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This image of Vasilopita the Greek New Years Bread was sourced from Irene Tamara’s Blog and the following information has been sourced from wikipedia:
Vasilopita is a New Year’s Day bread or cake in Greece. It contains a hidden coin or trinket which gives good luck to the receiver. It is made of a variety of doughs, depending on regional and family tradition, including tsoureki.
The tradition of vasilopita is associated with a legend of Saint Basil. According to the legend St. Basil called on the citizens of Caesarea to raise a ransom payment to stop the siege of the city. Each member of the city gave whatever they had in gold and jewelery. When the ransom was raised, the enemy was so embarrassed by the act of collective giving that he called off the siege without collecting payment. St. Basil was then tasked with returning the unpaid ransom, but had no way to know which items belonged to which family. So he baked all of the jewelery into loaves of bread and distributed the loaves to the city, and by a miracle each citizen received their exact share, the legend goes. In some tellings the sieging chieftain is replaced with an evil emperor levying a tax, or simply with St. Basil attempting to give charity to the poor without embarrassing them.
The traditions surrounding vasilopita are very similar to western European celebrations of the Twelfth Night and Epiphany: the Provençal Gâteau des Rois and the Northern French galette des rois, the Catalonian tortell, and the Louisiana king cake. Hasluck (1927) connects both the western and the eastern celebrations to the Roman Saturnalia and the ancient Greek Kronia, the festival of King Cronus, which involved selecting a “king” by lot.
The name “βασιλόπιτα” comes from βασιλεύς ‘king’ + πίτα ‘pie’, but was reinterpreted as Saint Basil’s (Βασίλειος) cake.
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