Palianytsia

Type	Bread
Place of origin	Ukraine
Main ingredients	Flour
Cookbook: Palianytsia   Media: Palianytsia

Palianytsia (Ukrainian: паляниця, uk) is an Ukrainian bread. It is made of wheat flour in a home oven. The yeast hearth bread has a semi-circle cut across the top third of the loaf.^[1][2][3]

The word "Palianytsia" comes from Ukrainian: палити, romanized: palyty, meaning "to burn" or "to smoke".^[4] This is because, when the cook is baking the bread, the raised crust can sometimes be burned. Another version is based on the belief that polianytsia is a traditional bread produced by the Polans ,who were an early medieval tribe of Eastern Slavs.^[1]

Folklorist, ethnographer, and linguist Mytrofan Dykariv [uk] claims that the word Palianytsia comes from the Greek: πελανος, romanized: pelanos,^[5] which mean "round cakes offered to the gods".^[6]

Traditional palianytsia was baked from a dough made with hops, year or sourdough, wheat flour and salt and baked.^[7][8]

According to GOST 12793-77, the bakeries of the USSR produced a standardized "Ukrainian palianytsia" baked in molds.^[9] It weighed 750 gram to 1 kilogram.^[8]

In Christianity, palianytsia, like bread, is a symbol of happiness and can represent well-being, the body of God, affection, hospitality and security. Palianytsia can also be used as a symbol of the sun.^[10]

The word palianytsia is used as an important shibboleth test in the Ukrainian language, to identify people not well-versed in the Ukrainian language.^[11]

During the Russian war of Ukraine, the word "Palianytsia" was used a lot of times to catch Russian soldiers or spies, as some of them claimed to be Ukrainians when they were captured or while doing spywork.^[12][13] Instead of pronouncing Palianytsia as Ukrainians, Russian speakers would mispronounce the stressed Ukrainian letter и (y), which is represented instead by Ukrainian і (i).^[11][14]