Greek Bread

Greek bread covers hard barley rusks, flat Lenten loaves and sweet festive rounds. Food tours in Greece are outings with a host, held in places such as Athens, Crete and Santorini. The topics here run from paximadi, dakos, pita and koulouri to lagana and tsoureki. Later topics include vasilopita, church loaves, koliva, barley, emmer, Demeter and the Greek mill. Related pages on Greek food, Greek desserts and Ancient Greek food add more background. More outings appear on the page for Greece tours.

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What is Greek bread?

Greek bread rests on wheat, the basic grain of Greece, with barley grown beside it. The older word artos once covered cakes, wheat loaves and bread as a whole. Modern speakers have moved to the word psomi for everyday bread and kept artos for church loaves.

Greek bread words reach back to Mycenaean Greek, an early form of the language. The term a-to-po-qo, meaning bakers, appears there in Linear B. Linear B is a syllabary, a script in which each sign marks one syllable. The first part of that old compound word is thought to be the stem of artos.

The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all treated refined baking as a mark of civilisation. At an ancient Greek meal, bread came with side foods called opson. English renders that word as relish. Flat loaves sometimes did a second job as plates, although terracotta bowls were the more common choice.

Commercial bakeries were well known and widespread when Rome conquered Greece during the 2nd century BC. A flatbread is dough rolled thin before baking, made from flour, water and salt. Ancient flat Greek bread served as street food, because people lacked kitchens at home. Etruscan and Roman eaters shared that habit.

• Friendship: In Greece, the phrase “bread and salt” describes a strong bond between friends.
• Starter: Traditional Greek sourdough is seeded with basil leaves soaked in room-temperature water.
• Triad: Greek cooking and its Mediterranean neighbours share one base trio: wheat, olive oil and wine.

Greek bread also met changing tastes in the Byzantine world. Meat eating seems to have risen while bread eating fell during the Middle Byzantine period. The two main grains of Byzantine Anatolia, the Asian part of that empire, were wheat and barley.

How did paximadi earn its place in Greek bread?

Greek bread in rusk form goes by the name paximadi, a dry slice baked twice until hard. Its name points back to an ancient writer. Paxamus, or Paxamos, was a Greek author of the Hellenistic age, the era following Alexander the Great.

His writing covered both kitchen and field. One work was a cookbook titled On Cooking, and another was a farming textbook titled On Farming. The story of Greek bread names him as the possible inventor of barley biscuits called paximathia, after himself. Another Greek writer, Athenaeus, mentioned Paxamus once in his work Deipnosophists.

The Geoponica, a Byzantine text on agriculture, also quoted him. The Greek word Geoponica signifies agricultural pursuits in the widest sense. This twenty-book collection of farming lore was compiled during the 10th century in Constantinople for Emperor Constantine VII. It stands as the only surviving Byzantine work on agriculture.

Around 50 manuscripts of the Geoponica survive, dating from between the 10th and 16th centuries. Its sources include Pliny and lost Greek farming authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Greek bread of this hard type has seafaring cousins. Egyptian sailors carried a brittle millet loaf called dhourra cake, and the Romans had a biscuit called buccellum.

• Abroad: Greek speciality shops in parts of the United States also sell paximathia.
• Two bakes: The word tvebak comes from Dutch tweebak, literally two bake, an old term for rusk.
• Brazil: The Brazilian version of rusk is called torrada industrializada, meaning industrialised toast, or simply torrada.

Greek bread in this dry form has relatives abroad. In Azerbaijani, rusk is called sukhary, a loanword from Russian through Persian. It comes from stale bread and buns. Cuban sponge rusk, by contrast, uses twice-baked yellow cake batter and resembles biscotti.

Why does dakos matter to Greek bread?

Greek bread turns into a Cretan salad in dakos. A slice of soaked paximadi sits under tomatoes and cheese. Cooks use a barley rusk and soften it in water or olive oil. The rest of the dish then goes on top.

Dakos also goes by the spelling ntakos, and it carries two further names in Greek. Koukouvagia is the Greek word for owl, so one name calls the dish an owl. Kouloukopsomo joins koulouki, meaning pup, with psomi, meaning bread. That name allegedly points to loaves fed to puppies under a table.

