An Interview with Nadezhda Savova-Grigorova

A Bulgarian Orthodox Christian, Nadezhda Savova-Grigorova holds a doctorate in anthropology from Princeton University in the United States. She is founder of the international Bread Houses Network [www.breadhousesnetwork. org], which fosters social cohesion through communal breadmaking sessions. Many of these take place in a Christian context, whether the formal Orthodox tradition of baking Eucharistic bread or the informal introduction of Christian concepts to wider society through the many biblical metaphors drawn from breadmaking. 

Nadezhda and her family attend St. Sophia Church in the center of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, whose fourth-century foundations make it one of the oldest Christian churches in Europe. She, her husband, and their four young children live in their self-built home approximately 10 miles [16 km] away in the mountain village of Bistritsa. Their yard contains one of the wood-fired Bread Houses that host community baking sessions. 

The editor of the East-West Church Report visited Dr. SavovaGrigorova in November 2023 to learn more about the Bread Houses Network. The interview took place in English. 

Could you explain what Bread Houses are? What gave you the idea to start them? 

I guess one way to define them would be community centers—but they are much more than that. The idea was born when I was visiting Bethlehem in 2008 and discovered that the name of the town means “bread house” in Hebrew and Aramaic. Bet means house and lehem means bread. A vision came into my head—how it would be so nice if there were houses where people were making bread together and rejoicing, with bread being the vehicle towards peace. To see how this might work, I created the first Bread House in my great-grandmother’s house in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in 2009. All this was while I was working for my PhD in anthropology at Princeton—my dissertation was on community centers and the arts as vehicles for social change. I was studying a cultural policy that had circulated under Communism in Cuba and Bulgaria, and which Brazil had also adopted; this cultural policy developed large networks of community centers to heal people and to unite youth through the arts. During the years of my PhD—2006-13—I also had a scholarship that allowed me to travel, research, and write, so I began to develop Bread Houses in different cities alongside my studies. That was just my personal passion, but eventually it became a part of my dissertation. 

Here religion came up, of course, because bread and breadmaking is so central to Orthodox Christianity: the baking of prosphora [Editor’s note: leavened bread offered at the  Eucharistic liturgy]. I started to realize that church people—at least in Bulgaria—don’t make prosphora anymore. We completely lost that tradition. Only the Greeks have kept it—the Greek grandmothers still bake prosphora at home and bring them to the church for liturgy. Then I started dreaming of including priests in the whole vision of the Bread Houses—priests who might lead community baking sessions with children and their parents, or with anyone at all. In Gabrovo we started inviting the local priest in 2010, and then priests from other cities started coming. They would bring people from their parishes and students from the theological faculty in nearby Veliko Tarnovo. 

Did you establish Bread Houses in Bulgaria before your initiatives abroad? 

Yes— we started in Bulgaria with the Bread House in Gabrovo. Then slowly, as I was travelling as a guest in different cities, people in churches or community centers became interested in starting a Bread House program where they were. We have had a number of different physical locations over the years. We currently have eight Bread Houses in Bulgaria— some are not designated spaces, but part of an organization that already exists. In the city of Varna, for example, we have three programs. One is at a church—the parish built a woodfired oven in their yard. They regularly involve residents of old people’s homes and orphanages, so that they can connect like grandparents and grandchildren. The other two programs are at centers—a day center and an eco-agricultural center—that work with people who have disabilities. 

I have never established a Bread House in Bethlehem itself, but recently a Palestinian Arab who runs a bakery in Bethlehem showed interest in starting the Bread Therapy training that we do online. Perhaps this will become something like an interreligious Bread House, a place trying to bring Jews, Muslims, and Christians together to talk about things that can reconcile their communities.

