Page - 33 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 33 As well as referring to bread and salt, khlebosolny or khleb da sol means a ceremony of welcome, using bread and salt.59 In War and Peace, Tolstoy refers to “the bread and salt of hospitality”,60 which writer Joanna Trew explains in relation to Slavic culture: “Across the Slavic world, bread and salt is offered as part of a traditional welcome ceremony. A round loaf of bread is placed on a tray, with a salt-cellar placed on top, or in a hole cut into the bread. Both the tray and the loaf would be highly decorated. The tradition persists to this day, especially at weddings, and during state visits from foreign leaders, where local people dress up in national costume to present the bread and salt.”61 Later on our journey, visiting the Bread Museum in St Petersburg, we read that „when a Russian person made a new settlement, they ploughed up a field and sowed bread”,62 or “sat down on the ground”.63 In Russian homes, the bread was stored in a special khlebnya: “a round or oval box with densely closed cover, placed in a forward corner on a bench under icons. Only the owner of the house could take bread out from it.”64 “Bread enshrined both farming and gathering, and it also had certain almost magical prop- erties.”65 When I mixed the ingredients by hand in our friend’s kitchen in Vilnius, I thought about the experience of touch. What kind of knowledge is generated through touch? How does touch bring about a different encounter with place, often with something that is visually less pres- ent? Making bread in a kitchen in Vilnius, as well as laying salt onto the grass, allowed me to imagine that I was making an intimate and direct connection with our ancestors. Through the action of making, I experienced the touching of substances and surfaces that they may also have touched, and I could understand this as a more direct encounter with the past. A direct encounter through touch has been termed praesentia by Kevin Hetherington.66 According to Hetherington’s idea of praesentia, place becomes, through touch, an encounter rather than a representation. Via the material poetics of an artwork, the encounter acts as a reference to and a physical index of place. In the next stage of the journey, we took our bread and salt to the village our ancestors had left in the early 1900s, uncertain as to what we would encounter. 59 Robert E. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 5. 60 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Amy Mandelker, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 405. 61 Joanna Trew, ‘Review of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace’, Bookdrum website, <http://www.bookdrum.com/books/ war-and-peace/9780199232765/bookmarks-401-425.html?bookId=730> [accessed 2 August 2017]. 62 Bread, meaning various grain crops, including rye, barley, wheat, oats and buckwheat. Source: Museum text, St Petersburg Bread Museum. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, p. 65. 66 Kevin Hetherington, ‘Spatial textures: Place, touch, and praesentia’, Environment and Planning A, 35 (2003), pp. 1933-44, at p. 1937.