The gate is not a gate so much as a trick. You walk toward the base of the rock expecting an arch and a view, and instead the wall swallows you into a vaulted tunnel that bends sharply left before it lets you out, so that at no point can you see through it. Medieval defensive logic: no straight line, no cavalry charge, no arrow with anywhere to go. It is short, and noticeably cooler than the causeway behind you.

Then you come out the other side and there is a town.

Not a ruin, not a viewpoint, not an archaeological site with a ticket booth and a laminated map. A town — one cobbled street running east, houses stacked in terracotta tiers above and below it, bougainvillea over doorways, cats asleep on warm stone, a bell tower, and the sea below the parapet at the end of every side alley. You were on a bare gray rock a minute ago. Now you are inside a medieval city, and the reason you never saw it coming is that Monemvasia is built entirely on the seaward face of its rock, invisible from the mainland and invisible from the shipping lanes, which was the entire point. The Greeks call it to petrino karavi, the stone ship. Yannis Ritsos, who was born here in 1909, used the phrase all his life, and the longer you look at the rock from the water, low and long with its prow into the wind, the more you understand that he was not being poetic. He was being accurate.

The name says the rest of it. Moní émvasis: single entrance. One way in, one way out, and a causeway you can defend with a handful of men. That single fact — the geography of one approach — made this rock one of the richest small places in the medieval Mediterranean. Its merchants were shipping a sweet amber wine to England and Flanders and the Baltic when London was a market town. Emperors in Constantinople exempted Monemvasia from twenty-eight separate taxes to keep its loyalty. Its bishops outranked their neighbors. Its ships carried a wine whose name the whole of Europe mangled into something local — Malvasia, Malvoisie, Malmsey — and which Shakespeare could put into three of his plays and expect the pit to laugh.

And when Constantinople fell in 1453, the great Byzantine capital of the East gone in fifty-three days, this rock did not fall.

It held out for another eighty-seven years. When it finally changed hands, there was no siege at all.

I visited Monemvasia this week, after spending about 14-days in a deep dive about its colorful and action-packed history. It was, in many ways, the ideal shore day: equal parts exploration, fantastic food and wine, and a lovely swim…thanks to a group of unlikely modern-day heroes of Monemvasia.

☕ What follows for paid subscribers: the full history from Justinian’s refugees to the last Venetian handover, the story of Malmsey and how to read a Monemvasia wine label today, and my complete guide to the Rock — nine places worth your time inside and outside the walls, with addresses, hours, and what to order at my favorite restaurant with the best view.

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A deep dive into Korcula with its street plan engineered to fight the wind, a tourist industry built on a maybe, a sword dance four centuries older than the postcards, and where to eat inside walls shaped like a skeleton.

Look down on Korcula’s old town from the water, and the street plan resolves into something almost too tidy to be an accident: a single spine running the length of the peninsula, with narrow side streets branching off it like ribs. It is, quite literally, built like a fish. And like most things in this town that look decorative, it turns out to be entirely functional.

Thinking about exploring the world by ship? Start your planning with my free Cultural Companion to Cruise Regions: the history, culture, and cuisine of fourteen cruise regions: from the Adriatic to Antarctica! Get the guide here.

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A Town Engineered Around the Weather

The streets on Korcula’s western side run straight, funneling in the maestral — the cooling summer sea breeze that makes an Adriatic July bearable. The streets on the eastern side curve, deliberately, to break the force of the bura, the brutal cold wind that can come screaming down from the mountains in winter. Put those two decisions together and you get the fishbone plan visible from any approaching boat — a piece of medieval climate engineering disguised, five centuries later, as picturesque geometry. The same layout appears in Chioggia, near Venice, which is not a coincidence: Korcula spent centuries under Venetian rule, and its town planners were working from the same playbook, adapted here to a hillier, windier stretch of coast.

What follows for paid subscribers: how Korcula's medieval planners engineered an entire town around the wind, the Marco Polo legend the town sells with a completely straight face, a sword dance that has survived four centuries when everywhere else it died out, the island's two rare native wines, and where to eat behind walls shaped like a fish skeleton.

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Kos Town, Greece · 23 July 2026

Greetings!

The tree is not old enough to be true, and everyone in Kos Town will tell you so anyway.

I am standing under it now, in the square just inside the harbor, a plane tree so wide its crown is propped up on scaffolding like an elderly relative who still insists on hosting dinner. Legend holds that Hippocrates himself taught his students in this exact spot, in the shade of this exact tree, some twenty-four hundred years ago. The tree is, by the most generous reckoning, about five hundred years old. The math does not work, and the town knows it does not work, and tells you the story anyway — with the useful footnote that this tree is very likely a root-sprung descendant of whatever tree actually stood here, so that the lineage, if not the timber, is technically intact. I have decided I love this explanation more than I would have loved a simple, boring truth.

Hippocrates was real, at least, and Kos is where he was born, into a family of hereditary physician-priests who trained him at the island’s Asklepieion — a hillside sanctuary, terraced in three tiers above the town, that grew over eight centuries from a small local shrine into one of the ancient world’s great centers of healing. What happened there, under Hippocrates and the generations of physicians who followed him, was nothing less than the invention of medicine as we would recognize it: the slow, stubborn insistence that illness had causes you could observe rather than gods you had to appease. Every doctor who has ever taken an oath in his name is standing, whether they know it or not, on ground this square is a five-minute walk from.

But turn around from the tree and the square keeps going, and this is the part that stopped me cold. Behind the tree stands a mosque, built in 1776 under Ottoman rule. Beyond that rises the Castle of the Knights of St John, built by Crusader knights across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to guard the sea passage for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, expanded and re-fortified right up until 1514, eight years before the Ottomans took it from them. And the whole ensemble — ancient legend, Ottoman mosque, Crusader fortress — was restored into its present, walkable form in the 1930s by the Italian colonial administration, which used a 1933 earthquake that flattened much of old Kos Town as an opportunity to rebuild the whole place in clean Art Deco lines around the newly excavated ruins.

Stand in that one small square, in other words, and you are standing in twenty-four centuries at once: a birthplace of Western medicine that may or may not be marked correctly, a house of Muslim worship, a Christian crusader fortress, and a twentieth-century Italian urban plan, all within the length of a decent throw of a stone. Nowhere I have lectured this year has made the layering of history quite so literal, or quite so willing to admit that some of its own foundation stories are more legend than fact. I find that honesty, oddly, more convincing than certainty would have been.

I spent this morning inside two of the buildings that layering left behind, and they only deepened the joke. The first was the Archaeological Museum, a few minutes inland on Eleftherias Square, in a solemn two-story building the Italians raised in 1935 — a museum that is now itself a protected monument of the 1912–1943 occupation, an exhibit that has quietly become part of the exhibition.

Inside stand the marble survivors of everything out in the square: a Hellenistic Demeter, a Kore, an Athena from the fourth and third centuries before Christ; an Aphrodite and her nymphs a little younger; a seated Hermes from the Roman rooms. And at the center, draped and grave and pressed into service as the museum’s presiding spirit, a statue the labels call Hippocrates — though whether the face is really his no one can honestly say, which by now was exactly the answer I expected. The island’s most famous man may or may not be the man in the island’s most famous statue.

