Veliko Tarnovo

As we passed through town (eating salads and ice-cream, drinking lemonades, trying to stay out of the heat) we saw the sights and felt that Veliko Tarnovo was putting on a show.  That was fine with us, because it wasn't working.  There's a show alright - sunset on the rooftops - but the tourist shtick was a little off base.  Sure, they've got visitors in droves, but the people of the old capital don't really care.

Bulgaria is beautiful in June, maybe nowhere more so than Veliko Tarnovo.  Swooping down into town, one feels as though they've found a sun-drenched cliff village, something like a colony of swallow nests.  The town sits at the crux of a series of twists in the river Yantra, winding itself along the water and up a series of steep streets towards a fortress and a jumble of old buildings.  This was once the town of kings, the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire - it's now ruled by university students sitting at cafes.  It's impossible not to find Tarnovo beautiful, but it's also more than a little tacky, alternately quiet and energetic, idyllic and jarring.  More than anything, it's a tourist town.

It begins with the prime tourist sight, Tsarevets fortress.  Once, this was among the largest and most impressive castles in the world.  From 1185 to 1393, it was the seat of power of one of Europe's biggest medieval empires - a kingdom that reached from present day Moldova in the north to Epirus in southern Greece, incorporating much of the old Byzantine lands and the Balkans in general.  The complex was huge, ringing three hilltops and including a ninety foot long throne.  The main citadel had been inhabited for at least four millennia before the Bulgars used it as their capital.  Truly a historic place.

It's too bad, but what currently passes for the seat of kings was constructed in 1981 by communist "historians" who based their castle design on whimsy and guesswork - it's essentially a modern pile of stones made to look old.  The kicker is the technicolor light show at night, supposedly designed to tell the story of the second empire.  Tsarevets is fun to look at, but nobody should consider this an honest-to-goodness castle.

From the street, most of the houses in the old town don't look very impressive - they're just small timber and plaster things, it seems.  From the inside, though, Tarnovo's residence have a wooden grandness that is pure, countryside Victorianism.  The Sarafkina House, now a museum, drops five stories towards the water - the entryway is on the fourth floor, the views of the river at the back are terrific.

After the Mongols and Ottomans reduced Bulgaria to a shambles, Veliko Tarnovo lost much of its importance but little of its allure.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the home of a number of prominent Bulgar families, wealthy enough to import gramophones and silks.  In a great collection of old photographs in the the Sarafkina house, the townspeople are shown dressed in very elegant suits and very muddy boots.

The houses and churches of town are all a little askew - creaking staircases, tightly bunched angles, leaning balconies - as though the concrete and roof tiles really were set down by nest building birds.  There are many decorated surfaces in hidden places, down alleys and on old walls.  Little icons appeared in courtyards.  Graffiti faces stared from within broken windows.  The church at the summit of the castle was covered with 1980's murals - not religious, of course, but depicting the struggle of the proletariat.

Tarnovo (as it was once called, before "Veliko," meaning "old," was added in 1965) is one of those peculiar places that has gone through many peaks and lows.  When Sofia was made the new capital, and as communism concentrated life in urban centers, the grand families moved away and the old buildings began to deteriorate.  This part of Bulgaria became a backwater, tourism was almost nonexistent.

Cresting at the moment, Tarnovo makes it hard to discern - through chain link fences and between communist walls - either the magnificent old capital or the elegance of the past.  Even as the area becomes the most affluent in the country, it still has plenty of grittiness left over from harder times.  It occurred to me, passing waiting taxis and sneaker stores, that there's only a certain amount of niceness that a place like this can have.

Prettiness is boring when there's so much of it, even if that's what brings in visitors like us. Becoming a thoroughly modern kind of place is the goal, tourist money lines the path there.  Cafes with heat-fighting mist systems line the boulevard and surround the parks.  Strip clubs and piano bars fight for the crowd's business, sleek pizza places and bistros have snapped up the best vistas.  The city has become too prosperous to linger over history (though lingering over the view is still encouraged).  

