forms of preservation and transmission of religious knowledge through the food code during the Soviet period. In the circumstances where nearly every channel of the institutional transmission of religious knowledge was either closed down or lost, its fragments were still preserved at the level of everyday family culture, as for instance in the home tradition of following major religious holidays, first and foremost the Easter. The author examines the ways in which the maintenance of traditional technologies at the everyday, “kitchen”, level (keeping recipes of the Easter cake, making the proper ingredients, preparing onion skins for dyeing Easter eggs, etc.) was instrumental in the preservation and transmission of religious identity and elementary knowledge of the faith within the family in the outer atheistic surroundings.