A few streets on lies the Casa Romana, and here the Italian hand is plainer still. Some wealthy Roman raised the house in the third century over the bones of an older Hellenistic one, and gave it thirty-six rooms arranged around three open atria, each with a pool at its heart to draw light and air down into the villa. When the same 1933 earthquake that remade the town also laid the ruin bare, the Italian archaeologist Luciano Laurenzi excavated it and had it roofed and rebuilt outright — walls, colonnades, a whole domestic world reconstructed around what had survived. And what survived earns the visit: floor mosaics of a leopard springing at a deer, a lion at a wild goat, dolphins and a Nereid riding a seahorse with a torch in her hand, wall paintings still gripping their plaster. The finest marine mosaic is not even here any longer; it was lifted out and set into a wall of the museum I had just come from, so that the two buildings quietly hold pieces of one another.

Two museums, though, are the polished indoor version of the past, and I have had only the one morning with them. What I did not have time for — and what I am already plotting a return around — are the open-air sites where that past is still lying in the dirt, unroofed and unpersuaded to explain itself. Chief among them the Asklepieion itself, on its terraces a few kilometers up the hillside, where Hippocrates’s successors actually kept their practice.

Down by the water, the Ancient Agora, the old commercial heart spilling out below the harbor. Across town, the Western Archaeological Zone with its small Roman Odeon, which once sat some seven hundred and fifty spectators. And then the sites that ask for a car and a whole free day: ancient Halasarna at Kardamaina on the south coast, a sanctuary of Apollo with an early Christian town grown up over it; ancient Astypalaia near Kefalos, the island’s older capital, which one stubborn tradition insists was the real birthplace of Hippocrates; and the roofless fifth-century basilicas of Agios Stefanos on the far western shore, standing open to the sea and looking across a narrow channel to a little islet. I will need to come back.

I am glad to need to.

If you are the kind of traveler who would rather stand in a place that admits its stories are partly invented than one that insists everything is exactly as it claims — who finds the gap between myth and evidence more interesting than either alone — Kos will reward you the moment you look up from the tree and notice everything standing around it.

The Dispatches are free and land every Thursday, from wherever the ship happens to have put me down that week. If a friend forwarded you this one, the subscribe button below brings you the rest of the season. And if a tree that is honest about its own dishonesty made you smile the way it made me smile, a restack sends it on to someone who needs a good myth this week.

Yours from under the plane tree,

Jennifer

The five windmills above Little Venice catch the last of the light each evening, and each evening a few hundred people gather along the harbor wall to photograph the phenomenon. I have now watched numerous times, and each time I find myself thinking the same slightly contrarian thought: these windmills were never built to be beautiful. They were built to grind flour, and they did it so well, for so long, that Mykonos once ran on them the way a modern town runs on its electrical grid.

That tension — between what this island was built to be and what it has become is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mykonos’s long history. And that it goes back much further, and much stranger, than the yachts currently filling the harbor would suggest.

What follows for paid subscribers: how sixteenth-century windmills turned Mykonos into “the bakery of the Cyclades,” the sacred island next door that Mykonos existed to serve, the single 1961 visit that turned a poor fishing island into the jet-set’s favorite address, a vocabulary for reading a Cycladic menu, and where to eat in Mykonos Town beyond the beach clubs.

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The Liston, Corfu · 16 July 2026

Dear Reader,

I fell for Corfu the way most people do: through a ten-year-old boy, his long-suffering mother, and a matchbox of scorpions loosed across the dinner table. That is to say, I fell for it through the Durrells — Gerald’s My Family and Other Animals, the whole sunlit, exasperated Corfu Trilogy, and lately the television series that carried the family to a new generation — years before I ever set foot on the island or gave a single lecture on its history at sea.

The Durrells landed in 1935: the widowed Louisa and her children, among them Gerald, the budding naturalist forever filling matchboxes with things that bit, and Lawrence, the elder brother already writing his way toward fame, all of them chasing cheap sunshine and an escape from English drizzle. They stayed until the war chased them off in 1939. Gerald turned those four years into the funniest childhood memoir in the language; Lawrence turned the same island into Prospero’s Cell, a spare, shimmering account seen through a very different eye. Between the two brothers they built a Corfu so vivid that people have been arriving ever since, half-expecting to find Spiro the taxi driver still idling on the quay.

Busts of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in Corfu

I will admit to a certain hunger for solid ground this morning, Durrells or no. Yesterday the ship kept me aboard — it happens, even to those of us who do this for a living, and the harbor at Sami slid past without me — so stepping onto the quay at Kérkyra today felt like being handed back something I had been promised and briefly lost. I walked straight into the Old Town, and the Old Town, as it always does, began quietly rearranging what I thought I knew.

Because here is what the Durrells, for all their enchantment, never quite pause to explain: why Corfu looks the way it does. And the answer reorders everything. Corfu is the one major Greek island the Ottomans never took. They tried, and not gently: a great siege in 1537, another in 1571, and a last, ferocious attempt in 1716. Each time the island held. And because it held — because for four centuries the flag over the harbor was the winged lion of Venice and not the Ottoman crescent — Corfu grew up facing west while the rest of Greece was pulled east. That single fact is why the least Greek-looking town in Greece is also one of the more beautiful

Walk it with me and the layers announce themselves. The Venetians ran Corfu from roughly 1401 to 1797, and they built for one purpose: to keep the island. Their engineers threw up two fortresses, the Old on its rocky twin-peaked promontory and the New behind the town after that first Ottoman siege of 1537. Between the fortress and the houses they cleared a wide, deliberate emptiness — a field of fire, kept bare so the cannon on the citadel had a clean shot at anyone who breached the walls. That killing ground is now the Spianada, the loveliest public square in Greece and one of the largest in this corner of Europe, where families stroll at dusk and, yes, where the British later mowed a cricket pitch. The most elegant promenade in the Ionian was designed so soldiers could shoot across it.

The saint belongs to this story too. In the church of Ágios Spyrídon, up a narrow lane off the main shopping street, the mummified body of Saint Spyridon lies in a silver reliquary, and four times a year the Corfiots carry him through the streets behind marching bands. One of those processions, every August, marks the siege of 1716 — the year the Ottoman fleet came for the last time, the year a summer storm wrecked their ships in the strait, and the year Corfiots swore they saw their saint drive the invaders off with a torch in his hand. History credits the German field marshal Schulenburg and the Venetian guns. Corfu credits Spyridon. It is a very Corfiot arrangement, and it explains why half the men on this island are still named Spyros.

Then the rulers changed, and each left the island a gift it kept. The French held Corfu only briefly, in the Napoleonic years, but they built the Liston — the arcaded terrace where I am sitting now, modeled on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, its cafés still the correct place to waste a morning. The British came next, from 1815 to 1864, and were busier than fifty years has any right to be: they built the roads that still carry you across the island, an aqueduct, a neoclassical palace, and they left behind two things no one expects to find in Greece — cricket, which is still played on that former field of fire, and ginger beer, which the Corfiots call tsitsibíra and drink to this day.

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Add the kumquat, a small bright citrus the British planted here in the nineteenth century and which now turns up as a liqueur and a spoon sweet in every shop window, and you have the strangest, most cosmopolitan pantry in the Aegean — except, of course, that Corfu is not in the Aegean at all, but the Ionian, facing Italy.

