We’ve been to the Klisura Monastery three or four times now. Last year when Justin’s mom came to Bulgaria with us, we took her there too. The monastery is small but very pretty—the courtyard all greens and silence and cobbled stones, the church standing tall in the middle of it. It’s an active monastery and monks still live there, but they also rent out rooms to tourists. My family stayed there for a night some years ago. Every time we visit, I have this wild moment when I fantasize about renting a room for a month or more. I picture myself sitting out in the yard and watching the roses climb up the porch, or hiding inside the dark church to breathe in the incense.
The monks have a lot of land, and from their orchards they make fruit wine. We’re not interested in their jams, but we’re very interested in their wine. The first year we went there with Justin, they only had the raspberry wine. The second year they had added sour cherry and plum. This year they also have blackberry. We buy one bottle of each. They are exquisite.
We stop at a trout farm after the monastery. It’s now an annual tradition: light candles in the church, buy dessert wine, go eat grilled trout. It’s Friday and the place isn’t very busy. We sit outside, near the pool. Across the driveway there is a garden where they grow vegetables for the restaurant, and also big lilies that make my mom jealous with their productivity.
The fish is delicious as always, so satisfying in its simplicity. We feed two fish heads to a dirty cat. We look at the trout swimming. Clouds roll over the mountains. Up here the possibility of rain is never far.
(trout farm; not pictured: delicious trout)
In our two weeks in Lom we eat more raspberries than we’ve eaten in the past eleven years in the States, combined. It feels vaguely illegal—washing a few handfuls and scooping them up with a big spoon rather than picking just one or two from a tiny expensive plastic container.
One afternoon before dinner we go to visit my godparents in a little village just outside of Lom. I haven’t seen them in years. They do look older than I remember them, but a more striking indication of the years that have gone by is when they talk about their grandson and his job in Sofia. “Job?” I ask. “Isn’t he twelve?” Apparently he’s 25. Time runs away from us when we aren’t looking.
On the way back we stop at a sunflower field because the sunflowers are too pretty not to, even though they are facing away from the sun rather than toward it. It’s yellow yellow yellow everywhere from your feet to the horizon, waiting for you to look, to touch. It’s hypnotizing—so many suns!
We eat more. Tutmanik (a cheesy, eggy bread with lardo), zucchini fritters, moussaka, thick chicken soup, roasted lamb shoulder, chicken livers sautéed with onions and tomatoes. So much of traveling and spending time with family and friends is about food. So much of life is about food!
At every meal we worry about how we are going to fit the leftovers in the fridge. My dad begins to talk about eating as a battle. His strategy is to go slowly and wear down “the enemy.” Overdoing it (cooking too much, putting too much on the table, eating too much) is not an act of gluttony. It’s an act of gratitude for having this delicious food and the opportunity to enjoy it together.
We go to my dad’s childhood friend’s house for dinner and it’s a feast that begins with rakia and two salads and salami and cheeses and boiled eggs and ends five hours later with baklava and ice cream. In-between there is rice with tuna fish, homemade bread, roasted carp, boiled hen with a strained-yogurt-and-mayo sauce, pork chops. Stories are told about my dad and his friend from when they were in middle school, studying German, playing the accordion. Toasts are made about family and friends and hospitality. When we finally get up to leave, it’s raining heavily, and we all shiver while we wait for my dad to turn the car around. It does not feel like summer.
(Shopska salad; bread; carp; baklava with homemade ice cream)
The next day we stop for breakfast at my aunt’s house (banitza and salami with yoghurt and wine), and then last night’s hosts come over for lunch at my grandparents’ house. While I hide to do some work, Justin works the grill. A bottle of rakia comes out at one point as the men chat around the fire while the women shred cabbage and beets for salad.
Everyone’s favorite treat are the skewers with lardo, onion, and green pepper. It’s something Bulgarians would make in the winter, on St. Trifon’s Day (the patron saint of wine and winemakers, celebrated on February 14). If you have a vineyard, you invite friends over, or you go to someone else’s vineyard to cut the first vine (a blessing ritual of sorts), and there is (usually) snow and (always) rakia and wine and a fire to roast meat on.
(pork chops; grill and grill master; heavenly lardo skewers)
My mom brings out a bottle of rakia she found some weeks ago forgotten in a cupboard. It’s not labeled, but thanks to its anise flavor, and—more obviously—the ladder inside, it is recognizable as a gift from a particular friend from Hissar, and it’s at least 30 years old. The joke about the ladder is that when you reach the bottom step, it’s time to go to bed, because the sun is probably on its way up.
Dad takes me out for my first driving lesson. (Yes, Justin and I are in our thirties and neither of us has a license.) In an abandoned parking lot we sit in the car and Dad tells me about the gears and the clutch and the wipers and all the gauges on the dashboard, then I make slow terrified circles around a patch of grass. The car is reluctant to do what I want it to do.
Before we know it, two weeks have gone by, and we pack our bags again and go back to Sofia for a couple of days. Leaving Lom is always complicated. What is the word for the emotion of leaving a place where you’ve lived for many years but don’t live anymore? What is the word for home-but-not-home?
In Sofia there is more working in pajamas, more starting to plan dinner during lunch, more late-night wine stories in new places with old friends.
We go to a rooftop bar in a hotel in the center of the city and have cocktails with a great view of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral and its golden domes. In this part of town I’ve only ever been on street level, so it’s amazing to look out from above the trees.
(ceiling of the hotel lobby; St. Alexander Nevsky)
On our last night in town we have dinner at an Armenian restaurant, Egur Egur. We went there last year and loved it, and our second visit does not disappoint. We have olive soup and keshkeg and stuffed cabbage leaves and chicken with Armenian pilaf and sweet salami and chocolate soufflé and cognac. There are five of us and we pass our plates around, sharing forks and dessert spoons when we give up waiting for the server to bring the utensils we’re missing.
We decide we need a nightcap and go looking for a hidden barn that’s been turned into a bar. (A barn in the center of Sofia!) We walk down several windy unlit side streets until we find the right one. In a dark yard we knock on an unremarkable door that doesn’t open. We are close to giving up but try the next yard with a similarly ordinary wooden door with no signs anywhere, and voila—the door opens and we walk inside the bar(n).
It’s all darkness and wood and stone and cigarette smoke. The bar and a few tall tables are on the first level. A railing-less staircase leads to a narrow second level with a few tables, and that’s where we sit. Instead of chairs there are crooked benches and tree stumps. Through the cracks between the beams you can see the lower level. There is a ladder going up into the attic space, which is presumably bat territory.
The only light in the whole place is provided by candles, which are balanced onto mountains of hardened wax (from their dead predecessors) straight on the tables, the bar, the staircase. The dingy sign above the bathroom (also lit by candles) reads “РЕДАКЦИЯ,” which means “Editorial Department.”
It takes a while for our eyes to adjust and for the smoke to stop stinging, but after the initial shock, we’re all about it. “I feel like we’re plotting an uprising against the Ottoman Empire,” I tell my sister. “Give me a document to sign with my blood!”
We leave the bar(n) with equal parts relief (hello, fresh air!) and regret. We’re definitely coming back here.