The largest structure is an intricate replica of the steelworks where fighters held off Russian attack for nearly three months, its industrial spires covered in rust-colored royal icing, with tiny frosting figurines of soldiers bearing AK-47s. Another depicts the bombed-out Mariupol theater, where Russian bombs killed hundreds of civilians sheltering there, its roof reduced to a pile of cookie rubble. A third shows the city’s maternity hospital, where at least three people died and 17 were injured after a Russian strike, with candy-colored walls surrounding a sugar-rendered emergency scene. “In memory of the children,” lettering ringing the display reads in both English and Ukrainian.
Velida is chief architect and construction manager, with assists from her husband and their three 20-something kids. When she first decided to make the structures, she wasn’t sure how it would go over. “I didn’t know how people were going to react,” she said. “It’s gingerbread — it’s supposed to be happy, it’s supposed to be cute.”
But she said people who have seen it have gotten what she was after: an awareness of the ongoing struggle facing the country and a celebration of the people’s spirit even amid loss and horror. “This is bravery to me,” she said. “They are a steel people with nerves of steel.”
A war-themed gingerbread creation isn’t typical, but Velida isn’t your average baker, either. She knows diplomacy, having accompanied her husband, the former deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on overseas assignments, including in Kyiv, where he served as deputy political counselor and deputy chief of mission. The couple are readying for a move to Estonia, where George will serve as U.S. ambassador.
And she saw the war’s effects firsthand. Just before Russian attacks began in February, Velida had hustled from Washington to Kyiv to help evacuate their daughter Alem, who was working as a journalist for the Kyiv Independent. When they reached Poland, where refugees had begun streaming across the border, Alem continued reporting while Velida stayed for six weeks, doing what came naturally. “She was like a mom to everyone,” said Alem, who had arrived at the family’s Arlington home 10 days earlier. Velida drove up and down the border, picking up friends and strangers, working her phone to find them shelter and safety.
Mariupol isn’t Velida’s first gingerbread rodeo. She began in 2008 with a generic house, an ambitious if conventional-looking structure, with instructions she found online. Over the years, she began weaving more personal stories and geopolitical context into her increasingly sophisticated annual confections. In 2014, for example, she re-created the Khan’s Palace in Crimea after the Russians prompted global outcry for annexing the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine (Velida herself is a Crimean Tatar American). In 2019, the year her husband testified in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and described how the president’s allies tried to get Ukraine to investigate Democrats, it was the Lincoln Memorial. Many of them have been publicly displayed and even auctioned off for charity.
This year, the couple held an open house for friends and family and also showed it at the Ukraine House, a cultural center in Washington, for several days. Velida hopes to auction the Mariupol gingerbread, with the proceeds benefiting medical funds for injured residents.
Creating the Mariupol scenes required a different kind of ingenuity. She formed the steel plant’s tall stacks using cannoli molds she connected using rolled-up sides of aluminum LaCroix water cans, all wrapped in foil. She wielded Dremel tools and X-Acto knives of various sizes. She fashioned little carts of coke — the hard coal used to heat ore — using jimmies and dragées.
She no longer builds initial models out of cereal boxes, the way she used to. “It takes so much time,” she said, and now she’s confident enough to cut walls and ceilings directly out of dough. This year, more than 30 pounds of flour went into the construction, which Velida fashions not from “construction gingerbread” — a style meant to create smooth, even panels — but the more traditional, old-fashioned kind, redolent of cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom.
The family pitches in: This year, Alem used food coloring to hand-paint the graffiti on the walls indicating what military units had participated in the standoff, while their son, Georgiy, 22, made the figurines from icing. (Daughter Jana, 20, was busy with college finals this year.)
By now, George knows his role. “I help with the concept, and I do the math,” he said, which means making sure the structures are roughly to scale with one another. “She’s the artist.” He’s also in charge of removing their front door from its hinges to get the display out. One year, the family built a board so large, they had to get a handyman to remove and reinstall a side sliding door, but now they limit their annual project to the exact width, 33.5 inches, that can clear the main entrance.
Of course, having a global affairs professional in the kitchen comes in handy in other ways. “I’m also the fact-checker sometimes,” George added with a laugh. This year, Velida said she first planned to portray a missile that had landed in the theater. “But my husband said, ‘It wasn’t a missile; it was a bomb.’”
To get the specifics right, she also scoured Google Earth images and news footage. She read a pair of graduate theses to understand how the steel plant was structured. She studied a widely circulated image by an Associated Press photographer for the most devastating detail of her gingerbread rendering: Amid the bomb scene at the maternity hospital, miniature medics carry a pregnant woman on a stretcher. Velida made sure that the figurine had the same white top stretched over a protruding belly, the same blond hair, the same strawberry-printed blanket beneath. Soon after the arresting image gripped the world, the AP reported that the woman and her baby had not survived.
As Velida pointed out the details, she noticed that one of the medical personnel was missing his head. She suspected that one of the children at a reception at the Ukraine House must have taken a nibble. This didn’t not seem to bother her, despite all the work that went into it. The point, after all, is for people to see it, to experience it, and to remember. “Oh well,” she said with a shrug. “I did say it was a big cookie.”
