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.

Strength, speed and a lustrous coat made the Karabakh horse a symbol of status, power and beauty in its native Azerbaijan, and beyond. Wars over the past century nearly eliminated them, but now breeders are steadily restoring their numbers.

Widely regarded as the most fragrant of roses, the Damascus rose bloomed first in Central Asia and came to the Levant and Anatolia via the Silk Roads. Today it is cultivated most intensively in Bulgaria’s Rose Valley, where it thrives as both export and heritage.

As long as a minibus and as thin as a canoe, curved like a banana and painted a rainbow of hues, the handbuilt wooden pirogue remains the watercraft of choice among half a million people who support the artisanal fishing industry along the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Pirogues were originally designed narrow for easier paddling, and their long, curved keels help them glide into surf and swell, where every morning hundreds of crews cast nets with the hopes of a good day's catch.

From co-op farms and export-driven factories to market stalls run by young entrepreneurs, continental Africa's smallest country is adapting its globally popular crop of groundnuts peanuts to changing climate, changing markets and rising aspirations.