Some of them were, but others were an adaptation of the main method that we use in the Bread Houses, called Theater of Crumbs. This is a form of art therapy. It starts with everyone drawing in flour and telling a story, or something that he or she feels about a chosen topic. We just spread out the dry flour over the table that we are going to knead upon, so that it becomes a white canvas. We choose a topic that interests us—it could be war, peace, friendship, humility, spring, summer… no matter how simple, there are always very personal and deep things that people start sharing. So we start to tell stories, and everyone connects his or her story to the previous one. Out of all these individual pieces comes one story, rather like a fairy tale. 

Then we make dough. We refer to a lot of Christian metaphors during the kneading stage. Sometimes we use this method as a form of catechesis, where we simply talk about Christianity and its message. Christ mainly spoke in metaphors, and there are many Gospel parables about flour, yeast, or leaven. One is the three cups of flour to which a woman adds leaven, and which Christ likens to the Kingdom of God [Matthew 13:33]. It’s not really “cups”—in the Bible it is actually an ancient, much bigger unit that cannot be translated into modern-day English. It is a very large measurement—something more than 20 kg [44 lb]. It immediately makes you wonder—why would a woman make so much bread? In Christ’s parable, the leaven that the woman placed in that huge amount of flour transformed the whole dough. So, it is a symbol of the tremendous power of Christ’s love. There are actually many interpretations of that parable. St. Nikolaj Velimirović [d. 1956] has a very beautiful, long one which refers to the three parts of a human being—the intellect, the heart, and the will, so it is also a symbol of our being trinitarian [https://www.pravmir.com/woman-symbolchrist/]. 

Has the breadmaking process made you think about biblical imagery in a new way? 

It always surprises me how people have different interpretations of the ingredients of bread. We talk about relevant biblical metaphors, and I ask, “What does it remind you of, personally?” I have always thought of salt as something related to negative emotions, for example—to tears or things that are painful. But I have had people who say, “No, it reminds me of being in the sea, of happiness.” People are always telling me new information: things I hadn’t noticed in the Bible, in the lives of saints, or the lives of fellow Christians. I started collecting these stories and by now I have gathered more than 300 pages—so I have also been writing a book along the way. A possible title would be Three Cups of Flour.

To return to the Theater of Crumbs—what is the next stage in the process? 

Having made the dough using all these metaphors, we don’t just make simple bread. We create puppets out of it, which depend upon the characters we came up with in the story. These could be actual characters or symbols. We put them in to bake, and when they are out of the oven we play a real theater, with a storyteller. We draw props on a new canvas of flour, and different people play the characters. It is really fun, as well as transformative for many people.

Could you give an example? 

Last spring [2022] we had sessions with Ukrainian refugees. In one session, we started off with the simple topic of “Spring” and suddenly it involved the image of the huge wheat fields of Ukraine—“the bread basket of Europe.” A man on a tractor goes out to work in his field when he sees a Russian tank approaching and attacking. The man stands bravely in front of the tank and says, “No, let’s make bread, not war!”—I had just told the group that I use that expression a lot at Bread House sessions, and they incorporated it. The soldiers then said, “Well yeah, why not?” They all sat there in the field and collected the wheat, made flour, then bread from the flour, and ate that bread of peace. Oh, there were so many tears during that story! Everyone was crying, children of different ages with their mothers. It was a very powerful experience for all of us. Because this is improvised, people come up with all kinds of stories and ideas that they wouldn’t normally think of. In this case, they even came up with an improvised song at the end, for the tractor driver. That is the thing about these sessions— you never know what is going to come out and this is why they are so therapeutic. When the refugees arrived, we did not say, “Now we’re going to talk about war.” The topic was “Spring.” Then someone said something, and it just flowed from there. 

So the sessions have a healing aspect. 

I haven’t studied psychology and, to begin with, I did not think about this method as therapeutic in any way. Then, when I was at a global conference on health, well-being, and the arts in Peru, I met Patch Adams—he practices humor therapy, such as visiting hospitals as a clown. There is a movie about him in which he is played by Robin Williams. As part of this conference, I did a breadmaking session, and when Patch Adams saw this and how people were reacting to it, he said, “This is therapy—bread therapy.” It grew from there. From 2018 until Covid hit, we had two very good programs in two children’s hospitals in Sofia. The children usually stay there with their parents, and we were also able to involve some of the doctors and nurses in the breadmaking. 