On the day we spent in Tarnovo, the sun was so oppressively bright, the air so sticky, that it was difficult to wander far without needing another lemonade.  As we sat in the shade or trekked across noon-beaten avenues, we mingled with young people in sunglasses and old tourists with shorts and white legs.  We looked at the view, we marveled at the old buildings, we scoffed at the castle.  'What a place!' we said.  It felt like a perfected idea of old Bulgaria, the most beautiful place a tourist could imagine.  Why did it leave us feeling so empty?  We're not really sure.

Lifestyles of the Rich & (in)Famous

It's not every day that you get to sleep were Mikhail Gorbachev once laid his famously birth-marked head. And don't you just dream of such a day? We booked a triple room at Arbanashki Han, the only one available online in our price range. When we arrived and they noticed we were a couple, they apologized that the triple had three individual beds, all narrower than a twin. "For 10 euros more, we can give you the apartment." We declined. These things happen, no problem at all, we'll get through. "Can I just show you the apartment?" the eager, nice gentleman asked. "It is very special." Pride was as much of a motivating factor as those 10 extra Bulgarian levs. The big, wooden door was opened to revel a massive, two floor suite. "Mikhail Gorbachev stayed in this apartment in 2002," he told us. We'll take it!

The Arbanassi Inn (Han = Inn) is also known as the Hadjihristov House. Built in 1646 by a wealthy merchant family of that name, it was one of many affluent homes in Arbanassi. The 17th and 18th century were wildly successful years for the village. Traders and craftsman did business with Russia, Poland, Greece, India, Persia, everywhere, using the mighty river Danube and benefiting from a tax exemption that covered all residents. At the end of the 16th century, Sultain Suleiman the Magnificent had actually gifted the entire town to his son in law, making it 'royal property' and therefore free from any taxation. Arbanassi has been VIP real estate from the beginning of its written history.

During Communism, the house, like most property, became state owned. Chairman of the Fatherland Front, Pencho Kubandinski, took a liking to the Hadjihristov House, renamed it "Arbanashki Han" and began to summer here. This is his original desk and library, right there in our (and Gorby's) suite. The 'notorious Arbanassi dames' of yesteryear were no longer prancing down the streets in silk and fur, servants following with jewel boxes in hand. There were no longer Wallachian princes building their second homes in the bucolic area overlooking Veliko Tarnovo. But the new upper crust - i.e. Kubandinski and his friends in high offices - kept Arbanassi's status as an elite retreat in tact.

"Real estate here is more expensive than in the states!" a Bulgarian man from Memphis, Tennessee told us. He'd visited the Arbanashki Han over a decade ago and looked a little sad at the construction being done on the leafy property. An in-ground swimming pool and conference center. "Rich digs" means something different nowadays. "Foreigners like to come and see old things, but Bulgarians like everything new!" he lamented further. Case and point: Kaloyanove Fortress. Its lobby is pictured above.  Welcome to Cribs, everybody.

We booked a night here on a lark, reading that it was a "Medieval Castle." We can't be sure exactly when it was built, but it was nominated for the 2008 Building of the Year Award from a Bulgarian hotel association.  According to the lobby pamphlet, the Fortress is a "great challenge to history."  Lost in translation.  A statue of King Kaloyan, or Kaloyan the Romanslayer as the kids call him, stands out front near the moat and drawbridge.  The tsar's monument is "one of the newest in the history of Bulgaria," the management boasts.  New, new, new. 

I doubt that living like a king was quite like this in Medieval Times. So... odor-free.  There were towel doves on our bed and a shower/jacuzzi thing smack in the middle of our room. The bathing contraption was so big and shiny that I fully expected Merlin to go in and emerge dressed as Batman. The hotel has a DJ at night, folk dancing on occasion and, by request, can give you a helicopter ride. The interior is the work of an Italian firm and the sound system is American.  Their slogan is "Enjoy a Royal Party!" It all reminded us of another thing our Bulgarian-Tennesseean neighbor had told us. "Now, all the buildings here are built by the mafia. Short lives, but rich ones!"

And then there is the truly named Arbanassi Palace, home of Todor Zhivkov who ruled Bulgaria as the head of the Communist Party for 35 years - one of the longest non-royal reigns in history.  He had this residence built in 1975, about halfway through his time as leader.  I'm sure he would have bristled at the word 'palace,' but that's sure what it is.  The location is magnificent, looking out over Veliko Tarnovo and the mountains.  Seeing it from afar, it couldn't have looked more perfectly like a Communist Palace - grand, but without ornamentation, big, blocky, but with subtly rounded towers that evoke hilltop castles.

