Nestled along an important mountain pass, Metsovo itself has been a wealthy mercantile center for hundreds of years. But today it exists in a kind of time warp. The town’s traditional denizens are Vlachs, a once-itinerant sheepherding tribe with Romanian roots and their own language, who settled in the region many centuries ago, eventually giving up their pastoral way of life to become some of the country’s most successful merchants.
We arrived at midday and walked around for a few hours, visiting the Tossitsa Foundation Museum, a former private mansion done up in period furniture and featuring folk art and other historic relics, and then moving on to the town square, where small groups of old men dressed in traditional Vlach garb chatted away in their mother tongue. (We resisted their offers to pose for -photos with us and then charge us for having done so.)
Metsovo was built for the cold, and for much of the year its sharply slanted rooftops are thick with a downy layer of fresh snow. Wood fires burn in the restaurants practically all year round, and although you won’t get the kind of home-cooked meal here that you might stumble across in the mom-and-pop tavernas that punctuate the Zagori villages (the cuisine in Metsovo’s rustic tavernas, like that in the restaurants of bustling Ioannina, tends toward more gentrified versions of country classics), you will find excellent renditions of local specialties, particularly the many unusual savory pies. Covered with a cornmeal crust, these delicious oddities are nothing like the multilayered phyllo pies found here and elsewhere in the region. The cornmeal has the effect of absorbing the flavors of the filling (generally a variation on greens and scallions or leeks), so that the whole pie ends up tasting like an infusion of local wild flora. You might also find meatballs baked over scallions, for example, or, if you’re lucky, a unique, spectacular sweet pie made with rice, milk, cinnamon, and raisins.
We left metsovo early the next morning, looping back toward Zagori for what turned out to be one of the most beautiful drives I can remember. The only car on the road for most of the trip, lost occasionally on the web of back roads, we savored every serene minute of it. All around us, smoky-blue fir trees rimmed the horizon, scalloped by greener and greener layers of forest beneath them.
After a few hours, we arrived in Vovousa, in northeastern Zagori, and stopped to snap pictures of some of its old bridges before continuing on to Laista, farther north, where Elli Papageorgiou had promised that we’d have a great meal at a friend’s inn. It was noticeably cooler there, and the food Kyria Vasso prepared, much of it seasoned with the ubiquitous Epirote dried hot pepper flakes, was meant to warm both body and spirit.
We oohed and aahed over pork stewed with wild celery and avgolemono (egg-lemon) sauce, and over two distinct regional pies, a pencil-thin cheese and batter number called alevropita, and a leek and celery pie with hand-rolled layers of crisp, gossamer phyllo. The fireplace glowed and crackled as we sipped crystal-clear firewater, a panacea for every ache and pain and tired spirit. The place was homey and rustic and refreshingly unfashionable, a country inn with no pretensions, in a place forgotten by the crowds. Further proof that Epirus is God’s country, just a stone’s throw from the clouds.
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