The Greek bread base of dakos takes chopped tomatoes, crumbled feta or mizithra cheese, and olive oil. Mizithra is a Greek cheese made from whey. Garlic and sea salt are commonly rubbed onto the rusk before it goes under the toppings. Dried oregano, a herb, then seasons the finished salad.

Capers, caper berries, olives and peppers are further ingredients on a plate of dakos. Capers are pickled flower buds of a shrub, and caper berries are the fruit of that shrub. The olives on this Greek bread salad are commonly Koroneiki, Lianes or Tsounates. Those three names mark separate olive varieties.

• Catalan cousin: Writers compare dakos with pa amb tomàquet, the tomato bread of Catalan cuisine.
• Italian cousins: Frisella and panzanella, two Italian dishes, also earn a comparison with dakos.
• Cretan label: Dakos counts as a Cretan horiatiki, the Greek word for a village-style salad.

Greek bread in paximadi form is the basis of dakos, listed as a Cretan meze. A meze means a small plate of food served as a snack or starter. Feta, one topping here, was already a Byzantine product, along with anthotiro and kefalotyri.

Where does pita stand among Greek bread types?

Greek bread in pita form carries a name that entered Byzantine Greek from Aramaic pitta. Another theory traces the word to Classical Hebrew patt, a morsel of bread. Pita belongs to the flatbread family, with deep roots in the Near East.

Greek bread history here starts far from Greece, in the Fertile Crescent. Ancient wheat and barley ranked among the earliest domesticated crops there, about 10,000 years ago. Domesticated crops are plants bred and grown by people. Germanic or Illyrian go-betweens also appear in theories about how the name travelled.

Commercial production lines today draw on silos that hold 45,000 kilograms of flour at a time. They turn out thousands of pitas per hour. Their ovens reach 430 to 480 degrees Celsius, much hotter than traditional clay ovens. Cooled on conveyor belts, the rounds can then go to commercial freezers at minus 12 degrees Celsius.

Steam-puffed pocket pita does not appear in the ancient texts or in medieval Arab cookbooks. Food historians Charles Perry and Gil Marks treat the pocket as a later development. The pocket forms because baked layers stay separated inside the deflated round. Pita baked without that space carries the name pocket-less pita.

• Souvlaki: Greek bread of this kind accompanies souvlaki, grilled meat on a skewer, in Greek cuisine.
• Gyros: Greek gyros wraps meat from a vertical rotisserie, onions, tomato and lettuce in pita bread.
• Pide: Turkish pide includes a flatbread similar to the one eaten in Greece and Arab countries.

Greek bread in this style also travels under other labels. Western use of the name pita reaches other flatbreads, such as Arab khubz, a word for bread. Pita also appears in the cuisine of the Aromanians, a Balkan people. Cut and baked again, it becomes crispy pita chips.

Which story does koulouri bring to Greek bread?

Greek bread takes a ring shape in koulouri. Crete keeps a dried paximadi version under the same name. That Cretan ring is served with a drizzle of olive oil, sometimes with oregano and grated tomato. Elsewhere the ring goes by the name simit.

The word simit comes from Arabic samīd, meaning white bread or fine flour. Other speakers use other names for this ring of Greek bread. Turkish has gevrek, Aramaic has qeluro, and the Armenian name is bokegh. In Judaeo-Spanish, the language of Sephardic Jews, the ring is known as roskas turkas.

Üsküdar, a district of Istanbul, set a standard weight for simit in 1593. Evliya Çelebi, a 17th-century traveller, counted 70 simit bakeries in Istanbul during the 1630s. Simit and its variants became popular across the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish state that once ruled Greece. Drinking tea with simit is a traditional habit.

The same Greek bread shape takes on other roles abroad. In Armenia, simit counts as a traditional Christmas bread. In Egypt, people eat it with boiled eggs or duggah, a mixture of herbs used as a condiment. In the mosques of Mecca and Medina, it commonly breaks the fast with yoghurt or buttermilk.

• Turkey today: Municipalities across Turkey produce simit through their own subsidiaries, meaning companies they control.
• Uyghur relative: Girde, a bread baked on tandoor walls, closely resembles simit in Uyghur kitchens of China.
• Sesame trade: Trade in sesame between Mesopotamia and the Indian subcontinent was under way by 2000 BC.