After Zhivkov's forced resignation in 1989 and the subsequent fall of Communism in Bulgaria, the building was turned into a hotel.  Once you get up close, it looks more like a hotel than someone's home anyway.  So, a no-brainer.  If you're wondering why Mr. Gorbachev didn't stay here instead, it's probably because during his 2002 visit they were tearing down some walls. They were renovating. I'm not sure if the solarium, Turkish bath, tennis courts and swimming pool were part of Todor Zhivkov's original floor plan.

We didn't stay at the Arbanassi Palace, but we did stop by for an evening cocktail.  It felt a little like trick-or-treating at a certain house just to catch a glimpse of what it looks like inside. There was a chandelier and leather-chair filled lobby bar, but the outdoor terrace beckoned. The views were vast and gorgeous, the sunset sublime.  A white circle with an H in the center marked a helipad on the field below.  There was no wonder at all why, in all of this large country, Zhivkov chose this spot for a residence.  We clinked our glasses and Robin Leach's voice popped into my head.  To shampansko wishes and caviar dreams!

Our Unexpected Vacation

We bought flip flops.  If someone had shown me a photo of Balchik before we went, I would have thought it was a dull, industrial port town.  Somehow, it is and it isn't.  We fell into our seaside days with a sudden rush of excitement and energy that took us by surprise - Balchik is wonderful, it was a pleasure we felt we shouldn't be having, it was a mess of ugly buildings and murky water, cement by the black sea and... fishing boats, bathing suits, grilled seafood, evening breezes and easygoing charm.  We started calling it our accidental vacation, but unexpected is really a better word.  We never plan on spending days like this, so they feel even better when they appear out of the blue.

We bristle when we're asked if we're "on holiday."  Our lives sometimes seem too good to be true - and we try, as much as we can, to have fun.  But traveling for years isn't a vacation, it's not easy.  We long for a break - this isn't something that's easy to say to everyone, but it's true.  Life on the road is lonely and mostly bleak.  Vulnerability is a constant.  We struggle every morning to remember exactly where we are.  The languages shift, the mood shifts, we have to greet strangers at every turn.  Things get stolen.  People stare at us or yell at us.  Finding something interesting every day is exhausting.
This is why we sometimes feel ourselves bracing against "vacation."  If we're enjoying ourselves too much, it somehow seems escapist or unreal.  Sure, we're usually in places where people spend their holidays, but that doesn't mean we aren't working while we're there.
In Balchik, on a narrow stretch of boardwalk along the Black Sea, we succumbed to happiness.  We were ensnared as soon as we caught sight of the water.

Balchik is unlovely, as far as small beach towns go.  But then again, it has its own yellow and blue beauty, a kind of shoreline sweetness that isn't a product of buildings or history.  Its the spirit of the place that felt uplifting, an intermingling of sun and tourism that made us feel we could be happy as long as we cast off our t-shirts and lay down on the sand with everyone else, gorged on grilled blue-fish, drank inexpertly-mixed cocktails and gave ourselves over to the meeting of water and limestone.  It worked.  A few hours after crossing the border we were loving Bulgaria and its people, our fellow tourists, the purity of the light, the lapping water.  We were suddenly on vacation!

Balchik hasn't been blessed with a naturally beautiful coastline.  What is there?  Nowadays, a jumbled line of pressed-cement tetrahedrons protecting the shore from erosion.  A few manmade beaches, some cement piers for swimming.  There's a harbor with three cranes and many uniformed guards.  There are fishing boats and a botanical garden, sunbaked soil and heat-hardened undergrowth, rampant construction, helicopters making their clamorous way down for practice landings on the docks.  There's a pretty backcloth of limestone that glows yellow in the evening light, some planted lavender, many roses.  There's a lively stretch of waterside restaurants and a slow-moving crowd of diners strolling among them in bathing suits and sandals.