Corfu joined Greece only in 1864, later than you would think, when the British handed the Ionian Islands to the young Greek kingdom as a kind of diplomatic gift. UNESCO put the Old Town on its World Heritage list in 2007, and the citation is almost comically layered: Venetian, French, British, Greek, one atop the next. Most Mediterranean towns give you their history one century at a time. Corfu serves it all at once, under an arcade, with a coffee.

If you want to pay your respects, there is a place for it. Tucked between the little church of Mandrakina and the gate of the Old Fortress lies a shaded municipal garden the Corfiots call the Boschetto — Italian for a small wood — and in 2006 the town renamed it the Durrell Garden and set two bronze busts among the trees: Lawrence and Gerald, looking out toward the Old Fortress and the wooded islet of Vídos beyond. They keep good company. The garden honors two Corfiot writers as well, the poet Lorentzos Mavilis and the novelist Konstantinos Theotokis — a quiet insistence, which I rather love, that this island was making its own literature long before two English boys arrived to be enchanted by it.

The Durrells fell for the light, the olive groves, the impossible blue of the water — and who could blame them. But standing on the Spianada this afternoon, I found myself falling for something they never wrote about: the fact that the whole idyll, the villas Lawrence wrote in and the hillsides Gerald combed for beetles, was only ever possible because this small island spent four centuries refusing to fall. The Durrells inherited a paradise. Somebody had to keep it first.

If you are the sort of traveler who wants to know why a place looks the way it does — who reads the fortress before the beach, who suspects a cricket pitch in Greece must have a story behind it and is delighted to be proven right — then Corfu will reward you far past its postcards, and far past even the Durrells.

My Dispatches are free and arrive every Thursday, from wherever the ship has set me down that week — next stop the mainland, and a harbor town Agamemnon would recognize. If a friend forwarded you this one, the subscribe button below keeps the rest of the season coming. And if you have ever loved the Durrells’ Corfu and want the harder, prouder history beneath the idyll, do restack this onward — someone in your corner of the internet needs the reminder that the most beautiful places are usually the ones that refused to fall.

Yours from the Liston, Corfu,

Stand close enough to the west door of Šibenik’s St. James Cathedral (Katedrala sv. Jakova) and run your hand along the stone, and you will not find a seam. No wooden beam holds up the roof. No nail pins one block to another. No plaster or cement binds the joints. The entire building — walls, roof, the soaring barrel vault over the nave — is stone locked into stone, cut with such precision that the building has stood, seam-tight, since before Columbus reached America. It took three successive architects and a hundred and five years to finish, and it is, by any reasonable measure, one of the strangest engineering feats in European architecture: a cathedral built the way you would build a puzzle, not a house.

I came ashore this week at Vodice, a small and really charming Croatian resort town a short drive down the coast from Šibenik, and immediately made my way to the taxi rank, eschewing the lure of the beach and the waterfront cafes with their multi-lingual menus and oversized Aperol Spritzes. What I sought instead was a stretch of the Dalmatian coast dense with fortresses, water engineering, and quietly astonishing history.

There is a reason this particular corner of Croatia got so serious about stone walls, and it has everything to do with what follows. Come with me to explore Šibenik!

☕ What follows for paid subscribers: the full story of how three architects built a cathedral with no wood or nails, the hidden baptistery vaulted with nine interlocking stones and carried by three stone children, the four fortresses that made Šibenik nearly impossible to conquer (one of them a Game of Thrones filming location), the waterfall that gave Europe one of its first hydroelectric plants, a vocabulary for reading a Dalmatian menu, and where to eat in Šibenik and Vodice — from a Michelin-starred dining room beside the cathedral to the fifty-year-old konoba locals still swear by.

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Hvar, Croatia · 9 July 2026

Dear Reader,

Greetings from beautiful Hvar, Croatia. After a long day, we landed on board Seabourn Quest in Dubrovnik, which will be home for the next two months.

The light here arrives first and asks questions later. I stepped off the tender this morning into a harbor so bright and hot that it felt vaguely confrontational — stone quay, stone campanile, stone fortress on the hill, all of it lit up like a held breath, and not a cloud anywhere to argue with it. Hvar claims more hours of sunshine than anywhere else in the Mediterranean — something over 2,700 hours a year, which works out to a place that is, on average, very rarely overcast.

That statistic is the kind of thing a tourist board says about itself, but Hvar’s relationship with its own sunshine turns out to be older, stranger, and considerably more interesting than marketing copy, and it starts with a piece of civic history I did not expect to fall in love with before breakfast.

In 1868, this small stone-walled harbor town did something that it seems no one else in Europe had yet thought to do formally: it founded a Hygienic Society, This was a proper civic association whose stated purpose was the good care of visitors, built on the idea that Hvar’s dry air and relentless sun were not just pleasant but medicinal, worth organizing a whole town around.

This was not a spa hotel putting up a sign. This was a town deciding, as a matter of collective policy, that hospitality toward strangers seeking better health was a project worth doing properly. The French Riviera, which the entire modern world associates with the invention of leisure travel, did not organize its own tourist association in Cannes until 1907 — Hvar beat them to the idea by nearly four decades. And in a detail I find almost too good to be believable, the effort is said to have drawn the support of Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Sisi herself, the most photographed and most restless woman in nineteenth-century Europe — lending the whole enterprise a kind of imperial seal of approval.

I have spent a fair amount of my career explaining to cruise passengers why a place matters, and most of the time the answer runs through a battle, a king, or a cathedral. Hvar’s answer runs through none of those. Its argument for itself was simpler and, in a way, more radical: that a town could organize its whole civic identity around the idea that people deserved to feel better when they left than when they arrived. That is not nothing. That is, when you think about it for more than a minute, most of what the entire modern travel industry has since built itself upon — and Hvar got there while Cannes was still just a fishing village with good light.

Find out more about Adriatic History: **A Short History of the Adriatic: Illyria to Independence.**

The proof of that old obsession with well-being is written into everything the island still grows and pours. Climb the hills above town and the air turns purple-blue with lavender — a crop introduced here in the 1920s specifically to help farmers fight off a vineyard pest, which then became, almost by accident, one of the most recognizable things about the whole island.

In the terraced vineyards on Hvar’s punishing southern slopes, the local grape Plavac Mali — a genetic cousin of Zinfandel, grown on stone in full sun with almost no mercy shown to the vines — produces wines that taste, quite specifically, of rosemary and dry pine and black olive: the exact scrubland the vines are standing in, distilled into a glass. You can taste the hillside. It is, I think, the most honest wine list I know.

By early evening the whole town smells of grilled fish, rosemary, and warm stone, and the light that felt confrontational at nine in the morning has gone soft and forgiving, gold across the harbor, and I understood, sitting with a glass of something local and slightly too warm from the sun, exactly what that Hygienic Society was organizing itself around a century and a half ago. Some places sell you a view. Hvar has spent a hundred and fifty years selling you the specific, bodily relief of simply being here.

Find out more about Adriatic cuisine here: Adriatic Cuisine, Culture & History | The Adriatic Table

If you are the kind of traveler who believes the oldest tourism idea is still the best one — that a place can be worth visiting simply because it makes you feel more like yourself — then Hvar was making that argument before almost anywhere else in Europe thought to.

The Dispatches are free and land every Thursday, and highlight wherever I happen to be that week. If a friend forwarded you this one, the subscribe button below brings the rest of the season to your inbox. And if an island beating the French Riviera to the punch by forty years delighted you as much as it delighted me, a restack sends it on to the next curious reader.