Greek bread of the ring kind shares its history with Turkish baking. Simit stands as an important symbol for lower and middle-class people of Turkey. In Levantine cuisine, the eastern Mediterranean kitchen, ka’ak is a common ring-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds.

What makes lagana a Clean Monday Greek bread?

Greek bread for Clean Monday takes the form of lagana, a flat loaf. Clean Monday opens the Orthodox fast before Easter. In modern Greek, the word lagana still means a flat, thin unleavened bread baked for that holiday.

Ancient cooks knew a dough called tracta, also named laganon, laganum or lagana. It was a drawn-out or rolled-out pastry dough in Roman and Greek kitchens. Its exact nature stays unclear, because no source describes its making in full. Laganon meant an unleavened bread, a pancake and later possibly a pasta, at different periods.

The writer Perry compares tracta to a ship’s biscuit, meaning hard bread for sailors. The Roman cookbook Apicius names tracta as a thickener for liquids. Cato the Elder’s recipe for placenta cake, a Roman layered cake, combines it with cheese. Greek bread history meets Italian food here, since one theory links lasagna to Greek laganon.

Older lagana was prepared unleavened, meaning without yeast. Leavened lagana is now the more common kind on the Greek bread table. It is not clear when the name first passed to a leavened loaf. Focaccia, from Italian cuisine, counts as a similar bread. A second theory ties lasagna to Greek lasana, meaning a trivet or pot stand.

• Topping: Sesame seeds commonly finish lagana, which also takes other herbs and a seasoning of olive oil.
• Old record: Salimbene di Adam’s chronicle contains a 1284 reference to lagana cum caseo, meaning lasagna with cheese.
• Lenten table: Lent rules keep fish to major feast days, which gave rise to elaborate shellfish dishes.

Greek bread for this day follows the paschal cycle, the church calendar built around Easter. The date of Clean Monday depends on that calculation and on the calendar each church uses. Orthodox tradition gives the day a happy, springtime mood alongside the fast.

What gives tsoureki its role in festive Greek bread?

Greek bread turns sweet in tsoureki, a rich Easter loaf with relatives across Southeastern Europe. Easter bread of this sweet kind traces its origin to Byzantium and the Orthodox church. Its honey-leavened recipe possibly dates to the Homeric Greek period, on anecdotal evidence.

Greek bread names travel far. The loaf also carries the name Armenian Easter bread. Common Armenian names include katnahunts, bsatir, choreg and cheoreg. Its ancient Armenian name, bsatir, joins bsag, meaning crown, with tir, from a verb meaning to put. It alludes to the crown of thorns of Christ.

Cozonac, a sweet bread of Romania and Bulgaria, belongs to the same wide family. It is common across Southeastern Europe, with Greece named among its homes. Its name possibly comes through Bulgarian from Greek kosonaki, a small form of kosona, meaning doll. Another view points to Greek kodunaki, a small form of the word for bell.

Turkish cooks season the same dough with orange zest, vanilla, mahlep and slivered almonds. Mahlep, also spelt mahleb, is a flavouring used for centuries on baked goods in the Middle East. Whole eggs pressed into the dough are absent from the Turkish loaf, unlike Greek bread at Easter. Recipes swap milk and butter for sunflower oil and margarine.

• Mahleb in Egypt: Egyptians turn powdered mahlab into a paste with honey, sesame seeds and nuts.
• Word origin: Mastic, a tree resin, takes its name indirectly from Ancient Greek, possibly from the verb for chew.
• Russian kin: Kulich ranks among the traditional Easter breads of Russia, a cousin in the same season.

Greek bread at Easter sits in a wider European habit, particularly strong in Central and Eastern Europe. Ukrainian paska comes decorated with crosses, flowers, braids and wheat shapes. Romania pairs its cheese-filled pasca with cozonac for the same festive season.

Which custom does vasilopita add to Greek bread?

Greek bread holds a secret at New Year in vasilopita, the loaf of Saint Basil. A coin goes into the dough before baking, so the finished bread hides it inside. Vasilopita means Basil pie, and the custom has Balkan cousins.

Other Balkan lands share the hidden coin at winter holidays without any link to Saint Basil. Ukrainians cut a pirog, Serbs eat česnica at Christmas, and Bulgarians bake pogacha. Albanian Christians and Muslims both eat pite or kulaç for the occasion. Greek bread of this kind therefore belongs to a wide regional habit.