In truth, Balchik was to be the beginning point of a long, westerly line drawn across Bulgaria.  It had seemed like a good jumping off point because it was at the eastern end of things and promised less resort-bustle than Varna or Albena.  It was just another town to plan for, the kind of place that looks like a point on the map before it swims into view.

But how easy it is to forget: catching sight of the sea makes any traveler's heart jump!  There it was, after hours of yellow and green, slowly shifting gears, drowsy passengers on an early morning bus.  It wakes you up, that first glimpse of the water, and makes you realize that traveling isn't about re-tracing cartography.  It's about arriving somewhere.

On the land to the west of town - unseen from shore, Balchik squarely faces the water - are endless fields, neatly plowed.  The region has been a bread basket for centuries, and wheat gave Balchik it's first identity.  Before tourism, this was where the Bulgarian and Romanians sent their grain out over the Black Sea.  Hulking remnant remain - huge silos by the beach and a large mill and trading complex, now sun-bleached and vacant looking.  As holiday makers came, the focus turned to swimming pools and hotel beds.  An old, salt-corroded sign by the beach pointed the way to water skiing, a discotheque and "shopping center."  The sign was probably put up with some hope.  There is none of that in town.

There was sun and plenty of barstools, pretty evening light and beach-reddened people.  We swam, though the water wasn't great, and drank, though the cocktails were weak and basic.  After the first day, we took off our shoes and bought sandals.  Not long after, we decided to lie on the sand.  Hours passed, the weekend energy ebbed as people took naps after lunch, then surged as they went out looking for dinner.  There were three nights booked at the hotel.  Balchik's sights don't take much longer than half a day to see.  Why not take a little vacation?  After all, we were already there!

The 'Quiet Nest' On The Black Sea

"I never thought about how well the sound of the sea goes with the smell of roses," Rebecca said.  We were walking through a June flood of blossoms, the ground strewn with petals. In the Bulgarian seaside town of Balchik, high up above the beach, a cascading paradise of terraces and waterfalls spills down towards the water.  It's crowded, hot, steep and overpriced - but completely worth it.  Once the private retreat of Queen Marie of Romania, it's now one of the best looked-after and beautiful botanical gardens we've ever seen.  Marie loved it so much she had her heart buried here, locked up in a gold box.  The heart's no longer here, the gardens have been thrown open to the public, it's not even Romania anymore - but the place is still full of stories about the queen, her lovers and love for Balchik.

Marie of Romania began her extraordinary life as Princess Marie of Edinburgh, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria on her father's side, a granddaughter of Emperor Alexander II on her mother's side.  She grew up in Windsor Palace and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and, from the beginning, was something of an enchantress.  In June 1900, Cosmopolitan said that "without being regularly beautiful, she is exceedingly pretty and winsome, in addition to which she excels in all the arts of coquetry and flirtation."  Indeed, flirtation became something of her calling card - her own daughter, when trying to dispel rumors of her mothers infidelities said that there had "only" been three men other than her father who had become regular characters in the family's life, but that's mis-stating the accusation.  Marie was a legendary seductress.
The young Princess's first cousin, Prince George (later King George V), proposed to her when she was seventeen, but her mother refused to let her marry him, finding for her instead the somewhat boring Prince Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Romania.

Marie never liked Ferdinand, but she loved Romania.  On a trip along the shore, riding on horseback, she fell especially for Balchik, which wasn't much more than a rocky cove of limestone cliffs and shady vineyards.  She described being pulled into mud huts so that she could bless the children there, and riding past all sorts of character in the villages around.  It was a distant, wild land at the time, far removed from the royal court in Bucharest.
A few years later, in 1926, as her husband's health declined, Marie began work on a garden and "palace" there, to be the seaside residence of the court.  It's a small, understated building to be called a palace, but it's pretty and comfortable and quirky, which is exactly what the queen had wanted (her mountain "palace" in the Carpathians was a treehouse).  On one side is a church, on the other a minaret (Marie had begun following the Bahá'í faith, which recognizes all religions as one), beside it is a watermill, in front is the sea.