Yours from the sunniest harbor in the Adriatic,

Riga, Latvia · 2 July 2026

Dear Reader,

It’s finally cool(er) in Riga.

After three weeks in Iceland and Norway, the inferno-like conditions in Amsterdam came as a shock, as did the woefully-under air conditioned Schipol airport – normally so calm and delightful.

I hate the heat, which is one of the reasons I moved to the Eastern Baltic shore. But even here, we have suffered several unseasonally hot days. A few days ago, things got out of control: read 32 degrees Celsius at nine in the morning, which is not a number Riga is supposed to produce in any month, let alone the one that is normally content with a mild 21.

Even the normally strident seagulls who herald the dawn seemed to lack energy. Outside, the courtyard smelled of hot stone and lime blossom, and the only people moving with any purpose were heading, as I was, toward the beet stalls at Riga’s Central Market — three cavernous former Zeppelin hangars a short walk from the train station, repurposed into a magnificent UNESCO World Heritage Site (another reason I moved here).

I am home in Riga for a brief sojurn, off the ships for a rare stretch during the busy summer season. Riga is a city built around long dark winters and mild, forgiving summers has spent the last week having to learn, rather fast, how to survive its own weather.

The answer to intense heat here is a bowl of something the color of a strawberry smoothie, spiked with brilliant emerald, green fronds of dill: aukstā zupa or “cold soup.”

The Lithuanians next door have no such reticence. Their version is šaltibarščiai, “cold borscht,” and they have turned it into something closer to a national identity than a national dish. Since 2023, Vilnius has thrown itself an entire Pink Soup Festival every June — the TV Tower and four city bridges lit up shocking pink, a foam slide built in the shape of a soup bowl.

In 2024 the rivalry between the two capitals actually became a rap battle: a Riga tourism agency posted a video staking a claim to the dish, and two Vilnius rappers turned up in the town hall square the next day to answer it, under the banner “Beef over Beet.”

Their position, delivered with total sincerity, was that Latvians eat their cold soup with rye bread because they eat everything with rye bread, and that any version served with a slice of sausage floating in it — the Latvian habit — is, as one online commentator put it, “pineapple on pizza.” Two nations arguing on camera over whether cold soup wants rye bread or boiled potatoes strikes me as one of the more proportionate disputes in this part of the world’s very long, very complicated history.

That history is older and stranger than the rap battle suggests. The soup’s roots run back to the shared culinary world of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which once stretched from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea.

Rimvydas Laužikas, a historian at Vilnius University, has traced elaborate beetroot soup recipes to the sixteenth-century court of Grand Duke Sigismund Augustus and his wife Barbara Radvilaitė — proof that this was never purely peasant food, whatever its reputation today.

It was not even always pink: the earliest versions leaned on sorrel and young beet greens rather than the root itself, and ran closer to a pale, tart green. One of the first recipes on record for the Polish cousin, chłodnik, was written down in Warsaw at the end of the eighteenth century by Paul Tremo, chef to King Stanisław August Poniatowski.

A German physician named Johann Peter Frank, teaching at Vilnius University in 1805, left an account of being served a cold soup with ice — a small, very welcome luxury before refrigeration existed to make it ordinary. By the time nineteenth-century cookbooks got hold of it, the recipes had gone almost baroque: the 1852 Kucharka litewska calls for crayfish cakes and roast veal alongside the beets and sour cream, and a 1913 Lithuanian farm manual folds in beef, smoked pork, and kvass. The pink, kefir-and-beet soup filling my fridge this week, by comparison, is the streamlined, democratic descendant of something the Lithuanian nobility once ate with a spoon in one hand and considerable ceremony in the other.

What has not changed in four centuries is the soup’s actual job, which is to cool a body down without heating up a kitchen to do it. There is no stove involved — only a jug of tangy, faintly sour kefir, beets that were roasted yesterday or the day before, and whatever cold, crunchy things are lying around: cucumber, radish, dill, a hard-boiled egg. Most of this country still has no air conditioning, so a dish that asks nothing of the stove has become, this week, less a delicacy than a survival strategy. I understand now why Latvians felt no need to remark on the color. When it is 34 degrees by nine in the morning, you are not thinking about how a thing looks. You are thinking about how fast you can get a spoonful of it into your mouth.

This is my own version, adapted this week to whatever the market had, and the heat allowed:

Latvian Aukstā Zupa

(serves 4)

Ingredients

6 cups of kefir

1 cup of plain yogurt

4 hard boiled eggs, yolks removed, whites chopped into a fine dice

2 Tbs of Dijon mustard

2 Tbs of prepared horseradish

3 large beets, roasted, peeled, and chopped into a fine dice**

1 bunch of radishes, sliced very thin

3 large cucumbers, peeled, seeds removed, and chopped into a fine dice.

2 bunches of scallions

1 large bunch of dill, chopped very finely

1 large bunch of parsley, chopped very finely

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Separate the yolks from the whites of the hardboiled eggs and place them together with the kefir, yogurt, mustard and horseradish in a blender or a food processor fitted with a steel blade and blend until smooth.

Slice the scallions finely and place them in a bowl of cold water for 10 minutes with a bit of salt to reduce their bite.

Combine the remaining ingredients into a large bowl and gently toss with the kefir mixture until the beets have turned the mixture a vibrant pink.

Chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour before serving.

Serve in a shallow soup bowl, garnished with more dill, chopped hardboiled egg…and rye bread if you are so inclined. The soup gets better after a day in the refrigerator and will keep up to four or five days.

Optional toppings: ham or sausage. I prefer it without.

**A note on beets: I like my aukstā zupa with a bit of a kick, which is why I use pickled or fermented beets – which are plentiful in Latvia – in my soup. If you don’t have access to these, wrap the beets in tin foil and roast them at 200℃ for 40-50 minutes or until the tip of a sharp knife easily pierces.

📸 Jennifer Eremeeva | Pickled Beets give the soup a nice kick

If you are the kind of traveler who wants to understand a place through what it eats when the weather turns strange — and who suspects, as I do, that a country’s arguments about food tell you more about it than its arguments about anything else — you will feel right at home here. The Dispatches land free every Thursday, wherever I happen to be that week, and this week that is a very warm apartment in Riga. If a friend forwarded you this one, the subscribe button below will bring the rest of the season to your inbox. And if the rap battle over rye bread versus potatoes delighted you as much as it delighted me, a restack sends it on to the next curious reader.

My fridge this week in Riga

Monday’s paid post goes further into this territory — the full vocabulary of Baltic cold soups, from Polish chłodnik to Estonia’s quieter herring version, plus where in Riga and Vilnius to eat the best bowl of each. For now, stay cool, enjoy your cold soup, and don’t let anyone tell you sausage belongs in it.

Yours from a very warm kitchen in Riga,

There is a moment, on the approach to a great fjord, when the ship goes quiet. Not the engines — the people. The mountains have been closing in for an hour, the channel narrowing until it seems impossible that anything this size could fit, and then someone on the top deck simply stops talking, and the hush spreads along the rail until a few hundred travelers are standing in the cold morning air saying nothing at all, watching a thread of waterfall drop a thousand feet down a black rock wall into water so still it holds the whole mountain upside down. I have watched it happen a hundred times. It never fails.