Margaret Hasluck disputed the Greek folk tradition behind the feast of Saint Basil in 1927. She called the popular belief a false etymology, meaning a mistaken word history. She compared Greek-speaking communities with western European customs of Twelfth Night and Epiphany. She accepted Gregory of Nyssa’s word that Basil’s festival followed Christmas, but no document names the basilopita.

Hasluck also read this Greek bread as the cake of the king, from basileus, meaning king. She judged that reading as accurate as the cake of Basil. Her support lay in the likeness between the hidden coin and the hidden bean. The bean custom belongs to the French gateau des rois, known in English as king cake.

• Caesarea story: One tale has Basil asking citizens of Caesarea to raise a ransom and stop a siege.
• Gold and jewels: Each member of the city gave whatever gold and jewellery they had.
• Siege lifted: The embarrassed enemy called off the siege without collecting the payment, according to that story.

Greek bread customs keep more than one telling of this tale. In other versions, the chief besieging the town becomes an evil emperor demanding a tax. Other tellings show Basil simply giving charity to the poor without embarrassing them. Cyprus knows the loaf as vasilopoulla.

When does the Artos appear in Greek bread custom?

Greek bread reaches church ritual in the artos, a leavened loaf blessed during Eastern Orthodox services. A large Artos for Pascha, the Orthodox word for Easter, is baked with a seal showing the Resurrection. Smaller loaves mark feast days, weddings and memorials.

The Paschal Vigil is the night service of Easter. Near its end, after the Prayer Before the Ambo, the large loaf reaches the priest. An ambo is a raised platform in the church. Its top shows either the Cross under a crown of thorns or the Resurrection of Christ.

Worshippers kiss the Artos when they enter the church, as a greeting to the Risen Christ. In monasteries, this Greek bread goes to the Trapeza, the dining hall, on each day of Bright Week. Bright Week is the week after Easter. A ceremony called the Lifting of the Artos closes the festive meal.

The leader lifts the loaf and says, Christ is Risen, and everyone replies, He is truly Risen. He then makes the sign of the Cross with it. Church writers link this Greek bread custom to the apostles, who left the head of the table empty. They laid bread on that place at ordinary meals for the invisibly present Lord.

• Bread of Life: Christ called himself the Bread of Life, a phrase from the Gospel of John.
• Old Testament echo: The Artos is also compared to the unleavened bread of ancient Israel during Passover.
• Kept portion: Russian Orthodox Christians keep a piece all year and eat it in illness or distress.

Greek bread in this form also recalls the evening at Emmaus. Two disciples recognised Christ there as he blessed and broke bread. Cyril, a 12th-century Bishop of Turov in Kievan Rus, preached on the Artos for the Sunday after Pascha.

What is the artoklasia in Greek bread ritual?

Greek bread stands at the centre of the artoklasia, a feast-day rite near the end of vespers. Vespers is the evening service. The name means breaking of bread. Loaves, wheat, wine and oil are blessed, and the priest breaks one loaf.

The rite follows the lity, a festive church procession that adds to great vespers on important feast days. A table stands ready in the middle of the church, with five loaves of leavened bread. Bottles of wine and olive oil sit beside this Greek bread. The Russian tradition adds a dish of wheat kernels.

A deacon circles the table with a censer, a vessel for burning incense, three times in all. Three dismissal hymns, called apolytikia, are sung during that time. The priest then takes one of the five loaves in his right hand and says a prayer. The prayer recalls the five loaves that fed the five thousand.

At the words loaves, wheat, wine and oil, the priest points with the loaf to each item. The movement makes the sign of the cross over this Greek bread and its companions. He then breaks the loaf he holds. Those at a vigil receive a piece of blessed bread and a cup of blessed wine for strength.

• Mount Athos: Monasteries, notably on Mount Athos, still share the bread and wine during the vigil.
• Later grain use: Local custom grinds the blessed wheat into flour or keeps it until the time of sowing.
• Seal: A stamp sometimes marks the loaves before baking, with an icon of a saint or a cross.

Greek bread also meets a leaner rite on Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter. Fasting rules ban oil that day, so only bread and wine are blessed. They are shared with six dates or figs, a custom now kept mainly in monasteries.

