Shopska Salad: A Tourist Attraction Under Cheese

A salad on tour

Its name comes from Shopluk, a cultural region centred on Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, and extending into neighbouring parts of Serbia and North Macedonia. The salad itself first appeared on the opposite side of the country, at a Black Sea resort near Varna.

In the mid-1950s, the state tourism organisation Balkantourist was reworking regional dishes for the restaurants serving foreign visitors on the coast. Shopska salad was one of five or six recipes created and promoted this way, and the only one to last.

One tourism official, who said he had been there, later described it as a follow-up to an earlier Balkantourist salad. The main difference, he said, was that the cheese was now grated rather than crumbled. Its white, green and red also happened to match the Bulgarian flag, a coincidence that did it no harm.

Its audience grew beyond the visitors to Bulgaria. In Serbia, it has a close relative in srpska salata, Serbian salad: much the same vegetables, without the cheese. Here, the cheese makes the difference.

Under the cheese

Beneath the topping, the vegetables were cut into substantial pieces. The cheese could fall between them and cling to their wet surfaces, bringing salt and richness to the tomato and cucumber. There was little preparation to distract from the ingredients themselves.

I had disliked raw tomatoes before coming to Serbia. Here, they were so good that I started ordering salads for the tomatoes themselves.

The cheese was welcome. There was just nothing underneath it that needed hiding.