How a handful of wheat defeated an emperor: An edible manifesto against death

Mount Athos koliva. Photo: UOJ

The year is 362. Constantinople. The first week of Great Lent. The city markets are full – meat, fish, vegetables, bread – everything necessary for life. Christians come to buy their provisions, unaware that Emperor Julian the Apostate has turned every stall into a trap.

The emperor’s order was simple and cunning at once: sprinkle all food in the Constantinopolitan markets with the blood of animals sacrificed to idols. Secretly, so the buyers would not know. Christians observing the fast could not eat what had been offered to idols – it was a direct violation of apostolic teaching. Julian understood this perfectly. He placed Christians before a choice: either break the fast and defile themselves with pagan sacrifice, or starve.

The trap was flawless. Julian – nephew of Constantine the Great, baptized in childhood, renouncing the faith in his youth – knew Christianity from within. He knew where it hurt most. And he struck precisely.

But then something happened that shattered the entire plan.

The dead man who saved the city

On the night before the Saturday of the first week of the Fast, Archbishop Eudoxius of Constantinople had a dream. A man in military armor appeared to him. The face was unfamiliar, yet the archbishop immediately understood – this was a saint.

The warrior spoke: do not buy anything in the market. Everything is defiled by the blood of idol sacrifices. Boil wheat with honey.

In the morning Eudoxius awoke in bewilderment. Who was this warrior? What was this wheat with honey? In Constantinople they did not know such a dish. Yet the archbishop obeyed – he announced the vision to the people. The entire city began to boil wheat.

Only later did they learn who had appeared to him: the holy Great Martyr Theodore the Recruit, burned for his faith fifty-six years earlier, in 306, in the city of Amasea. His relics rested in Euchaita, and there they indeed knew the dish of boiled wheat with honey – koliva.

A dead warrior saved a living city. Julian was put to shame – his trap snapped shut on emptiness.

From that time, on the first Saturday of Great Lent and on all memorial days, the Church remembers this miracle. She blesses koliva. She distributes it to the faithful.

But why wheat? Why not rice, barley, or something else?

The biology of resurrection

Christ spoke words about Himself that became the key to understanding Christian death: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

The Apostle Paul developed this thought while explaining to the Corinthians the mystery of resurrection. His tone is sharp, almost severe – he answers skeptics who ask: how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?

And Paul responds bluntly: “Foolish one! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other kind. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body” (1 Cor. 15:36–38).

A grain. Not an apple, not bread, not meat. Precisely a grain.

Because only a grain possesses this unique property: it can die and rise again.

It is buried in the earth like a body in a grave. There it breaks down, loses its form, decays. And yet precisely through that dying new life bursts forth – a stalk bearing dozens of new grains.

Meat buried in the soil simply decomposes and vanishes. Vegetables rot without remainder. Bread, baked from flour, is definitively dead – the grain has been ground, its capacity for resurrection destroyed forever. Only the whole grain can pass through death and return. This is biological fact.

For Christians, it is theology written into the structure of matter itself. God inscribed in the nature of grain the image of what will happen to a human being after death.

What we are truly eating

We stand in church on Universal Memorial Saturday – the day when the Church remembers all the departed from the beginning of the world. The priest, according to tradition, gently rocks the dish of koliva in the form of a cross, or lifts and lowers it, while the choir sings “Memory Eternal.”

This gesture is not decorative ritual. It recalls the earthquake at Christ’s Resurrection – the moment when the earth could no longer hold and yielded up the dead. Or perhaps it echoes the ancient offering, when the Israelites lifted the first fruits of the harvest toward heaven.

The memorial dish is heaped like a mound. That shape is not accidental. It resembles a burial hill.

The wheat, poured over with honey, suggests a body awaiting the sweetness of Paradise. Raisins and dried fruits scattered across the surface symbolize spiritual fruitfulness – that vine of Christ into which every baptized person is grafted.

We eat koliva and, by that act, proclaim an entire theological confession. The departed whom we commemorate has become divine sowing. He was placed in the earth not to disappear, but to sprout. And here lies the clear boundary between a Christian memorial meal and a pagan one.

We do not feed the dead

Pagans brought food to graves in order to feed the departed. They believed the dead hungered in the afterlife and required sustenance. They set plates of meat upon stones, poured wine into the soil, left bread beside tombs.

It was care for the dead as if they were still living – only living somewhere else, in a dim kingdom of shadows.

Christians do something fundamentally different. We bring food not for the dead, but in honor of the dead. We distribute koliva as alms and partake of it ourselves. We ask others to pray for our departed loved ones.

Every spoonful of koliva is a confession of faith that death is not final. That the body lying in the grave is like a grain in the earth. It will sprout. One day the graves will open as soil opens in spring, and from them the resurrected will emerge. Koliva is like an edible dogma, a taste of resurrection placed upon the tongue.

What we have lost – and what we must restore

Today people bring sweets, cookies, store-bought cream cakes, plastic flowers that will never wither, “for the soul” to cemeteries. It is convenient, quick, effortless.

But when we boil wheat with our own hands, sort the grains, add honey, shape the mound – we are performing an ancient rite of connection with generations of Christians before us.

With the fourth century, when Saint Theodore the Recruit saved the faithful from defilement. With the Apostle Paul, who explained the mystery of resurrection through the image of grain. With Christ, who called Himself the grain of wheat fallen into the earth.

In this labor there is memory – and in that memory, hope.

People sometimes ask: why is wheat replaced today with rice? Rice is also a grain; it can sprout; the symbolism is similar. But wheat is biblically precise. It is the very grain Christ spoke of. The bread-bearing cereal from which the first Christians made the Eucharistic bread.

And the colorful candies, beloved by confectioners and scattered instead of raisins – they are no longer symbols. They are kitsch, the loss of true meaning.

God’s sowing season

We live in a time when cemeteries grow faster than we can grow accustomed to loss. A time when we bury the young, the strong, the best among us. When the earth receives bodies every day.

And in this grief Universal Memorial Saturday tells us something crucial. We are sowing our people into the earth. It is unbearably painful. Every grave is another wound in the heart.

But God sees it as a sowing season. He buries seeds so that they may sprout. Not now. Not tomorrow. But they will sprout.

Today the Church remembers all the departed of all ages – everyone who has ever lived and died. Billions of grains sown into the earth across thousands of years of human history.

Preparing and tasting koliva, we proclaim that one day all the cemeteries of the world will become a golden field of wheat. Ears of grain will rise from the graves. And there will be a harvest.

This is not consolation for the weak. It is a fact in which we believe. A handful of boiled wheat in our hands is an answer to death – simple, quiet, yet utterly unyielding.

Death thinks it is burying.
God knows He is sowing, awaiting the fruit.

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