The extraordinary committee of the intangible cultural heritage of Unesco - according to what ANSA learns - has registered
Borscht
, a typical dish of Ukrainian cuisine based on beets, fresh cabbage, broth, beef and pork, and with sour cream,
in the list of Unesco world heritage sites
.
The candidacy, launched in 2019, should have been evaluated between 2023 and 2024 but the Unesco Committee has decided to move forward to this year and to proceed urgently, with the support of Italy as well.
"The victory in the Borscht war is ours", wrote on social media the Minister of Culture of Kiev Oleksandr Tkatchenko saying he was satisfied with the decision of UNESCO.
Ukraine "will win the Borscht war and this war too," he wrote on his Telegram account, referring to the conflict with Russia.
Ukraine will share the recipe for this beetroot soup with all civilized countries, "and also with uncivilized ones, so that they have at least something light, tasty and Ukrainian".
The Unesco Committee met in extraordinary session for the first time, compared to the ordinary sessions generally scheduled between November and December, to decide on Borscht's candidacy, we learn, as "given the contingent situation of the conflict it could not be expected" .
The approval took place, again according to what has been learned, "unanimously and there was no objection to the opinion that had been drawn up by the technical body, the Unesco Evaluation body, and it did so without any changes" .
In particular, it is not the dish that is in danger as such but "the practice and tradition of knowledge linked to the making of the dish" which risk dispersing due to the continuing conflict ".
As already highlighted last May by the president of the Unesco Evaluation Body, the Italian Pier Luigi Petrillo, when the urgent procedure was announced, Unesco does not issue any paternity or originality stamp: if a country enters an element in the List of world heritages this does not mean that that tradition is unique and exclusive to that country, on the contrary, for UNESCO, the candidacies of traditions that bind several countries to each other should be privileged.
Moscow reacts to UNESCO's decision
and points to it as a case of Ukrainian "nationalism", speaking of "Ukrainization".
"To give the world a culinary example of 'current Kiev nationalism' I will mention one fact: hummus and pilaf are recognized as national dishes of several countries," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.
"But from what I understand - she continued - everything is being Ukrainized".
