On the morning before Easter, the volunteers at Chervona Kalyna Kharkiv did what they do every morning: they started cooking. This time, alongside the daily pots of soup and the charity lunch for displaced residents, they baked paska — the traditional Ukrainian Easter bread, sweet and braided, dusted with icing. By afternoon, some of it was on its way to soldiers holding the line in the Kharkiv region.
What paska means when you are far from home
For Ukrainians, paska is not simply bread. It is the smell of the kitchen the morning after the night liturgy. It is the table that your grandmother set every year. It is, in some way, the idea of home itself — a home that several hundred thousand people in the Kharkiv region no longer have access to.
The volunteers at Chervona Kalyna Kharkiv understand this. When they pack a food box for a displaced family or drive a batch of loaves to soldiers at the front, they are not delivering calories. They are delivering a signal: someone remembered. Someone made this for you.
Nova Poshta Humanitarian, the foundation’s longtime logistics partner, handled the delivery to soldiers — free of charge, as it has done with hundreds of aid shipments over the past three years.
Two villages, one tradition
On April 12, the foundation’s team drove to the village of Khvorostove in the Kharkiv region. They brought humanitarian packages and holiday treats. The village gave back something in return: freshly baked paska, made by local residents, for the volunteers to take to soldiers.
The exchange was small and unhurried. People talked. The foundation thanked Natalia Khvorost and Oleksandra Krysko by name, as it always does — because the people who give matter as much as what they give.
A separate trip took the team to Baranove and Rohivka. More packages delivered, more paska exchanged, more names recorded: Starost Mykola Petrenko, Viktoria Petrenko, Valentyna Mizyak, Antonina Dudnyk. The foundation has been visiting these villages for years. They know each other now.
«Christ is Risen» — in a city near the front
The foundation’s Easter post was brief. It wished its subscribers peace, warmth, and people close by. It said what Ukrainians say at Easter: Khrystos Voskres — Christ is Risen.
There was no self-congratulation. There was no mention of the shelling that had hit the city the week before, or the power cuts that had made cooking harder than it should be. Those things were understood. The post was about the holiday.
The kitchen opened again the next morning.
About Chervona Kalyna Kharkiv
Chervona Kalyna Kharkiv is a Ukrainian charitable foundation that has operated without interruption since 2022, providing hot meals, food packages, legal aid, and community support to displaced people and residents of Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region.
Support our work: chervona-kalyna.org/en/donate/
Become a volunteer: chervona-kalyna.org/en/become-a-volunteer/
Website: chervona-kalyna.org/en/
Facebook: facebook.com/ChervonaKalynaKharkiv
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