At the time, Marie was perhaps more beloved in Romania than her husband - while Ferdinand had abandoned the front during WWI, his wife had worked in Army hospitals and stayed quite close to the action, handing out medals and calling herself an "encourager" - Romanian soldiers were said to have gone into battle shouting "Regina Maria!" instead of the name of their king.
Marie showed up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles uninvited, to represent Romania against her husband's wishes. While there, she negotiated for Besserabia to be added to her crown lands, which more than doubled Romania's pre-war population and made her a heroine.  In the process, she also shocked Woodrow Wilson with frank discussions about sex - she showed him a photograph of her "love child," and explained to the president why this daughter was darker-skinned than her other children.

In fact, there were a whole host of sensationalized affairs - everyone from Lord Waldorf Astor and Crown Prince William of Prussia to Russian Grand Dukes and a certain Colonel Joe Boyle of the Canadian Army found their way into Marie's bed - including one that would leave a lasting mark on Balchik itself.  Jules Janin, the Swiss gardener, was said to have been lured to the Black Sea coast not only by the position as gardener to the queen, but also as one of her lovers.  She built him a little house, high up in the garden, and entrusted the entire garden design to him.

What Janin created is spectacular.  A playful mix of formality and wilderness, it brought the more modernist English garden aesthetic of the twenties to a warmer, seaside climate.  There are rows of cacti intermingled with boxwood topiary, ginkos and rubber trees, wooded glades of wildflowers and square-lined flower beds.  It's a colorful, eclectic mix that has nothing to do with the court gardens of other royal residences.  Wandering from space to space, the demeanor of the plants changes, from stiffly arranged to almost untended and relaxed.  There are two waterfalls and a few rocky pools, water sounds are a constant.  Views outward over the sea open up unexpectedly, then gets closed off again.  In all, there are about two thousand species planted here.  Hundreds and hundreds of roses fill in the margins, all just reaching their peak when we visited.

There are six main terraces below the parklike upper reaches of the garden.  It's said that Marie wanted one for each of her children (including the "love child"), and the character of each supposedly reflects the nature of her different offspring.  From above, the terraces look sun-burnt and dry.  Lower, one finds ingeniously placed pockets of shade and pools of water.  Stairs meander up and down, it's impossible to find a direct route from one place to another.  Just beyond the lower wall, strolling couples pass by with ice cream cones and sunbathers pay to sit below umbrellas.

June is probably the best month to go garden visiting - the colors are the brightest, the flowers are at their most raucous, the leaves have most of their springtime green.  There is now a winery housed in some of the old buildings, and free tastings are included in the admission price - we tasted some honeyed wines during a lull in the tour-group crush, but didn't linger there long.  All the people made the gardens a bit hectic, but one could sense the peace that it once possessed, when only the sound of the waves would waft up the slope.  Marie called Balchik her "Quiet Nest."

When Marie died, she was to be buried at Castle Bran, in Transylvania, which had become her primary home.  Her heart, though, was buried in her seaside chapel in Balchik, enclosed in a glass jar within a gold sarcophagus.  It was supposedly her last wish.
Not much more than two years later, though, Bulgaria gained control of this part of the coast.  Though the new proprietors promised to take good care of Marie's heart and the chapel, the Romanians decided that they wanted to have their queen's organ remain in Romanian soil, so they reburied it in the Transylvanian alps.  Unfortunately, not long after this, the new communist government dug the sarcophagus up again and put it in storage, where it's mostly remained - it's now scheduled to be part of a temporary exhibition at a museum in Bran.  It's sad - I'm sure the Queen wouldn't have cared who controlled Balchik.  After all, it's still her place.

Meeting the Locals

There are certain things we've come to expect from seaside towns.  There are the old men with skin that looks more like the product of a tannery than a suntan.  There are colorful boats and piles of tangled nets.  More than anything, there is our sudden urge to consume as much fish as humanly possible.  Our success has varied, simply because we're talking about living creatures here.  And you can't always count on all your guests to show up for dinner.  In Greece, we were faced with the depressing truth that the water all around us had been drastically depleted of its fish.  On Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, we had to play a game of dodging the famous Ohrid trout, whose own survival in the world is facing some serious struggle against the human appetite.  So, really, we didn't know what to expect in Balchik, a small town in the north of Bulgaria's Black Sea Coast.  What would the local fish be and would we get a chance to meet them?