The Norwegian fjords do this to people. The National Geographic Society once rated the West Norwegian fjords the finest natural heritage site on the planet, and standing at the rail you do not argue. But “beautiful” is a lazy word for them. What the fjords actually are is legible: you can read, in the very shape of them, a story two million years long, written by ice. And the Norwegians, who have lived among them since long before the Vikings rowed out of them, will tell you a different story entirely — one involving trolls.

Both stories are below, along with the part you actually need before you book: which of these fjords are worth crossing the world to sail, and how they differ. Because they are not interchangeable, and the famous ones are not always the ones that will undo you.

For paid subscribers below: what a fjord actually is and how the ice built them, the trolls the locals blame for the scenery, the legend of the seven sisters and the suitor who took to drink — and a connoisseur’s list of the six fjords most worth sailing, from the UNESCO giants to a hidden slot in Lofoten barely wider than the ship.

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📸 Racks with dried fish | Photo credit: Jennifer Eremeeva

Svolvær, Lofoten Islands, 16 June 2026

Greetings!

The smell reaches you before the racks do. It rides in on the wind off the Vestfjord — briny, faintly sweet, insistent — and by the time you round the headland and see them, you understand it has been doing this for a thousand years. Hundreds of wooden A-frames, the hjell, march across the foreshore, and from every crossbar hang split cod by the thousand, lashed in pairs by the tail, drying in the cold clean air of an Arctic spring that never quite gets warm enough to spoil them.

These are the granite peaks the brochures sell you — Lofoten’s serrated skyline rising straight from the sea, green and impossibly steep — but the thing I came north to find is hanging on those racks, swinging slightly, looking like driftwood and worth, pound for pound, rather more than you might expect of a dead fish.

It is tørrfisk. Stockfish. And it is, to my mind, one of the most quietly consequential objects in the history of European food.

Here is how it works, and the genius of it is that it has barely changed. Each winter, vast shoals of Arctic cod — the skrei— leave the Barents Sea and swim south to spawn in the relatively mild waters off Lofoten. They have done this since long before anyone wrote it down, and they arrive, conveniently, in the dead of the Norwegian winter, January through April, when it is too cold for anything to rot and too dark for much else to be done. The fishermen take them, behead and split them, and hang them on the hjell in pairs. Then they simply wait. No salt. No smoke. No fire.

The cold dries the fish slowly from the outside in while the long sub-zero nights keep the bacteria at bay, and over two or three months the cod loses most of its water and concentrates into something hard as a board, light as a plank, and — this is the crucial part — essentially immortal. Properly made stockfish keeps for years. Reconstituted in water, it returns to something close to fresh, with a flavor far deeper and more savory than the original ever had.

A protein that does not spoil, weighs almost nothing, and can be shipped thousands of miles in the hold of a ship. In the Middle Ages, that was not a foodstuff. That was a currency.

Map Credit: The Map Archive

And so it traveled. From at least the 12th century — the trade was already well established by the 1100s — the dried cod of Lofoten was carried south to Bergen, where, from 1350, the German merchants of the Hanseatic League ran the whole enterprise with monastic discipline and ferocious profit. From Bergen it fanned out across a hungry continent, and here is where the geography becomes theology. The medieval Catholic Church forbade meat not only through the forty days of Lent but on every Friday, on the eves of feasts, on a thicket of vigils and ember days that, all told, claimed more than 150 days of the year. For nearly half the calendar, all of Christendom needed protein that was not meat. Fish, conveniently, did not count as flesh.

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A dried cod that kept for years and could be hauled over the Alps was the answer to a prayer — quite literally. In Italy it became baccalà and stoccafisso; in Portugal and Spain, bacalhau and bacalao; salted and dried in a slightly different style, klippfisk. The Venetian who broke his Friday fast, the Lisbon convent observing Lent, the Provençal village pounding salt cod into brandade — all of them were eating a fish that had hung on a wooden rack within sight of these granite peaks, in a winter darkness they could not have imagined.

A medieval Italian fast day depended on a fish dried on a wooden rack above the Arctic Circle.

You can still read the trade routes in the grocery aisle, if you know where to look. The old Norwegian quality grades for stockfish carry the names of the cities that craved them: Lub for Lübeck, Bremer for Bremen, Hollender for the Dutch market. The fish was sorted by destination before it ever left the north, the way a sommelier might lay down wine by the table it would one day grace. And the appetite has not died: Lofoten stockfish won Norwegian protected status in 2007 and, in 2014, became the first Norwegian product to earn EU geographical protection — the same legal armor that guards Champagne and Parmigiano. Most of it still goes to Italy, where it is treated with a reverence the Norwegians themselves find slightly baffling, given that for them it was, for centuries, simply what you ate when there was nothing else.

📸 The Lofoten Islands | Jennifer Eremeeva

I find there is something clarifying about standing among the hjell and following the thread all the way out. We talk a great deal, those of us who travel for a living, about “authentic” local food, about eating the thing that belongs to the place. But the most interesting dishes are almost never the ones that stayed home. They are the ones that left — that got dried and salted and packed and shipped, that crossed mountains and changed their names and ended up on a table that had never seen the sea they came from. The cod on these racks is the most Norwegian thing imaginable and also, somehow, deeply Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. It belongs to the fast days of a continent.

If you are the kind of traveler who would rather understand the wooden rack than photograph the mountain behind it — who reads the grocery label and wonders how the word got there — then you have found, I think, the right correspondent. Welcome aboard.

These free Dispatches go out every Thursday and cost nothing but your curiosity; if you’d like them to arrive in your inbox, the subscribe button is just below, and I would be glad of your company. And if this one made you look twice at the baccalà on a menu, do restack it for the next curious traveler — that is how this little expedition finds its crew.

Next week I follow the fish south to Bergen, to the rain-slicked wooden wharf where the Germans ran the whole thousand-year trade and very nearly forgot which country they were standing in.

Of all the lectures I give aboard ship, the Viking talks are the ones I look forward to most. I have built a whole series of them over the years — the Viking Age, Viking Women, the Norse gods, the long road west. They are always packed with guests eager to learn more as they sail through the same gray North Atlantic the Norse themselves crossed, which lends the whole enterprise an agreeable shiver of plausibility. The sea out the lounge window looks exactly the way it always did.

There is one moment I have come to wait for. I say the words “the Vikings reached North America,” and someone in the third row leans forward, and I can almost watch the thought form — one bold ship, one dramatic landing, the world changed forever. Then I explain how it actually happened: not a single heroic leap but a methodical, multigenerational chain of settlement, each island a stepping stone to the next horizon. And I watch that same person recalibrate. The story gets bigger. It also gets more human.

That recalibration is what these talks are really about, because almost everything we think we know about the Vikings is a costume the nineteenth century put on them. They were raiders, yes. But they were also farmers, traders, poets, lawmakers, and explorers, living inside a world that had suddenly become much larger than it was — and the most interesting of them never lifted an axe in anger.

The horns are the least of what we get wrong. Let me show you the rest.

For paid subscribers below: where the horned helmet really comes from (it involves a German opera), the three classes and the assembly that let you read any saga, the road west from Iceland to Greenland to a turf longhouse on Newfoundland, the road east down the Russian rivers to the silver of Baghdad, the Varangian Guard that left its runes in Hagia Sophia and the Norse chieftain invited to rule Russia in 862, the two women who went furthest of all — and how to stand inside the Viking age yourself, starting with the 83-meter hall just up the stunning coast of Norway, where my ship is headed as I write this.