Who receives antidoron, the blessed Greek bread?

Greek bread reaches worshippers as antidoron, an ordinary leavened loaf that is blessed but not consecrated. It comes from the remains of the prosphora, the church loaves. Portions of those loaves are cut for the Eucharist, the Christian rite of bread and wine.

The Greek word antidoron means instead of gifts, in other words instead of the Eucharistic gifts. Orthodox churches share it after every Divine Liturgy, their main service. During preparation, the priest blesses each prosphoron as he takes it up and removes small particles. The rest of this Greek bread is cut into fragments and kept in a bowl.

At the close of the liturgy, worshippers come up to kiss the blessing cross and receive their piece. Non-Orthodox visitors, who cannot share the consecrated bread and wine, are encouraged to take antidoron instead. The gesture expresses Christian fellowship and love. Orthodox parishes also give this Greek bread to catechumens, people preparing for baptism, as a sign of hospitality.

Canon rules ask for antidoron to be eaten before leaving the church, though variations are allowed. Because this Greek bread is blessed, certain churches require it to be eaten only after fasting. On Bright Saturday, the Paschal Artos is cut up and shared instead. Antidoron is not considered a sacrament.

• Western record: The earliest references to the custom appear in the Western Church, in a letter of Augustine.
• Eastern record: Mentions in the Eastern Church began to appear around the ninth and tenth centuries.
• Treatise: Germanus of Constantinople discusses antidoron in his treatise The Explanation of the Liturgy.

Greek bread of this blessed type has Western relatives. French and Canadian Latin Catholic churches use a similar loaf called pain bénit, meaning blessed bread. In late medieval England, households took turns to bake and present a holy loaf to the parish church.

Why does the prosphora seal matter in Greek bread?

Greek bread for the Liturgy takes the form of the prosphora, a loaf marked with a stamped seal. The impression bakes into the bread and shows the priest where to cut. The Greek-Byzantine tradition uses one large loaf with a complex stamp.

The classical plural of this word is prosphorai. Any church member in good standing can bake this Greek bread, given baking knowledge and a clean conscience. Bakers sometimes keep special kitchen tools for this loaf and use them for nothing else. Enough loaves for a number of services are commonly baked at one time.

Slavic traditions use five small prosphora with a simpler stamp. The priest takes a triangular piece and smaller particles from each one while he prays. Particles also commemorate the nine ranks of angels and saints, the living and the ruling bishop. One prosphoron honours the Virgin Mary, and its stamp commonly shows her icon.

The Panagia, meaning the All-Holy, is a name for the Virgin and for this loaf of Greek bread. In monasteries, it is cut in half and laid crust downwards on a dish in the refectory. A refectory is a monastery dining hall. After the meal, each monk passes a piece through incense and eats it.

• Single round: Loaves baked for blessing outside the Liturgy come from a single round of dough.
• Simple seal: Those loaves carry a simple cross or an icon of the local patron saint.
• Russian bakers: Russian Orthodox monasteries can assign the baking to workers called prosforniki or prosfirni.

Greek bread in this form has also given a phrase to wider speech. The motto the loaf of Nature’s kitchen table derives from prosphora. It serves as a common metaphor for returning thanks and agape, meaning unconditional love, back to nature.

How does koliva link grain to Greek bread custom?

Greek bread customs share their grain with koliva, a dish of boiled wheat eaten at Orthodox memorial services. The practice is traditional in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Russia, among other lands. Orthodox Christians in the Middle East keep it too.

During a requiem service, called mnemosynon in Greek, family or friends of the departed prepare the koliva. The dish stands in front of the memorial table where the service is chanted. Those attending then eat it together after the liturgy and speak of the deceased. They ask that God forgive the person.

A grain tale outside Greek bread itself explains Theodore Saturday, the first Saturday of Great Lent. Tradition says Emperor Julian the Apostate ordered blood from pagan sacrifices sprinkled on market food in Constantinople. The food was thus unsuitable for fasting Christians. Theodore Tyro then appeared to Archbishop Eudoxius in a dream and advised eating only boiled wheat with honey.

The 12th-century church lawyer Theodore Balsamon credited the ritual use of koliva to Athanasius of Alexandria. Sometimes rice or barley replaces the wheat that Greek bread and koliva share. Rice entered as a practical response to a famine in Soviet Russia, when wheat was unavailable. Certain communities still use rice for it today.

