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Karelian Kalitka Festival in Karelia towns
The Karelian Kalitka Festival celebrates kalitka, the open rye-crust pie filled traditionally with mashed potato, barley, or rice porridge that is one of Karelian and northern Russian cuisine's most recognized dishes, with celebrations rotating among towns and villages across the Republic of Karelia.
Kalitka belongs to a family of small open pies baked across the Russian North and the Finno-Ugric communities of Karelia, made from a thin rye or mixed rye-wheat dough pinched into an open boat or round shape and filled, most commonly today, with mashed potato, though older versions used barley or rice porridge, or occasionally berries, reflecting whatever a household's rye fields and garden could reliably produce through a short northern growing season.