For centuries, shepherds and their kin were the only ones to ply the goat paths from plains to mountains and back, and the shepherd’s lifestyle is still reflected in the cuisine of Epirus. The local pasta, for example, from egg noodles to the pebbly trahana, was something the shepherds always had in their portable pantries, and the dozens of savory pies unique to the region are the ultimate itinerant food, easy to make from available ingredients—wild mushrooms, leeks, shepherd’s cheeses, and foraged mountain greens such as nettles—and easy to bake on any makeshift oven. The pies also fulfilled two other basic needs of itinerant people—they were portable and didn’t spoil easily. The readily accessible meats of the region—goat, lamb, wild boar, and the deer known as zarkadi—rounded out the meals.
My point of reference in this part of the country has always been my friend Vassilis Paparounas’s village, Ano Pedina, and some of the neighboring bundle of 44 villages that together are known as Zagori or Zagorohoria. Vassilis and I met ten years ago in Athens, when I was a regular at his superb restaurant near the Acropolis. Over the past five years, he’d spent less time there, preferring the peacefulness of the mountainous region where he grew up. A child of the last generation of nomadic shepherds, Vassilis returned to Ano Pedina a few years ago to set up a game farm. And in 2004 he closed his restaurant altogether in order to pursue his other passion, mushroom foraging. The oak- and chestnut-carpeted slopes of the Pindus mountains are a mycologist’s heaven, and Vassilis is probably the best-known mushroomer in Greece, foraging enough to have started a cottage industry in dried chanterelles, porcini, trumpets, and morels, which he sells both domestically and abroad, mainly to Italy.
Like the neighboring villages, Ano Pedina is a cluster of ash-gray stone houses connected to one another by kalderimia (the ridged stone pathways designed long ago with rain and donkey hooves in mind). Most of the villages up here are sparsely populated, especially in winter, when the snow can make them unreachable. But some, like Monodendri (popular because it’s the first place outside the city of Ioannina that affords a riveting view of the massive chasms of the Vikos Gorge) are busy year-round. After wandering its narrow streets and stopping for a taste of the local cheese pie (something of an attraction here even though the owner of the taverna that made it famous sold her business a few years back), Vassilis and I walked about half a mile out of town, to the Agia Paraskevi monastery, which clings precariously to the cliffs. One of dozens of Byzantine monasteries in the region, each with its own lugubrious beauty, Agia Paraskevi was to me the most breathtaking, perhaps because of its perch right in the midst of the gorge.
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