The People’s Bread Museum was founded in 1981 and belongs to the national ecological and naturalistic center for student youth of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. The museum contains over 2,000 exhibits that tell about the history of bread, its importance for humans, the origin of the main grain crops (rye, wheat, corn, barley and others). City schoolchildren collected over 60 loaves from different parts of Ukraine, ritual baked goods, Georgian lavash, and Jewish matzo. In addition, the exhibits are dedicated to poets who wrote about bread, scientist-breeders who developed new varieties of wheat, the museum has more than 100 samples of agricultural crops, ancient mortars and millstones.
More than 150 loaves can be seen in the exhibition “Bread is the Head of Everything.” Also here you can see bread from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania and even from France and other countries of the world. The museum contains about 100 exhibits of various agricultural crops: wheat, rye, oats, barley. The museum’s exposition includes cosmic white and black bread, donated by cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union P.R. Popovich.
The museum’s exhibition also talks about the famine that broke out in the USSR in the 1930s. In this museum, those events are presented as a tragedy of the Ukrainian people. Also in the exhibition, a significant place is devoted to the story of the war years (1941-1945) and the recovery period. In particular, the standards for issuing bread to the population of besieged Leningrad using bread cards are shown. The Bread Museum focuses on displaying the history of the development of grain production on the territory of modern Ukraine; the exhibition has a national flavor.
2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Bread Museum. During this period, over 1.5 million visitors visited here. Over 15,000 students visit the exhibition annually. Leonid Kuchma visited here twice; deputies of various ranks, diplomats, scientists, writers and cosmonaut Leonid Kadenyuk left their entries in the guest book. The museum annually hosts seminars for teachers, students, teaching staff of out-of-school educational institutions, all-Ukrainian competitions “Bread through the eyes of children”, “Bread of my Fatherland” and others. Museum workers often travel to villages, collect exhibits, and record the stories of grain growers.
Where is the People’s Bread Museum?
Vyshgorodskaya street, 19
Mon-Thu: 09:00-18:00, Fri: 09:00-17:00, Sat, Sun: closed
430-02-60