My image of Greece was honed on an island in the Aegean, and for as long as I can remember, the country was eternal summer in my mind’s eye. The days were slow and sweet as honey, and at night a cavorting spirit would whisk me away, seductive as a waft of jasmine floating on the breeze. Life was absolute in its contrasts and reassuringly simple: There was the sun, mercilessly hot, almost paralyzing, and there was the sea, ubiquitous, welcoming, liberating.
Then, at the height of August a few years ago, I took the ferry back to Athens and drove to Epirus, the mountainous northwestern part of the mainland, to visit a friend. The mercury had been soaring well above 100 degrees, and the respite, so far from the madding crowds (at that time of year, the entire country seems to congregate in the islands), came as a great relief. An intoxicating perfume of wood fire and wet earth permeated the air, and an icy drizzle chilled my bones for the entire five days I was there.
That trip marked the first time I had ever seen this other Greece, Balkan Greece, with its ponderous beauty, its dark, looming, snowcapped mountains, and its graceful old bridges laced over frigid, rushing rivers. It was a place that felt more like El Greco’s Toledo than the luminous blue and white island paradise I’d always known, and I was utterly entranced. Also, unlike the Aegean, which brims with life for most of the year, Epirus was refreshingly tranquil, its villages serene, lonely places and its inhabitants somber, as though the massive peaks that surrounded them also weighed on their psyches. Even the music was different: Rather than quick-fingered bouzouki riffs to jump and jig to, it was the clarinet’s plaintive wail that resonated at local get-togethers, and the accompanying folk dancing was slow and deliberate. I have been back many times since.
On my most recent trip to Epirus, I was in desperate need of peace and quiet. The clamor of my having recently opened a small seasonal restaurant in Ikaria had just about beaten me down, and I wanted to spend a few days without much in the way of plans, just driving around, relishing the landscape, the vistas, the long walks, and the soul-warming food.
The Greek mainland is roughly 80 percent mountains, and Epirus, which means “continent,” is home to the country’s “Alps”—the Pindus range, whose jagged peaks separate the region from Thessaly, the great plain and wheat belt to the south, and Macedonia, to the northeast. Whereas Greek island landscapes are bleached and bone-dry most of the year, Epirus is always lush. Its environs are so densely forested they appear almost impenetrable. (One part of Epirus is called Agrafa, or “unwritten,” because the mountains are so formidable that they were inaccessible to all but the most intrepid travelers, hence unknowable and unrecorded.)
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