The answer is yes.  A chalkboard at the very first place we stopped displayed the list of available fish.  We could make out the Cyrillic, but the names were still mostly a mystery to us.  Goby, shad, garfish, scad?  Every body of water in the world has its own residents, just like on land.  It's not going to be lobster and salmon everywhere (even if the menu says so).  But we were still taken aback by this list of strangers.  We went to the fish market for some insight, to put some faces to names.  There were just a handful of people with buckets and trays, set up near a parking lot.  Without any signage, it was difficult to really use their offerings as a reference, but we could at least see that it was mostly small fish along the lines of sardines and the small bluefish pictured (grilled) above.  Okay, I won't be ordering too much dourade or tiger shrimp, then.  We wondered about the barbecued octopus and squid we'd already had.  The octopus had been skewered with sliced pickle (more amazing than you'd think) and the squid had been sauteed and then sprinkled with toasted bread crumbs - deconstructed fried calamari. 

Next to the market was a lunch joint, basically a food truck without wheels.  Lunchers filled the picnic tables set outside and the posted chalkboard left absolutely no room for miscommunication.  There were only five fish listed and just two had prices filled in next to them.  We'll have one of each, please!  A попчета (popcheta) and a сафрид (safrad).  The silvery fish are the safrad, also known as scad or, more familiarly, horse mackerel.  They had none of the bitterness of sardines or the density of sprats.  They were so lightly floured, just an opaque coating like sea salt on a car that's been parked near the water.  The larger, golden ones are the popcheta, translated to round goby.  It's a bottom dweller, so its fins have that paddle look and its mouth resembles the front of a Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa.  Both plates tasted like the fish had been alive that morning, the oil had been poured and heated just for us and the man who worked the fryer had the touch of a great pool player.  They were out of this world.

Speaking of the world, we were actually helping it out eating those round gobies.  They are an invasive species, an aggressive fish that comes in and takes over.  Their one ecological benefit is that they happen to really like eating zebra mussels, which are even more invasive and have succeeded at completely wiping out the Black Sea's scallops.  We saw this man separating a net full of small, black and white zebra mussels.  They are too tiny to be worth eating (and many people strongly advise against it anyway), so I wasn't sure what his mission was.  Now I think that maybe he was really in the goby game.  Just sorting out his bait?

Luckily, the big, plump, all black, edible mussels are also here in the Black Sea.  Signs around town tout them as "100% organic Black Sea Shells."  We can see what look to be mussel farms out in the water.  They look a lot like trampolines submerged in water, a ring with a netted fence.  Restaurants serve mussel salad, mussels with rice, mussel saganaki (with melted cheese), mussels au natural.  At a vaguely Greek (but not really at all) restaurant named Mikado, we ordered "the Captain's mussels," which I hoped wouldn't be similar to the chef's salad and come with slices of ham.  You never do know in the Balkans.  They came brothless with a sweet tomato sauce and soft, julienned carrots.  The Captain has good taste.

Balchik is historically a fishing village.  That doesn't mean that there are boats lining the harbor or that early morning mass exodus of lone fishermen.  This is no Marsaxlokk.  Most of the business seems to center around tourism.  Still, Balchik's fishing tradition has instilled a real love of seafood into their cuisine.  I could eat grilled fish every day, but I've really been appreciating the variety of methods and approaches here in Balchik.  Menus have it smoked, marinated, stewed, fried, steamed, grilled, skewered and tartar'd.  They even have it all wrapped up in rice and seaweed with a wedge of avocado and diced cucumber - at least at the restaurant below The White House Hotel.  It's not too often that you can sit by the water and have four pieces of a sushi roll before your order of perfectly charred sea bream arrives.

And when it arrives, it's hard to compete with.  The char tastes like barbecue and the flesh like the sea.  It tastes even better than that bit of salmon, because it's local.  It is a product of the time and the place, the here and the now.  And we're here by the Black Sea!  And it's summer!  You want more proof?  There's sand between my toes right now.   Balchik has treated us well.

