Layers

Layering is its core. You spread the fila dough and deftly fold it on top of itself, curl the fold into a rose. The dough will tear between your fingers and that will be that. If you fold it tight enough, nobody will notice. Once you’ve planted the flowers, you pour the yoghurt-egg-cheese mixture into the buds, let it spill over between other petals. The most important part, though, comes after the oven and after the banitsa cools: tasting another’s, sharing your recipe, asking for theirs. Gathering ideas: spinach, olives if you’re a little wild. Your friends from the outside will ask you what it is and say it’s good, but they are not the center of this magic. Here, here the miracle happens.

Greasy fingers, belly-laughing. Crumbly dough falling underfoot. Someone turns the radio on and although we have all left the country we are still patriots and sing along to the music. In our mind’s eye the sea is as blue as ever, close enough to smell the salt. Banitsa is not a meal: it is a memory, cherished forever. Banitsa is a thousand memories, folded on top of themselves like torn dough. A thousand hands passing napkins; a thousand voices overlapping. A thousand memories, folded into me, pouring and flooding my soul.