Driving out from the village of Dikorfo (“Twin Peaks”), we parked and wandered past a romantic little gazebo to reach a point from which the mountains undulated in every direction. Confronted by that sea of vast slopes stretching to the edge of the sky, I felt as if I was on top of the world, and, despite Vassilis’s presence just a few feet away, starkly alone. Driving, I had had the opposite sensation: As if I’d been curled up, overwhelmed by the mountains’ bearlike embrace.
Zagori is a word of Slavic origin that means “behind the mountain,” and the region’s formidable Mitsikeli peak is one of the Pindus’s grandest. These villages saw their heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, under Turkish control, when the area enjoyed special economic and social privileges from the sultan, and under Ali Pa_a, the infamous 18th-century ruler whose fortress still stands in Ioannina. By the end of the 19th century, Zagori had begun to decline, with waves of people emigrating to Russia, Austria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Cruising around the villages by car, you get a look at a way of life that has changed little over the centuries. The rhythms are still set by the shepherd’s slow pace, and it’s not uncommon to come upon a thick flock of sheep plodding across a road, oblivious to the dangers of traffic.
The village of Kapesovo, poised on the northwestern slopes of Mount Graditsa, is so perfectly camouflaged, its gray stone houses blending into the slate-colored slopes, that you can barely see it as you approach from the road. Here was everything a Zagori village once needed to thrive: plenty of stone with which to build, plenty of pastureland on which to graze sheep, plenty of water, easy (everything is relative) communication with nearby villages, and a perch that enabled it to be at once hidden and unhindered in its view, so that it could protect itself from marauders.
At least those were the concerns when the region was at its peak two to three hundred years ago. Today, perhaps the best thing about this sleepy little village is Sterna, a small shop that takes its name from the ancient well that dominates its interior. Here, Thucydides Papageorgiou and his family have resuscitated some of the local delicacies that started to disappear as more and more people began to leave the countryside in the 1970s. Daughter Elli bakes traditional cookies and biscuits, as well as a delicious sausage-shaped confection called sbecky, made with strung walnuts dipped again and again into a mixture of grape-must syrup and flour until it congeals around them like jelly. The Papageorgious also sell local honeys, dried wild herbs, and Vassilis’s dried mushrooms. We stocked up on some homemade wine, spoon sweets, and liqueurs and headed back out on the twisting roads.
After languorous Zagori, Ioannina, one of Greece’s quaintest provincial cities, felt like another world. We spent a few days exploring its many tavernas and cafés, as well as the zacharoplasteia (pastry shops) for which it has long been famous. At a café overlooking Lake Ioannina, we shared dense baklava and kataifi made with the region’s mountain honey, redolent of pine, sage, chestnuts, and heather, depending on the time of year it is harvested. The pastry tradition up here is one in which syrupy, nut-studded phyllo desserts figure prominently, mainly because for several generations the local boys often went off to Poli—Constantinople, or present-day Istanbul—to apprentice with the city’s pâtissiers.
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