Five lots of British royal wedding cake sold by Julien's Auctions in 2018

Selling slices of royal wedding cake is nothing new. Naturally, any guest may ask for a piece of the wedding cake to take home, and many keep this relic, some from mercenary motives, and others, presumably, wishing to bring their nearest and dearest into contact with the sacred body of the king, if one recalls Marc Bloch.

In 2018, if memory serves, Julien's Auctions sold as many as five unique confectionery lots at once, a kind of royal flush: one from the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, part of the 225-pound cake of Charles and Diana in 1981, one from the wedding of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew in 1986, another cake from the wedding of Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005, and, finally, a piece of cake from the wedding of William and Kate in 2011.

All these cakes were kept in a freezer and did not turn into a shapeless mush, but it would hardly be worth tasting them. Although the British tradition of baking a fruitcake for a wedding makes it possible to eat it even a hundred years on. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, however, broke with tradition and served a lemon and elderflower cake, but I would not take their treats even for free

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Pope Leo XIV on the courage to do good, to forgive and to enter into dialogue

Orientalist Grigory Kozakov with relatives and children at a picnic near the village of Zhikharevka in 1903

Konstantin Ivanov's Cosmonautics Day poster, published in Moscow in 1977

Signs of violent death found on skulls from burials beside the royal tombs at Abydos