This summer I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years. To this day, Bulgaria has remained a kind of distant terra incognita, beckoning "adventure" travellers to the edge of the European

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... nt. All the more reason for travellers -foreign and Bulgarian -to record their journeys, to map the remote physical and cultural recesses of this Balkan periphery, always seemingly "backwards," in transition, and "off the beaten track." The veritable sea of travelers' accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989.