Gypsy Kitchens: Salată de Vinete

In the rural town of Ieud, we stayed with two local schoolteachers.  Their house was on the edge of a meadow, we ate on a porch looking at wildflowers and old barns.  Over two nights, our hostess made us a staggering array of delicious food: green bean stew (thick with butter), honey cakes, carrot and potato patties, crepes, a soup of matzo-like dumplings, creamed peppers, candied plums, stewed cabbages, fried cheeses… everything, she said, was from their garden, everything was "very natural."  We ate until we couldn't anymore.
The star, though, was her homemade salată de vinete.  She scooped it out of an old canning jar and put it on the table with fresh bread.  We ate an embarrassing amount.  Something like baba ganoush, salată de vinete is what Romanians love to do with eggplant.  Creamy, smokey, lusciously textured, it's a dish that's hard to believe isn't full of mayonnaise or oil.  In fact, it's one of the richest-tasting healthy foods you can imagine - and it's about the simplest thing to prepare.

Salată de vinete doesn't have to be any more complicated than eggplant, cooked and skinned and mashed with salt.  In fact, the name means nothing more than "eggplant salad."  We decided to do it a little bit differently, though, to make the recipe worthwhile.  So, we added onion, garlic, dill and green olives, plus a little oil and white wine.  Throwing in just the dill and raw garlic would have been fine, or just the olives.  Paprika would also be a great addition, or another kind of chili powder.  Cumin could work, tahini would make it more like baba ganoush, lemon juice would have been excellent.  The idea is to use the eggplant as a base for some other flavors, and, really, whatever appeals to you would probably work.
What we did was simmer about half a yellow onion and three cloves garlic in a little white wine and oil until it was soft and the wine was almost gone.  This mixture got added, along with minced olive and de-stemmed fresh dill, to the mashed auborgine.  But lets not get ahead of ourselves - the main thing is to soften up the eggplants.

There is a strange myth about eggplants that they're hard to cook - some spook story handed down through generations of American cooks has frightened us all into thinking there's only one way to cook them (breaded and fried, smothered in a casserole, pressed and steamed, whatever your mother told you).  We can see and taste other results - meltingly soft roasted dishes, delicacies off the grill, baba ganoush - but aren't really sure how these things relate to the toughened rounds of flesh we're used to.  Well, stop being afraid.  It turns out that there is almost nothing easier to cook than an eggplant.

Start by preheating the oven to 350° F.  Then, turn on one of your gas burners and char the skin of your eggplants from tip to tip.  The fruits turn a sickly orange-purple, and blister a little, but they're pretty hardy.  Our stove also wasn't that powerful.  A fork helps, as they get pretty hot.  Don't worry about this process too much - it's more to give them a nice smokey flavor than to cook them.  Really, don't expect to blacken the skin - aim for a second degree burn.
We had fantasies of doing this over a grill or open fire, then cooking the eggplants wrapped in foil, tucked into the coals.  It'd work perfectly - humans haven't always had indoor ranges, after all.
When your fruits have a nice char, put them into some kind of coverable, oven safe container.  Prick them a few times with a fork, if you haven't already.  Cover them tightly and put in the oven for half an hour to an hour or until soft all the way through (don't worry, you'll be able to tell… they melt into puddles).

The nice thing is, it doesn't really matter how long you keep your auborgines in the oven, they really won't overcook.  When we made Imam Biyaldi in Istanbul, we simmered the pot for hours.  When they're soft, split open the skin (which will barely have enough tensile strength to hold together) and scoop out the watery, steaming innards.  Combine this glop with whatever else you'd like to add and mash until smooth.  We used a pair of kitchen shears to help things along.  If you have the luxury of owning a blender or food processor (our rental apartment wasn't well equipped), a few seconds of pulsing should result in something even more luxuriously smooth.
It may not seem believable, but the salată de vinete doesn't need anything other than salt.  It will taste oily and delicious without anything additional.  We added a little oil (about two teaspoons), plus our onion and garlic mixture, the olives and as much dill as we'd bought.  Let the mixture cool in the fridge at least an hour to bring out the full flavor, or serve warm - it's a hard thing to mess up!
(Throw the skins out, they're bitter.)