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The light here does not behave. It is nearly eleven at night as I write this, and the sky over the harbor is the pale gold of late afternoon, with no sign of giving up. The fishing boats throw hard little shadows that point the wrong way for the hour. I have stopped trusting my watch and started trusting my appetite, which is the only honest clock this far north in June. Reykjavík does not so much go to sleep as briefly lower its voice.

This week, I headed east, out past the last of the suburbs and into a landscape that looks like the earth in rough draft — all moss and black rock and steam rising from the ground as though something underneath were quietly cooking. Forty minutes from the capital the road delivers you to Þingvellir, which never disappoints.

Þingvellir means, plainly, “the parliament plains,” and the plainness is the point. In the year 930, while most of Europe was busy being feudal, the scattered chieftains of Iceland rode here from every corner of the island, pitched their turf booths along the river, and convened the Alþing: an open-air assembly to make law, settle feuds, and argue, loudly, about both.

Althing by W.G. Collingwood

They came back every summer for the better part of nine centuries. The assembly met on this spot, in one form or another, until 1798, which makes it the oldest parliament whose proceedings we can still follow — older than Westminster, older even than the comfortable assumption that ordinary free men might gather and govern themselves at all.

And here is the detail I find almost unbearably apt. The heart of the assembly was the Lögberg, the Law Rock, where each summer the lögsögumaður — the lawspeaker — stood and recited the law of the land aloud, from memory, a third of it each year, so that across his term the entire code passed through his mouth and into the open air. There were no printed statutes to consult. The law existed because a man stood on a rock and said it, and the people stood below and heard it. A constitution you could only keep by remembering it together.

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But the rock itself is the marvel. Þingvellir sits directly astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in the rift where the North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart at roughly two centimeters a year. You can walk down into the gap — a long, sheer-walled corridor of stone called Almannagjá — and stand with one wall that is technically America and another that is technically Europe, the distance between them very slowly widening as you breathe. Of all the ground on the island, the Icelanders chose to found their republic on the one stretch that is actively coming apart beneath it. They built their democracy on the only piece of land guaranteed not to stay still, and somehow the arrangement held for the better part of a thousand years.

Thingvellir National Park | Photo credit: Ruta Siksna

Which brings me, as these things invariably do, to lunch.

All that steam drifting up from the ground is not decorative. Icelanders have been cooking in the earth for as long as they have been arguing on it, and the smell that keeps catching me here — faintly sulfurous, like a just-struck match — is, against every expectation, the smell of dinner. The proof is a loaf called hverabrauð, “hot-spring bread,” and it is one of the quietly astonishing things you can put in your mouth.

📸 GPritchettPhoto

You make it by mixing a dark, faintly sweet rye dough, sealing it in a pot, and then burying it — about a foot down, in the black volcanic sand at the edge of a hot lake, where the earth holds steady at a little over ninety degrees Celsius. Then you walk away. For twenty-four hours. No oven, no flame, no anxious peeking. The next day you dig up the pot and discover that the planet has baked your bread for you: a loaf so dark it is nearly black, dense and moist to the point of being almost cake. At Laugarvatn Fontana, a geothermal bath about an hour from Reykjavík, the staff unearth a fresh pot every day and slice it warm at the lakeshore, under cold local butter and a drape of smoked trout pulled from the same water. They perform the little ritual twice daily, at 11:45 and again at 2:30. If you find yourself anywhere near the Golden Circle, I cannot recommend it more warmly — it is that rare tourist experience that also happens to be entirely, deliciously true.

I have eaten a great deal of bread in a great many countries, and I will say this plainly: bread that the earth bakes for you, in a nation that founded its parliament on a fault line, tastes like rather more than breakfast. It tastes like a whole national temperament — patient, unhurried, faintly amused at how anxious the rest of us are about our ovens.

If you are the sort of traveler who reads the plaque before finding the gift shop, who would rather understand one rift valley than photograph ten waterfalls, then you and I are going to get along splendidly over the weeks ahead. This is the second of a series of letters I’m sending from the road this summer as I sail north — Iceland now, Shetland and the Scottish Highlands ahead, and after that the Norwegian fjords and the high Arctic, where I am promised a sun that does not set at all.

Next Thursday’s Dispatch will come to you from Svolvær in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. It’s a place I really love, not only for its vibrant Viking history, but also because the scenery is stunning, the air bracing, and the food delicious!

A new Dispatch arrives every Thursday, free, from wherever I happen to be standing in the world. Subscribe and travel north with me — the fjords are coming.

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And if you know someone who would love Iceland told this way, send them this letter. It’s the kindest thing you can do for a writer at sea.

Yours from the land of the midnight sun,

The first time someone handed me a cube of hákarl, we were standing in a low shed near the Reykjavík harbor in a wind that seemed to come straight off the ice cap, and the smell reached me a full second before the toothpick did. Ammonia, mostly, with a sweetish edge underneath, the cheerful eye-watering reek of a public swimming pool that has lost an argument with its own chemistry. My host watched my face with the particular bemusement Icelanders reserve for foreigners about to eat fermented shark, and waited.

I chewed. I swallowed. I reached, exactly as instructed, for the shot of brennivín that exists precisely to follow it, the clear caraway schnapps the locals call Black Death with evident affection. And somewhere underneath the ammonia and the burn, I finally understood something I had been circling for years about the way Icelanders eat. This is not a cuisine that happened by accident, and it is certainly not a cuisine built to charm tourists. It is a thousand-year argument with a volcanic landscape that was not immediately abundant.

📸 Hakarl or Rotted Shark on sale in Reykjavik | Photo credit: Jennifer Eremeeva

I should admit my expectations were low the first time I came, in 2015, for the wonderful Iceland Writers Retreat. I had spent years in the food-writing trade by then and thought I knew roughly what a remote North Atlantic rock would put on a plate. How delightful to be proved so completely wrong. I arrived a few days early to write and explore, fell hard for the tastes of Iceland almost at once, and have been going back ever since to find the love only deepening. In all those visits, across simple harbor shacks and white tablecloth tasting menus, I have not had a single bad meal.

Consider, though, the hand the island was dealt. A volcanic rock just below the Arctic Circle, a growing season measured in weeks, almost no native grain, no real tradition of fruit, and, by the eleventh century, trees so scarce that the medieval settlers burned through the forests within a few generations of stepping ashore. For most of its history the Icelandic table held what the sea, the sheep, and the cow could be persuaded to give. The central problem in that kitchen was never flavor. It was time. How do you keep food alive through a winter that begins in September and forgets, for months, to end?

The answer turns out to be the throughline of everything you will ever eat there. And it begins, as so much in Iceland does, with the bread that the earth itself bakes for you.

What follows for paid subscribers: how to read an Icelandic menu without flinching (the full vocabulary, from hangikjöt to Þorramatur), how to bake underground, where in Reykjavík and Akureyri to eat everything from food trucks to upscale dining, the food and beer walks worth booking, the geothermal farm that grows a surprising crop, the essential product to carry home, and three books that will change the way you taste the whole island.