I have also had a few experiences when I would make bread with war veterans or former prisoners. A program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst chose to approach female veterans using the community baking method. We were doing the Theater of Crumbs at the veterans’ shelter when one of the women started crying—the toughest one of all, who never spoke about anything. She said, “The only nice memory I have from my childhood is my grandmother making biscuits”—she was from the South—“and I can smell them now that I smell the baking bread.” I had a similar reaction from a former prisoner in London, UK. He was a big, tough guy from Uganda, and he started crying—again, it was the best memory of his childhood: his grandmother baking another type of bread over the fire. He had been a refugee, immigrated to London, and became involved in various street gangs. He said, “I want to change my life, bring joy to orphans like me.” Bread is truly amazing—the smell and touch can bring you back to things you have lost in yourself. 

Are the breadmaking sessions with a specifically catechetical element aimed primarily at adults? Honestly, it’s for anybody who comes. Recently, at a church in the nearby village of Pancharevo, we just announced to the community, “Hey, whoever wishes, come on the day of the Christian family”—for us, that is 21 November, the feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple according to our calendar. A lot of people came, and we did the Theater of Crumbs with Christian metaphors. Many parents did not know anything about the particular feast or the Bible—even though they considered themselves Orthodox, they had never even opened the Bible. My Protestant friends sometimes say to me, “Do Orthodox Christians never read the Bible?” I explain that the tradition of catechesis, of Christian education, was lost in Bulgaria during Communism. So if your parents don’t teach you, how are you going to learn? There is no religious education in schools. The whole catechism process is growing very slowly here, with younger priests in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. 

Rather than catechism, which has to be organized as regular sessions with written materials, what I am doing is more like a way to build community. It’s more like a Sunday school, or initial outreach to people who are not at all educated about what it means to be Orthodox. It is not, “Come Let Us Teach You About Orthodoxy.” If it were, people wouldn’t come at all—Bulgarians generally have a negative attitude towards the Church because they heard that it was corrupted by the Communist Party, which was smart enough to install priests  obedient to the Party. So people are skeptical, even now. Many say, “Oh, those priests—you can’t trust them! They just collect money from baptisms and weddings.” People also prefer yoga— that is the big fashion here now. It is very hard to change such attitudes, but breadmaking while discussing different Christian topics is a good way to introduce people to the Church. 

Were you raised Orthodox yourself ? 

I was seven when the Communist regime in Bulgaria fell in 1990. I was brought up believing that God exists, but the only way that most people who believe in God in Bulgaria demonstrate that is to go to church and light a candle. They just go whenever they feel like going, light a candle, pray, and leave. I didn’t know that anything special happened on Sundays until I went to the United States for my bachelor studies. My friends at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, asked me where I went to church on Sunday, and I was surprised: “Why would I go to church on Sunday, I just go whenever I like—but here there is no Orthodox church, so I don’t go.” When they asked me, I also thought to myself, “What am I?” They were asking, “What do you believe in? What is this—‘Orthodox’?” None of my fellow students knew about Orthodox Christianity— they thought I was Jewish when I mentioned Orthodoxy. I discovered online that there was a Greek Orthodox church nearby. Gradually, a group of us formed—an Ethiopian, an Egyptian, and another Bulgarian—and we started going to church regularly. The priest there explained Orthodoxy to us, and this is how my life in the Church began. 

Later on, when I started developing the Bread Houses, I organized breadmaking sessions in various Orthodox parishes around the USA, from the East to the West coast, and I deeply miss the spirit of American Orthodox Christianity—it is so full of joy and active community outreach. This is something largely missing in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and I hope it will slowly grow.