Salată de Vinete with Green Olives and Dill Recipe

Ingredients:
2 medium sized, ripe eggplants
1 small yellow onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, diced
4 tbsp. olive oil
1/4 cup white wine
1/3 cup green olives, pitted and chopped
Dill, de-stemmed
Salt

Method:
- Preheat oven to 350° F.
- Simmer onions and garlic in white wine and 2 tbspn. oil until softened and wine is almost all gone, about ten or fifteen minutes.  Remove from heat and set aside.
- Over an open gas burner, singe the skins of both eggplants from tip to tip, using a fork if your fingers get hot, working quickly and not burning the skin too badly (if your range is very powerful).  Put the fruits into an oven safe container, cover tightly and place in oven.  Cook until soft - between 1/2 and 2 hours, with about an hour being ideal.
- Remove eggplants from oven, split open skin and scrape flesh into a bowl.  Discard the skins.
- Add to the bowl the onion mixture, olives, remaining oil and dill and mash well, or use a food processor to make really smooth.
- Let mixture cool at least an hour in the refrigerator, then serve with bread, crackers, chips or spoons.

Check out all of our recipes.

Paying with Plastic

 

A little over a year ago, we drove through Romania en route from Moldova to Italy. It was our first visit to the country and a brief one at that - less than 24 hours. We got a quick glimpse of the landscape (beautiful), the roads (treacherously sidewalkless), and the currency (like none we'd ever seen before). It's always a frantic thing to cross a border and then just drive and hope that an ATM will show up at some point. Once it does, you hear that heavy electronic shuffling of bills inside the box and then a stack is spat out at you. What will it look like?? Especially because the Eurozone has made this sort of thing a little more rare, it's exciting to try some new money on for size. Romanian lei are beautiful. Bright, flowery, shiny...? They are crisp, clean, smooth like wax paper or something else? In our hands, they slip around against each other.  In Romania, whether by cash or card, you're always paying with plastic.

Romania is one of about seven countries in the world who have completely switched to polymer banknotes, a plastic covered bill first developed and issued by Australia in 1988. The United States tried its hand at making this brand of currency, but smudgy ink turned people off from the tests. Last year, Canada switched its $100 bill to polymer. While polymer notes are more expensive to make, they are almost impossible to counterfeit. See that little transparent window shaped like the masks of comedy and tragedy (in honor of the man on the bill, Ion Luca Caragiale)? Try faking that. Oh, and the hologram. The higher the leu's value, the more security elements are in the design. This isn't the first thing someone will tell you about the benefit of polymer cash. Nine times out of ten, a comment about Romanian money will elicit this excited response, "You can put it through the laundry and it's okay!" The stuff is basically indestructible.
Seriously. We tried ripping it, washing it. It doesn't crease or wrinkle. It bounces back out of most folds and basically leaped from my hand when I tried to crumple it. See for yourself. No scotch-taped bills or sweaty summer money here in Romania. It can't even get dirty!

Polymer money is said to have a lifespan four to five times longer than paper money, which is mostly great. However, there are those times when a country's currency needs a little shape-up. In 2005, the Romanian leu needed to shave a few zeros off. From January to July of that year, they were officially the world's least valued currency unit. Gosh. After reevaulation, the 1 million leu bill became the 100, the 10,000 lei became 1 and all denominations in between. They kept the design of the bills basically the same, just with four less zeroes. They took the opportunity to re-size them a little, too, shaping them to match the euro banknotes. That way, when Romania switches to the Euro, they won't need to refit all of their ATMs.

People say that Romania is set to switch to the euro in 2015. Sure, their ATMs will be fine, but what about all the visually impaired people that depend on the polymer money's value specific texture? Really, I'm just sad to see this currency go. So darn pretty. Each note has a national figure, his corresponding window design and a flower. There's George Enescu beside a music note and a carnation. Nature and artists take the places usually reserved for architecture and politicians or royalty.

I feel like the money that's exchanged between hands within a country is part of that place's cultural identity. What it looks like, who is on it, remembering those days when a hundred was worth a million. It's also a part of travel, fiddling with a pocketful of coins and taking way too long to leaf through funny money. On the upside, polymer money is completely shreddable and recyclable. Its material is used to make plastic gardening appliances. So, if things go according to plan, Romanians may have themselves a whole bunch of brand new wheelbarrows in 2015.