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Dear Reader,

There is no land in any direction this morning, and there will not be for two more days. I am writing to you from a teak chair on Deck 7 of the Queen Mary 2, somewhere east of the Grand Banks, where the only landmarks are the ones the ship makes for herself: the long white wake unspooling behind us, the last of the gulls that gave up and turned back toward Newfoundland, and a horizon so perfectly, gloriously empty that it has begun to feel like a form of wealth. We are four days out of New York and two from Southampton, and I have not looked at my telephone since Tuesday.

Since this is the first of these letters, let me introduce myself properly, because it explains why I am out here in the middle of the ocean to begin with. I am Jennifer Eremeeva, a cultural historian, and I make my living as an enrichment lecturer aboard luxury cruise ships: a genteel way of saying I am the woman who stands at the front of the ship’s theater on a sea day and talks, with rather more enthusiasm than is perhaps strictly dignified, about the history, art, and food of the places we are sailing toward.

I read the menus before the meals and the plaques before the gift shops; I tell people why a Viennese coffeehouse matters, what to order in Bergen, and which queen lost her head and precisely why. The ships carry me from port to port, and in return I try to send the passengers ashore seeing more than they otherwise would. These Dispatches are simply that same impulse, written down — the running commentary of a professional explainer who cannot help herself, sent to you each Thursday from wherever the work has taken me.

📸 The Queen Mary 2 | Courtesy of Cunard

And this week the work has carried me onto the most romantic conveyance left afloat: Cunard’s Queen Mary 2. People who aren’t on board wonder what on earth there is to do out here. The question always makes me smile, because it assumes a crossing is a cruise, and it is not. A cruise takes you to places; a crossing takes you across one. There are no ports, no tender tickets, no “back on board by 4:30,” no shore excursions to optimize before breakfast. There is only the ocean, the ship, and seven days that belong entirely to you. A crossing is not a vacation that happens to take place on a boat. It is a deliberate decision to make the journey itself the destination — to treat time, for once, as something you are allowed to spend lavishly. For me, it’s work, yes but also a much-needed reset.

Here is the part that converts the skeptics. A modest cabin on a transatlantic crossing runs somewhere between two and and four thousand dollars a person — which is, with almost suspicious regularity, about what a business-class seat across the same ocean now costs, and the gap narrows each time the price of jet fuel climbs.

📸 My Oceanview suite on QM2 this week | Photo credit: Jennifer Eremeeva

The difference is everything. The airplane gives you a reclining chair, a sleep mask, and eight hours of being fired through the stratosphere in a pressurized tube while a stranger asks you to raise your tray table. The Queen Mary 2 gives you seven mornings of waking to nothing but sea (and breakfast in bed if you want it), seven unhurried dinners, and the small miracle of stepping ashore in England feeling rested rather than jet-lagged and faintly traumatized. One of these arrangements asks you to return your seat to its full upright position. The other lets you arrive thinking in longer sentences.

📸 Cunard poster | via Wikimeda Commons | Public Domain

And what a tradition to step into. The ship beneath me is the last of her kind: the only true ocean liner still in scheduled transatlantic service, the final living chapter of a story Samuel Cunard began in 1840, when his little paddle-steamer Britannia carried 115 passengers and the Royal Mail from Liverpool to Halifax and Boston and proved, for the first time, that the Atlantic could be crossed on a schedule — come November gale or August fog.

What followed was the great age of the liners: the Mauretania, the first Queen Mary outrunning U-boats in her wartime coat of gray, the QE2 sailing stubbornly on into the jet age out of sheer devotion. This Queen Mary 2 was built in 2003, at the same French yard in Saint-Nazaire that produced the legendary Normandie, expressly to keep the tradition alive — not a cruise ship that happens to cross the ocean, but an ocean liner that happens to offer cruises. You feel the difference in her bones: the deep draft, the reinforced bow built to meet real Atlantic weather head-on rather than flee it. I met a proper gale on an earlier crossing — thirty-foot swells turning the horizon into a moving wall of gray water — and she simply leaned into it and kept her dinner reservations.

What you actually do, on a morning like this one, is rediscover a tempo modern life has carefully trained out of you. The days stop being calendar squares and become chapters. You wake without an alarm. You check the sea state the way people ashore check the forecast. By mid-morning the ship has sorted itself into its tribes: the readers folded into deck chairs under navy blue blankets, the walkers doing their brisk circuits — three laps of the Promenade make a a bit more than a mile. People like me disappear into the largest library at sea. There is afternoon tea in the Queens Room, white gloves and a three-tiered stand and a string quartet, the whole improbable ritual; and a proper British pub, the Golden Lion, for something more honest before dinner. And there are the lectures: my reason for being aboard. A talk on history or art lands very differently at sea than on land.

📸Illuminations: a 500-seat Theater where I give my Enrichment Lectures | Photo credit: Jennifer Eremeeva

My workshops here on board on creativity and creative writing are packed with guests taking tentative steps into writing books or easing into a creative project. In port, a lecture competes with a cathedral. Out here, with nowhere else on earth to be, a room full of curious people will happily follow you down any rabbit hole you care to open. I’ve come to believe that a crossing is the best thing that ever happened to the curious mind.

If you have ever suspected that the trip itself might be the point — that you would gladly trade a dozen rushed port mornings for one long, slow week of reading and weather and good dinners — then you are exactly the sort of traveler I am writing these Dispatches for. Pull up a deck chair.

I make landfall in Southampton on Saturday, and from there I will head northwest. Sadly by airplane, but to join another ship — and one of my favorites — Seabourn’s Ovation. Iceland first, then Shetland, the Scottish Highlands, and the Norwegian fjords and Arctic, at a time of year when the sun that refuses to set. I will write to you from each of them.

A new Dispatch arrives every Thursday, free, from wherever the ship has carried me. Subscribe and come along — Iceland is next, and the ground there does not stay still.

And if you know someone who has ever dreamed of crossing an ocean the slow way, send them this letter. It travels better with company.

Safe onward travels!

Jennifer

📸 Header image courtesy of Cunard

📷:Impression of the coffeehouse Korb by Mojmir Fotografie via Shutterstock

The Herr Ober at Café Central moves through the room as though time is something that happens to other people. I had been sitting at my marble table for two hours — one Melange, a diary entry I wasn’t really focusing on, and the vague intention of doing something productive — and he had not once glanced at me in a way that suggested I should order again, vacate the premises, or do anything other than exactly what I was doing. In most cities, this kind of tolerance would constitute remarkable customer service. In Vienna, it is simply how a coffeehouse works.

📷: ViennaBattle 1683 by Frans Geffels, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The institution has been working this way for a very long time. In 1683, the Ottoman army retreated from the walls of Vienna after a failed siege — the farthest point of Ottoman expansion into Europe. They left behind, among other things, several hundred sacks of mysterious beans that Viennese soldiers found in the abandoned camp and didn’t quite know what to do with. Georg Franz Kolschitzky — a merchant who had served as a Habsburg spy by passing through Ottoman lines dressed as a Turkish trader — knew exactly what they were. He claimed the sacks as his reward and, within months, opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse.

That the Viennese coffeehouse was born from the wreckage of a siege, using beans left behind by a retreating army, is precisely the kind of origin story the city deserves. Vienna does not do simple beginnings.

