Photo courtesy of author
Author Gene Todorov
PARTNER CONTENT
Evgueniy Todorov has spent a good deal of his life in rooms where the stakes were real. Twenty years in the United States Marine Corps took him to Japan and Indonesia, to the Persian Gulf, through three tours in Bosnia, and after September 11 to Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired as a master sergeant. His top decoration is a Bronze Star, from Iraq. His last posting was Kyiv, at the U.S. Defense Attaché Office.
He now writes about Norse gods arguing over sourdough starters.
Todorov — Gene to nearly everyone in Alexandria, where he lives with his wife and daughter — has four books out and three more in progress, and they share a single deranged premise: that the whole of human myth and history can be retold through food, played straight, at length, with footnotes.
"It takes a staggering amount of nerve to create a completely different universe, no matter how absurd, and actually commit it to paper," he says of the process. "You must possess the sheer, unapologetic confidence to write a world where heavily armed Norse gods duel over sourdough starters, treat it as absolute truth and dare to serve it hot to the reader."
None of the books, he is careful to say, are cookbooks. However, "Odin's Baked Goods II: The Icelandic Bread Sagasm” there are recipes for Icelandic breads and cakes.
The book about Kyiv
The most interesting of the four is the one that looks least like a joke.
"Bread and Blood: The Bakers of Kyivan Rus" is what Todorov describes as an unhinged and intensely carbohydrated journey through Ukraine's flour-dusted myths, gods and princes. It is jacketed in blue and yellow. It is also, on his own account, an argument.
The idea arrived while he was still writing the Norse material, and it was shaped by where the Marine Corps had put him last. "The posting definitely helped in the decision," he says, "as I developed close connection and affinity to the country and people of Ukraine."
Writing comedy about a country at war was a deliberate choice, not an accident of timing. "Using humor is the best way to confront violence and war," he says. "Given everything Ukraine has been through in the last decade, and still bravely resisting, humor is the counterbalance of violence and hatred." Readers, he decided, did not need another dry academic treatment of Slavic myth — they needed something they would actually finish.
Underneath the bread jokes is a claim about history. Slavic folklore, Todorov notes, has never traveled the way the Norse material has; most American readers can name Odin and Thor and would struggle to name a single figure from the Kyivan pantheon. The book is his attempt to fix that, and to place Ukraine where he believes the record places it — as a nation with its own long history of contact with the rest of Europe.
He is direct about the point of it. The book is meant, he says, to show "that Ukrainian history and nationhood precedes Moscow by centuries, with Kyiv being the center of the fusion of Slavic tribes and Scandinavian traders and settlers long before Moscow ever existed." Kyivan Rus, in his telling, was trading and marrying into Byzantium and Scandinavia while Moscow was not yet a place anyone had written down.
"Even though it is presented in a humorous form through baking," he says, "it demonstrates the resilience of the Ukrainian people through their history."
A second Slavic volume, "Bread and Blood: The Balkan Ovens," is in final edits. A third is in early development. The three follow the standard division of the Slavic world — North, East and South — and the Balkan book takes Todorov back to the region he came from.
The long way to Alexandria
Todorov grew up in Sofia and graduated from the Sofia Mathematical School in 1986, where he competed at the national level in essay writing.
Then came two years in the Bulgarian Army — not a career move but a legal obligation. Every able-bodied male served two years after high school, a policy Bulgaria has since abandoned; the country joined NATO and the European Union and converted to an all-volunteer force. Todorov's memories of it are unsentimental. Mostly, he says, he remembers hardship, being miserable and hungry, and counting the days until discharge.
Economics at Sofia Economic University followed — a conventional enough trajectory for a young man in a country that was, at that moment, about to stop existing in the form he knew. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In the political reordering that followed across Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, Todorov emigrated to the United States in 1991. Two years later he joined the Marine Corps, making him that rare thing: a man who has served in two armies on opposite sides of the Cold War's dividing line.
He kept studying throughout. He holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a master's from American Military University — credentials acquired, presumably, in the gaps between deployments, which says something about the temperament that would later produce a heavily footnoted comic novel about Vikings.
The Brass House
Between the Corps and the writing desk there was one more chapter, and it began as a joke in Afghanistan.
On his last deployment, a fellow Marine suggested that when they got home they should open a bar — compensation, as Todorov puts it, for a year without a drink. A year later the joke had a liquor license. The Brass House, a jazz and blues bar, opened at San Jacinto Boulevard and Second Street in downtown Austin, Texas.
"We had enthusiasm in abundance, but not much capital and even less experience in operating such an establishment," Todorov says. "And after a few years we were broke. But it was tremendous fun while it lasted."
A man who follows a 20-year military career by running a music venue in Texas and then writing comic Norse fantasy is not moving through life at random. He is a man who decided, fairly deliberately, to spend the second half doing what he actually wants to do.
He landed in Alexandria, met his wife and settled down. It is here, he says, that he was finally able to pursue writing seriously — something he had done since those high school contests, mostly for family and friends.
Four books, and a fifth on the way
The publication order looks scattered and isn't. Todorov borrowed his structure from Peter Jackson, who shot "The Lord of the Rings" as one production and released it in three parts.
"It's a Sausage World," which applies the food treatment to world history by way of charcuterie, stands outside the series entirely. It came out of a family tradition — about five years ago Todorov and a few friends started making their own sausages, and have done it together every year since. The book was a nod to that. But it was also the proof of concept. "While not everyone will appreciate homemade sausages," he says, "everyone can relate to baking."
