The gleaming Dnipro hotel lobby off Yevropeyska Square was abuzz with Ukrainian and foreign voices. At 9 a.m. the business life was in full swing, some people were sitting at the round coffee tables over modest breakfasts either leisurely talking on current affairs or tensely discussing urgent issues. Others were measuring the hall with a mobile pressed to ear. Dutch partners Henk Dijkstra and Gosse Tjoelker, who recently started their new business project in Kharkiv were sitting at one of the tables facing the busy square waiting for me.

“I wanted to bring roggebrood (Dutch rye bread) to Ukraine, to sell it and produce it here,” Henk explained as he introduced Gosse to me as “a hereditary Dutch baker, a twelvetime baking champion, who is now the company’s second partner.”

Then Henk started describing the advantages of rye bread over wheat. He sketched out roggebrood as low calorie, naturally made, contains more minerals and is manufactured without any yeast. All the products (rye, honey, salt, and water), according to Henk, are Ukrainian. “The quality of Ukrainian rye is much higher then Holland’s, so our baker is a bit jealous about it,” he laughed. At the beginning the bread is will be sold through the Kharkiv shops, supermarkets, health centers, and hospitals. So, during business development, Ukrainians will have to go to Kharkiv to shop for roggebrood.

Though rye bread is uncommon to Ukrainians and takes around 36 hours to prepare, Henk is sure of their success. “One woman, an acquaintance of my friend, is feeding now and eats one kilo of roggebrood a day. Even for Dutch people this is a lot, I would say.” He illustrated the popularity of the Dutch bread in Ukraine, stressing the recipe is a unique one and created by Gosse’s family 275 years ago. He said that no one in Ukraine knows the exact time of making, dozing, and mixing roggebrood except for the two bakers that were trained in Holland, so “it’s like Coca Cola,” Henk smiled proudly.

The breadproducing business is Henk’s second project in Kharkiv, the first one being the book club named “Family Leisure Club,” which allows ordering books through a catalogue and having them delivered to your home. Although now the club doesn’t have any relation to Henk, since he has sold his stake, the first three years of Club’s development should be owed to him. Before coming to Ukraine, Henk opened similar book clubs in Russia and Spain and says, “Ukrainians read really a lot in comparison to other countries.” To Henk, the book club system seemed the quickest and easiest way of leading the country from the collapse of the old book distribution system. During the first three months, Henk boosted the club’s membership by 300,000, a definite success. Today, the club has around two million families in membership. “So after going into the book business, I decided to go into the food business – after feeding people’s minds, feed their bodies,” Henk concluded joyfully.

Therefore with established business connections in Kharkiv, and a wife from the same city, he decided to build another business in Ukraine’s East. Now however, Henk spends most of his time in Holland, coming to Ukraine monthly. “Our child goes to school and it is not easy to transfer the child all the time,” he remarked. Anyway, he has travelled enough over Ukraine, while managing the Family Leisure Club at the end of nineties. Moreover, life in “hectic and nervous Madrid” and in Moscow, where “people talk more than do,” added to his nostalgia for his native Holland and roggebrood, of course.

Yet the first time Henk came to the nowpostSoviet area was in 1970, while leading the Dutch delegation of historians for the congress to Moscow. In those days he “was dealing with a mix of geology and history, making some excavations of bronze and iron ages as well as Roman and Medieval periods, most of them in Holland.” Medieval history is Henk’s favourite period which explains his passion for historical detective novels.

His other passion is learning languages, or as he calls it, “brain training.” In addition to Dutch of course, he knows English, French, German and Spanish well. He understands Russian and is now starting to learn Chinese. “I knew a little bit of Japanese before and wanted to start from scratch. I didn’t know a lot about Chinese at the beginning of my studies,” recalled Henk as he pointed out the main difficulty of learning the language was writing and memorizing its characters.