• Funerals: Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian Orthodox funerals offer koliva to all who attend.
• Soul Saturdays: Church calendars set general commemorations for the departed on these days, mostly during Great Lent.
• Trusted maker: Certain Orthodox parishes name one person to make it, partly because badly prepared wheat ferments.

Greek bread shares its wheat with a dish built on a deep symbol. Planting and emergence, death and life, run through the making and eating of koliva. Romanians decorate the finished dish with crosses of cocoa, chocolate or candy.

How heavy was barley as a Greek bread grain?

Greek bread made with barley was nourishing but very heavy in ancient times. Barley is a cereal from the grass family, and it ranks among the first cultivated grains. Domestication took place in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BC.

Its use spread throughout Eurasia by 2000 BC. Western limits of wild barley include North Africa and Crete, and its eastern limit is Tibet. The plant behind this Greek bread prefers low temperatures and well-drained soil. It tolerates drought and salty soil, but it is less winter-hardy than wheat or rye.

In mainland Greece, barley’s ritual role possibly goes back to the earliest stages of the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were secret rites of Demeter held at Eleusis, near Athens. Initiates drank a preparatory mixed drink called kykeon, made from barley and herbs. The Homeric hymn to Demeter mentions that drink.

Homer describes a wine and cheese drink in Book 11 of the Iliad. The maker grates goat’s milk cheese into Pramnian wine, then throws in a handful of white barley meal. In the 19th century, a different barley wine was prepared from recipes of ancient Greek origin. Greek bread and these drinks drew on one grain.

• Uses today: Worldwide, 70% of barley feeds animals, and 30% goes to beer, whisky and foods.
• Kitchen role: Barley goes into soups and stews and into the barley bread of different cultures.
• English word: The word barn comes from Old English bere-aern, which means barley store.

Greek bread grains also feature in world farming figures. In 2023, barley ranked fourth among grains by quantity, at 146 million tonnes. Maize, rice and wheat stood ahead of it. Barley grains also commonly become malt through a traditional and ancient method.

What part did emmer play in Greek bread?

Greek bread in its cheaper ancient form was black bread made from emmer, a hulled wheat. Emmer cost less and was easier to make into bread than wheat. People associated black bread with the lower classes and the poor.

Along with einkorn, emmer was one of the first crops domesticated in the Near East. It was widely grown in the ancient world. Today it survives as a relict crop, a leftover of earlier farming, in mountains of Europe and Asia. Greece still appears on the list of lands that grow this Greek bread grain.

Translators of Greek and Latin texts traditionally render references to emmer as spelt. Yet spelt was not common in the Classical world until very late in its history. The ancient Greek word zeia has an uncertain meaning, possibly einkorn or emmer rather than spelt. Modern scholars variously identify zeia with emmer, spelt, rye or other grains.

This Greek bread grain is a hulled wheat, so strong husks called glumes enclose each grain. On threshing, the spike breaks into spikelets, small clusters of grain. Those spikelets need milling or pounding before the grains come free. Einkorn and spelt, two other old wheats, share this hulled form.

• Word history: The English word emmer comes through German and Latin from Ancient Greek amylon, meaning starch.
• Wild form: The ripe head of wild emmer shatters and scatters seed, unlike the domesticated plant.
• Self-planting: Wild emmer spikelets drill themselves into soil through the pumping movements of their awns, or bristles.

Greek bread grains appear in ancient plant writing too. Theophrastus lists millet along with wheat in his Enquiry into Plants of the 3rd century BC. Ancient Greek kitchens also knew stais, a spelt flour, which gave its name to a pancake called staitites.

Which goddess stood behind Greek bread in ancient Greece?

Greek bread had its own goddess in Demeter, the ancient deity of cereals. Epic poetry and the Theogony of Hesiod show her providing grain for bread and blessing its harvesters. She also gave the secret rites and the laws of cereal farming.

Greek bread history reaches the Bronze Age through a title written si-to-po-ti-ni-ja, meaning Lady of the Grain. Scholars read it as her predecessor or as one of her names. Jane Ellen Harrison reads the name Demeter itself as Grain-Mother rather than Earth-Mother. Another name, Deo, seems tied to deai, a Cretan word for cereals.