The coffeehouse that Kolschitzky and his successors built is now a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — one of the few institutions, rather than objects or performances, to receive that designation. The UNESCO citation describes it as “a place where time and space are consumed, but only coffee is found on the bill.” This is precise. The genius of the Viennese coffeehouse, the thing that separates it from every other coffee-serving institution on earth, is that you are not expected to leave. You pay for your coffee. The table is yours for as long as you want it. The Herr Ober — the title implies rather more authority than his employment might suggest — will not hover, will not bring a second menu, will not place a card reader in front of you as a hint. He will leave you alone, which in Vienna is considered the highest form of hospitality.

Alfred Polgar, the Austrian critic and essayist, described the Viennese coffeehouse as “a place for people who want to be alone but need company to do it.” I have not encountered a more accurate sentence about the institution. The tables are marble, the chairs are bentwood, the newspapers arrive on wooden holders that prevent folding and thereby discourage the kind of aggressive paper-shuffling that might disturb the atmosphere. There is a quality of time in a Viennese coffeehouse that is different from time elsewhere — slower, more suspended, as though the room itself is running on an older clock.

☕ What follows for paid subscribers: the intellectual history of who actually sat at these tables — and it is extraordinary — plus the six coffeehouses still worth your afternoon, with exactly what to order when you get there.

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I arrived in Riga in the autumn of 2017, when the light was the color of old gold, and the city seemed to be quietly going about the business of being itself, which, after you know the history, feels like an act of profound defiance.

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You know that feeling when you’ve just finished a book set in a place you’ve never been, and the author mentions a particular church, or a recipe, or the light in November, and suddenly you feel not quite at home in your own life? That’s what this newsletter is for.

I’m Jennifer Eremeeva, and I spent my twenties falling in love with cities that don’t appear in most travel guides — Moscow first, then the smaller, stranger capitals of Europe that tourists overlook. I’ve written about food as history, lectured my way across the ocean, and spent enough time in libraries and restaurant kitchens to know that the most interesting stories aren’t the ones being amplified. They’re the ones whispered in the margins.

The Cultural Concierge exists because I believe there are people like you who don’t want to be told where to go, but rather why to go there — and more importantly, what you’ll find when you arrive that no algorithm will suggest to you.

I first went to Russia to study its history. Then I went to live there — a posting meant to last two years that quietly stretched past two decades. Somewhere in the middle of it all, between learning to navigate a Soviet-era apartment block and the correct way to fold pelmeni, I worked out what it is I actually do: I translate one culture for another. History, food, architecture, the small daily rituals that tell you more about a place than any monument — these are the things I cannot stop explaining to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen.

I studied Russian history at Columbia and photography at the Moscow Institute of Photography, and for years I wrote the weekly food column for The Moscow Times, still Russia’s largest English-language newspaper. Two books came out of that life.

The first, Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow, is an award-winning memoir of expatriate life that explains, among other things, what it is like to have the embalmed founder of the Soviet state freshened up in the building across your courtyard. The second, Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia, is a pocket guide that compresses thirteen centuries of Russian history into something you can actually finish in a weekend — and, I hope, enjoy.

These days I live in Riga, Latvia, when I am not at sea. I work as an enrichment lecturer for the small-ship luxury lines — Cunard, Explora, Seabourn, Viking, Regent Seven Seas, Oceania, and others — which is a grand way of saying I am the person who tells you why the city you are about to spend eight hours in matters, and where to find the best lunch while you are there. I think of the role as a kind of cultural concierge, and that is the name I have given this Substack.

If you subscribe, here is what lands in your inbox. Twice a week I send a letter from wherever I happen to be — a dispatch from the road, a deep dive into the history, food, and culture of a particular place, a practical guide to making the most of limited time in a port or a city, and the occasional book I think you should read before you go. I write for the curious traveler: the one who wants to understand a destination, not merely tick it off a list.

The formula will no doubt evolve, as these things do, and as you tell me what you want more of. I will keep it generous, keep it useful, and keep it honest about what is worth your time and what is not. I would love to have you along.

Stay in touch

Comment, reply, and send me your travel dilemmas — I read everything.

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Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Prayer in Cairo Jean-Léon Gérôme, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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📸 Christian Kaehler

There is a particular kind of satisfaction — I won’t pretend it isn’t a little smug — that comes from knowing about a place before everyone else does. Madeira has been my secret for a while now, but the secret, I sense, is getting out. So consider this fair warning: the mid-Atlantic island that most people associate primarily with its sweet wine and a certain famous footballer’s homeland is quietly becoming one of the most compelling destinations in the cruise world.

Funchal, Madeira’s compact and surprisingly sophisticated capital, does something rare: it manages to feel genuinely off the beaten track while being entirely civilised about it. You can walk from the port to the old town in fifteen minutes, detour through a flower market that smells like a florist’s fever dream, and find yourself sitting at a table with a glass of poncha — the local rum-based drink made with honey and lemon that is absolutely not to be attempted before noon — before you’ve quite decided where you’re going.

The famous toboggan ride is not, I hasten to add, a toboggan in any traditional sense. It’s a wicker basket on runners, piloted by two men in white linen suits who will move you down a steep cobbled street with considerably more speed than you expected, and considerably more grace than you deserve after last night’s dinner. It is completely absurd and entirely wonderful, and I recommend it without qualification.

📸 Castro Cicero

But Funchal rewards those who look a little further. The levadas — the centuries-old irrigation channels that network across the island’s steep volcanic interior — make for hiking unlike anything in Europe. The Monte Palace Tropical Garden, reached by cable car (skip the toboggan queue and take the cable car first), is one of those places that genuinely stops you in your tracks: azulejo tile panels narrating Portuguese history, koi ponds shaded by dragon trees, and views of the harbour so perfect they feel arranged.

The food scene has quietly matured. Bolo do caco — the flat sweet potato bread cooked on a basalt stone that you’ll find at every market — is the kind of thing you’ll try to recreate at home and not quite manage. Espetada, chunks of beef skewered on bay laurel and cooked over charcoal, is Madeiran cookery at its most elemental and satisfying.

And the wine. Madeira wine has had an unfair reputation for many decades as something your grandmother served at Christmas. The dry sercial and the medium verdelho are completely different propositions: complex, sharp, mineral, the kind of thing that makes you want to know more.

📸 Jennifer Eremeeva

What I find most interesting about Funchal is the particular quality of its light and its history. This was one of Portugal’s first Atlantic colonies, a staging post for the Age of Exploration that changed the world. The merchants and sailors who passed through here were, quite literally, heading somewhere new. Standing at the harbour, it’s still possible to feel that edge-of-the-known-world quality — even with a luxury cruise ship in the foreground.

Eight hours turns out to be rather a lot, actually. You can do the cable car, the Monte garden, the toboggan, the old town, the market, and a proper lunch — and still have time to find a miradouro and watch the light change over the harbour.

Read the full 8 Hours in Funchal guide →

The passengers are charming about it. They wear green. They toast. They are, in the way of well-traveled people everywhere, perfectly happy to lean into a bit of seasonal theatre.

And every year I stand to the side of this and think: the real story is so much better.

📸: Nheyob

I have been thinking about St. Patrick since I undertook to create a lecture on the history of Ireland in just 45 minutes. Certain historical figures become permanent residents in the mind — not because you set out to study them, but because they keep surfacing at the intersection of things you care about. Ireland’s cultural identity. The late Roman world. The mechanics of religious conversion. The question of what makes a destination feel, to a traveler, like it is made of storiesrather than merely decorated with them.

Ireland is made of stories. Patrick’s is the first one, and it is the one that shapes all the others.

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