What followed was a single Norse project, written as a whole and split into three:
"Odin's Baked Goods" reimagines the Nine Realms as a cutthroat professional kitchen, the Aesir recast as rival restaurant executives, creation itself the result of a baking accident that produced the primordial dough. It runs from the making of the world through Ragnarök, then out to the Viking explorers — Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons Ivar the Boneless and Bjorn Ironside, Erik the Red in Greenland, Leif Erikson in North America.
"Odin's Baked Goods II: The Icelandic Bread Sagas" is drawn entirely from the Sagas of the Icelanders and covers roughly 150 years of settlement on brutal ground. Todorov reads it as a Viking Wild West: entrepreneurial settlers claiming land, building farmsteads and inventing a parliament — the Althing — to keep the disputes from killing everyone. It opens with Egil Skallagrimsson.
The third volume, currently in edits under the working title "The Bread Kings," covers the kings of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and their long contest to rule all three. It ends in 1397 with the Kalmar Union. That will close out the Norse cycle.
He works on the Norse and Slavic books simultaneously, switching when one wears him out. The shared baking vocabulary makes it easy to move between them.
Why Odin
Ask Todorov why the Allfather has held readers for a thousand years and he does not reach for the horned-helmet answer.
"Unlike deities who are born omniscient, Odin must sacrifice for his knowledge," he says — trading an eye at Mimir's well, hanging himself from the world tree Yggdrasil to win the runes. "This portrays him as a tragic, intellectual god who understands that true wisdom requires profound personal sacrifice and continuous learning."
What interests Todorov is the Odin who is a patron of poets, scholars and lawmakers rather than a god of war — a figure he calls "the ultimate, complex mentor of humanity." It is a reading that sits oddly well alongside two decades of military service and a bar full of blues. Odin is not a warrior king in this telling. He is a leader who understands what leadership costs.
Mythology endures, he says, for reasons that have nothing to do with nostalgia: "Ancient lore acts as a cultural time capsule, offering us a vital connection to the ancestors who sat around primitive hearth fires, asking the exact same existential questions we ask today."
And fantasy, he insists, is not escape. "Every great technological and scientific achievement of our modern era was once dismissed as a ridiculous, impossible fairytale. For centuries, flying like a bird, embarking on space travel to distant stars and constructing mechanical robots to automate our labor were strictly the domain of 'crazy' dreamers and fantasy writers. Yet, because we had the courage to write these fantasies down, we eventually engineered them into our daily physical reality."
The jokes are for the people who know
The comedy rests on real reading. The bibliography runs to the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda and Heimskringla, Beowulf, works on Norse ritual and symbolism, histories of medieval Europe, and — inevitably — books on actual Scandinavian baking. The joke only lands, Todorov argues, because the underlying material is straight.
"You cannot successfully break the rules of the Viking Age or ancient empires until you understand the exact historical foundations of their actual sagas, conquests and kings."
The proof is buried in the text, where a certain kind of reader will find it. In the creation chapter, the giant Bergelmir escapes the flood of Ymir's blood on what Todorov calls a floating piece of debris — "or, more likely, a discarded bread box." That is a joke about a genuine translation dispute: the Old Norse word *lúðr* has been rendered variously as a boat, a chest, a cradle and a flour bin, and scholars have argued about it for a century and a half.
There are more where that came from. "I have a few other hidden gems in the text," Todorov says. "I hope the readers find them and enjoy it. I've been reading the Norse myths and sagas for the past 20 years, and it always fascinates me how there are slightly different interpretations in the translations."
The illustrations, and the covers, are his own — generated with AI tools after what he describes as numerous tries and edits. It was partly economics, since commissioned art and cover design are expensive for a self-published author, and partly curiosity: he wanted to learn how the software worked.
A city that keeps good company
Todorov is generous about what Alexandria has given him, and specific in a way that suggests he means it.
"To walk its red-brick sidewalks is to share a breathing, dynamic space with the architects of a nation," he says. He names Gadsby's Tavern, where he likes to think about the Revolutionary-era patrons who passed through — Washington, but also Jefferson and Madison — along with Christ Church and the George Washington Masonic National Memorial. He points to the city's proximity to Washington, absorbing the capital's cosmopolitan energy while keeping "the intimate, collaborative charm of a historic seaport."
But the quality he returns to is not the history. It is the mixing. Alexandria, he says, works as "a welcoming cultural crossroads where entirely different perspectives, backgrounds and artistic disciplines seamlessly intermingle."
Which, from a Bulgarian-born Marine writing Viking comedy in a colonial seaport, is less an observation than a demonstration.
Where he writes
Most of the book was written at home. But the notes and ideas that became chapters came from five places around town, and his list is a decent guide to the area's underrated thinking spots:
• Misha’s Coffee, Old Town
• The Old Town waterfront
• Virtue Feed & Grain, 106 S. Union St.
• Barnes & Noble, Potomac Yard
• Hollin Hall Pastry Shop, 7920 Fort Hunt Road
The pastry shop, one assumes, was research.
The books, and where to get them
• ”ODIN's Baked Goods: Asgard-Bakers, Giant-Cakers, Viking-Pastry Makers and The Quest for The Perfect Loaf"
• ”Odin's Baked Goods II: The Icelandic Bread Sagas"
• ”Bread and Blood: The Bakers of Kyivan Rus"
• ”It's a Sausage World: World History Depicted Through the Noble Art of Sausage Making"
All four are available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. "Odin's Baked Goods" was listed at $25 on Amazon before tax and shipping as of August 2026. Todorov sells copies for $20 at signings.
He signed books at Barnes & Noble in Potomac Yard, 3651 Richmond Highway, on July 18, and expects the store to schedule another signing in September or November. For more information, visit genetodorovreads.com.