Two of her titles speak directly of Greek bread. Megalartos means of the big loaf, and Megalomazos means of the big mass or big porridge. Bread from the first harvest fruits carried the name thalysian bread in her honour. Homer mentions the Thalysia, a Greek harvest festival of first fruits held for her.

In Attica, the region of Athens, she was called Haloas, of the threshing floor. She also carried the names Chloe, meaning ripe grain or fresh green, and Ioulo, meaning grain sheaf. Sito means of the grain, and Himalis means of abundance. Chrysaoros, Lady of the Golden Blade, refers to golden blades of wheat.

• Cyprus: In Cyprus, the ancient term for harvesting grain was damatrizein, an echo of Demeter.
• Athens: The festival Chloeia was held in Athens for her, with a sanctuary near the Acropolis.
• Stars: In art, the constellation Virgo holds Spica, a sheaf of wheat, beside Leo the Lion.

Greek bread begins with clean grain, and Homer gives that task to her. In the Iliad, light-haired Demeter separates the grain from the chaff with the help of the wind. Chaff is the dry husk left after threshing.

What does the Greek mill add to Greek bread history?

Greek bread depended on flour, and flour depended on mills. The Greeks invented the two main parts of watermills, the waterwheel and toothed gearing. So-called Greek mills use a horizontal wheel with a vertical shaft, the older and simpler design.

Greek bread history meets engineering in the treatises of Philo of Byzantium. Those texts hold the oldest known proof of a wheel driven by water. This Greek engineer lived around 280 to 220 BC and wrote the Pneumatica and Parasceuastica. Lewis has shown that his water wheel passages, once taken for later Arabic additions, date to the original.

Lewis dates two mill types that matter to Greek bread history. He places the horizontal-wheeled mill in the Greek colony of Byzantium in the early 3rd century BC. The vertical-wheeled mill goes to Greek-ruled Alexandria around 240 BC. Strabo reports a water-powered grain mill near the palace of Mithradates VI at Cabira before 71 BC.

Greek bread also enters verse through Antipater of Thessalonica, who tells of an advanced overshot wheel mill. He was a Greek epigrammatist, a writer of short verses, active around 20 BC to 10 AD. An overshot wheel takes its water from above. In his lines, Demeter hands grinding to water nymphs, whose wheel turns heavy Nisyrian millstones.

• Greek style: These mills work well only with high water speeds and small millstones.
• Later reach: Greek historical tradition says India received water-mills from the Roman Empire in the early 4th century AD.
• Wider use: Caliphate engineers adopted watermill technology from former provinces of the Byzantine Empire.

Greek bread history also counts a later source of power, the wind. The vertical-axle windmill had reached the Aegean Sea by the 11th century. Earlier multiple-sailed mills appear in Greece, as well as in Spain, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia.

What do travellers ask about Greek bread, and what are the answers?

Greek bread questions from travellers turn on grain, ritual and old farm tools. Threshing and winnowing cleaned the harvest in early Greece. The eiresione branch carried food and song. The kernos vessel held offerings for Demeter and Kore.

In early Greek bread history, how was grain threshed?

Threshing frees grain from its stalks. Citing the Iliad, the writer Struve says Greeks of the 8th century BC trampled cereals with oxen. The threshing board, a sledge dragged over the harvest, was not used in early Greece. It spread widely only after commerce developed there in the 5th and 4th centuries.

What is the liknon in Greek bread lore?

Winnowing separates chaff, the light husks, from grain. Its simplest form throws the mixture into the air so that wind carries the chaff away. The winnowing fan, a shaped basket, was called liknon in Greek, a word that also meant cradle. It featured in the rites of Dionysus and in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Which Greek bread appears in the eiresione song?

The eiresione was a branch of olive or laurel, covered with wool, fruits, cakes and olive flasks. Singing boys carried it at the festivals of Pyanopsia and Thargelia, then hung it at the house door. Only children with two living parents carried it. Its song names figs and rich bread, with honey and oil.

Before a Greek bread tasting, what is the kernos?

The kernos is a pottery ring or stone tray with small attached vessels for offerings. It served mainly in the cults of Demeter and Kore, and of Cybele and Attis. Kore is another name for Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. A priestess carried it in procession on her head at the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Featured photo: GPierrakos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.