AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. In Ukraine, most of the population is celebrating the holiday. And as NPR's Joanna Kakissis tells us, families are sharing a fluffy bread called paska made this year with a special kind of flour.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Paska is a small and round bread. It's sweet and usually topped with icing. Paska is the centerpiece of the Ukrainian Orthodox Easter meal. This weekend, it's been pouring rain. About a hundred people have shown up at a massive yellow cathedral in central Kyiv. They carry baskets filled with cheese, painted eggs and, of course, paska.
UNIDENTIFIED PRIEST: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: A priest sprinkles holy water onto these baskets and blesses the bread. Do people bake their own? I had to ask.
Hello.
(LAUGHTER)
KAKISSIS: Did you buy the bread?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah, we bought it.
KAKISSIS: Bakeries in Kyiv have been working overtime making paska this holiday - oven timers constantly ticking.
Oh, it smells great.
Tisto Cafe is one of these bakeries. Tisto means dough in Ukrainian.
OLGA OTRESHKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: And Tisto's owner, Olga Otreshko, tells me this year, she's using flour from wheat that's been harvested from Ukrainian farmlands once filled with landmines.
OTRESHKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: "Easter is about rebirth and resurrection," she reminds me, "and removing landmines is one way to resurrect Ukrainian land." Using this reclaimed farmland is part of an advocacy project called Soul of Soil. Both the Ukrainian government and the United Nations Development Program are involved.
BEN LARK: The type of land contaminated is predominantly farmland, agricultural land. Yeah. Grain-producing land.
KAKISSIS: Ben Lark leads the U.N.'s Mine Action Programme in the country. The U.N. estimates that at least 20% of Ukraine is land-mined and that mines and munitions have wounded 1,400 Ukrainians in the last four years and killed nearly 500 - many of them farmers.
LARK: Farmers will take the risk quite often and they will go and they will farm their lands.
KAKISSIS: Oleksii Rudenko (ph) is a wheat farmer taking that risk on his fields in southern Ukraine. He's in suburban Kyiv visiting his daughter for Easter.
OLEKSII RUDENKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: He recounts how his brother-in-law who ran the farm with him was killed by an anti-tank mine planted by Russians in 2022. Today, Rudenko says the explosives have been cleared and crops are growing again.
RUDENKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: "I wish you could see how green it is," he says, "how beautiful it is, and how the land has come back to life."
Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Kyiv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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