Tristan Rutherford

After decades of decline under communist rule, food enthusiasts—including brother chef and baker Bledar and Nikolin Kola—are pioneering the return of the country’s traditional dishes. Chefs and other culinary aficionados are drawing on Albania’s 500-plus years of culinary heritage to reinterpret the foods of their ancestors. Their efforts are re-establishing traditions that were feared lost.

For centuries iso-polyphony, a style of folk singing, has chronicled Albanian life. The songs are part of a rich tradition, vital to weddings, funerals, harvests, festivals and other social events. Indeed, a Ministry of Culture official dubs it “the autobiography of a nation,” a means for the preservation and transmission of different stories.  Recently, crowds gathered for the National Folklore Festival in the  “stone city” of Gjirokastër, demonstrating that interest in iso-polyphony remains high. The challenge is getting younger generations to engage. But some are taking up the call.

Two thousand years before Columbus and 1,500 before Erikson, the Phoenician maritime empire covered the Mediterranean and west to the Canary Islands. In 2019 a replica Phoenician ship set its sail to find out if they could have gone farther.

Masterpieces of a wooden-boat tradition from the center of the 5,200-kilometer-wide Indonesian archipelago, pinisi schooners are both unique and related to the Arab dhows and European sailing ships that preceded them on the waters that link the region’s thousands of islands. Using memory,  not blueprints, pinisi shipwrights build each boat by hand.