In the first episode of Materia Mensa, we find ourselves in Silivryak - a place where the city feels like a distant memory. This is a story about choosing the wild over the familiar, about silence, solitude, and the kind of life that strips everything back to what's real.

"If a person manages to combine reason with taste, they have made the best dish," says Chef Maria Zhekova - and she means it the way only someone who has truly left something behind can mean it. High in the Rhodopes, in a guesthouse that belongs more to the mountain than to any map, she prepares Balkan trout the way it deserves to be prepared: with patience, with purpose, with place.

Beside her, master ceramicist Maria Baleva shapes a plate to hold it all - one that begins as clay, passes through hands, and arrives at the table as something more than an object. A vessel for a moment that won't repeat itself.