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.)
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.
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.
Wandering along Ioannina’s main drag, you can’t help but notice all the silver, copper, and bronze wares—everything from water pitchers to elaborate belt buckles—jangling from the shops, bearing witness to the city’s past as a bustling trade center known primarily for its metalsmiths. The old city, contained within the walls that Ali Pa_a, the “Lion of Ioannina,” built when he was overlord here during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is filled with lean Ottoman-era houses, narrow, winding cobbled streets, and the fortress itself, its slim minarets lending an anachronistic Eastern air to the old part of town.
We bought a ticket for the small ferry that chugs back and forth every half hour or so to To Nisi, the tiny island that looms from the fog that seems always to be hovering over the lake. Disembarking with island denizens (just a few dozen families call it home), excursion-thirsty locals, and other curious tourists, we proceeded to walk the entire island in 20 minutes, then relaxed over a lunch of batter-fried frogs’ legs and sweet water crabs with walnut-garlic sauce—culinary claims to fame available at any of To Nisi’s handful of small tavernas.
Driving east out of the city, we were two hours on hairpin turns before arriving, harried, in Metsovo. It’s easy to see, amid the dense oak and chestnut forests, why this part of the country has long been known for its wood craftsmen. There aren’t many left today, but we were determined nonetheless to seek out the dying art of the barrelmakers whose creations are responsible for the smokiness that gives Greece’s world-renowned feta so much of its cachet.
The Dallas family, like most barrelmakers, produce their wares in a highly mechanized factory. We had to shout to hear each other over the buzz created by the women (there were few men on the floor) cutting planks into strips and separating and slowly training them into barrels, first by fitting them with one set of rings, then by boiling them and hammering again with a second set of rings. Others were smoothing over the rough spots with lathes, while still others sanded, shaved, and shined them.
Epirus’s barrel-made feta is undoubtedly a culinary treasure, but there are several other worthwhile cheeses made in this part of the country. The road to Metsovo is studded with small facilities turning out hard chèvres dotted with peppercorns; smoked, log-shaped cheeses not unlike smoked provolone; myzithra, a whey cheese; and soft, sour, naturally fermented galotyri (which Vassilis makes every summer from the milk of his own herb-munching goats).
We pulled into the parking lot of the Tossitsa-Averoff cheese company, founded in the mid-1970s by one of the village’s noble families. An attempt to revitalize the town in the face of an employment crisis that was seeing its younger generation moving away, the modern facility succeeded in giving local shepherds an outlet for their milk, and, therefore, a reason to stick around.
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.