Colivă: The Funeral Wheat Romanians Hand Out for the Soul of the Dead
Outside one of the many churches in Iași (also spelled Iasi), someone handed me a plate that looked like a birthday cake: a white surface with a cross drawn on it in cocoa. But the spoon didn't sink into sponge, it sank into grain.
Colivă is sweet boiled wheat mixed with walnuts, sugar and cinnamon, shaped into a mound and dusted with icing sugar or coconut - a dish that Romanian cuisine doesn't cook for lunch, but for the souls of the dead. You eat it with a spoon; nobody cuts it.
A Word That Once Meant Small Change
Calling it a "funeral cake", the way Czechs do, wrongs colivă twice over: it is not a cake, and the word itself has come a long way from what it once meant. The Greek kóllybos meant a small coin, and in Hellenistic times the name passed to little cakes of boiled wheat as well; out of the Greek kóllyba, Church Slavonic made kolivo and Romanian colivă, with the stress on the second syllable. Small change turned into food for eternity, which is a promotion money rarely gets.
Romania didn't invent colivă, though: sweet wheat for the dead is known across the whole Orthodox world. In Greece pomegranate goes into kollyva and the monks on Mount Athos insist on exactly nine ingredients, Bulgarian cuisine carries kolivo wrapped in a napkin to the graves on the Saturdays of the Dead, and Serbs bless žito not only at funerals but at the slava too, the family feast of a patron saint, which is more celebration than mourning. Boiled grain has distant relatives outside Orthodoxy as well: the Sicilian cuccìa that Sicily eats on 13 December for Saint Lucy, and the Turkish aşure, into which Turkish cuisine puts some forty ingredients, because Noah is said to have cooked up everything left on the ark after the flood. They share no family tree with colivă, only the idea.
An Emperor, a Martyr and a Grain That Has to Die
The Orthodox Church has a story for how colivă came by its feast day. Emperor Julian the Apostate (reigned 361-363) had the food in the markets sprinkled with blood from pagan sacrifices during the first week of Lent, to defile the Christians who were fasting; the martyr Theodore Tiron appeared to the archbishop in a dream and told him to have people buy nothing and eat boiled wheat with honey instead. Romanian Orthodox believers still keep the day: the first Saturday of Great Lent is called Sâmbăta lui Toader, and that is when housewives cook the first colivă of the year. It is a church legend rather than history, and wheat for the dead is older still: the Greeks offered a boiled mixture of grains to the departed at the Anthesteria long before Christ. Nobody can date the journey from the ancient offering to the Orthodox bowl, and ancient Rome, so often mentioned in the same breath as Greece, seems to have nothing to do with colivă at all. As for why it has to be wheat, a priest will point you to the Gospel of John: a grain that does not die remains alone, and if it dies, it bears fruit. Colivă is that sentence, boiled.
What Colivă Is Made Of and How It Is Handled
The basics are simple and the work is slow. The wheat - in Bukovina, hulled barley - has to be picked over, rinsed and boiled soft, and only then do the ground walnuts, sugar or honey, cinnamon, vanilla, lemon zest and a splash of rum get stirred in. On the dish the mixture is shaped into a mound called a movilă, a burial mound; the surface is smoothed over, covered with breadcrumbs and icing sugar, and only on that white canvas is a cross drawn in cocoa or cinnamon. Around the cross go sweets, almonds, sometimes the initials of the dead; and sometimes coconut goes on instead of the sugar. It tastes like the semolina pudding with cinnamon sugar you remember from school dinners, except that the grains need chewing and the walnuts give it a grown-up gravity.
Colivă is carried to church for funerals and for the memorial services called parastas: on the third, ninth and fortieth day after the death, then after a year, after two, after seven, and on the Saturdays of the Dead. The priest blesses it, and when "Veșnica pomenire", Eternal Memory, is sung, the relatives lift the dish and rock it. After the service it is handed out as pomană, alms for the soul of the dead, and it isn't done to refuse it - in Bukovina they even believe the grains are the sins of the departed and that the guests carry them away by tasting. Don't look for it on a menu: anyone who wants to try colivă without a death in the family waits until somebody offers a plate outside a church, or buys a cup of colivă la pahar in a pastry shop, around 150 grams, which is usually headed for somebody's parastas anyway.
A Plate Outside a Church in Iași
I was given colivă in Iași, outside one of its many churches, and it probably wasn't a funeral, though I never found out what exactly was being remembered that day. The plate stood on a blue embroidered tablecloth and the cocoa cross was drawn so carefully that I didn't want to be the first to sink a spoon into it. The wheat was soft, but the grains still had bite, the walnuts came through more than the sugar, the coconut on top was dry and sweet, and the cinnamon arrived last of all. It cost nothing - colivă is given, not sold. So for a dish named after small change, I didn't pay even that.
