To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  What intrigues me about Biljana’s song is the role reversal: she stands and speaks for herself, while the vintners are the chorus. The groom-to-be remains speechless – ‘finished’ means betrothed – and though Biljana is left disappointed, she is fully in charge of her linens. The locals have made up a coda, told as a legend: once the vintners went on their way, Biljana’s engagement ring – ah, she was already engaged! – was thrown in Lake Prespa, as a gesture of protest. But it popped up in Lake Ohrid, to prove that everything is connected. And that, no matter how assertive you are, you can’t escape your fate. Biljana has some springs dedicated to her, near the last protected wetland of the lake, by the marina, where you can sit under the vast plane trees and listen to the frogs’ chorus in the reeds for many happy hours.

  My first week in Ohrid was spent humming ‘Biljana Washed Her Linens’, panting up lanes, looking up relatives, and browsing books on the lake promenade where a gently spoken bouquiniste with patched clothes, called Elijah, set up his stall in the afternoons. Thunderstorms interrupted the days and made you run down the slippery cobbles in search of shelter, while Elijah deployed his emergency plastic sheets over the books.

  On warm days, I’d swim at the tiny Sarayishte beach by the Lower Gate. It was named after the now vanished Ottoman saray, or mansion, that had been built here by the ruler Djeladin Bey. Earlier, a medieval money-printing press had occupied the spot. For generations, in their basements by the water, locals had been digging up valuable old coins – or were suspected to have been digging by their neighbours.

  With apt symbolism, the old Sarayishte boat jetty had faced eastwards, while today’s jetty on the promenade faces west. Planted with weeping willows, Sarayishte sat on land reclaimed from the lake. Well into Anastassia’s time, the water lapped against house walls and flooded gardens, sometimes entering windows, bringing in the detritus of the lake: carpets and shoes, barrels and pots and coins from different eras. It was here that the girls of the old town would swim, but only at night and fully clothed. The first Ohrid woman to swim here in a bathing suit, in plain daylight, caused a scandal. I met her great-granddaughter. Her name was Trena, after her great-grandmother.

  Trena was my age and a gifted social entrepreneur. Though she’d had opportunities for an academic career abroad, she had returned to the Lake. No matter how hard it was to make a living here.

  ‘Each time I went abroad, I’d start dreaming of the Lake. Like it was calling me. It’s in my blood. If I had a thousand lives, I’d still choose the Lake.’

  Trena was from a family of strong women, as she put it. Her great-grandmother Trena, the swimmer, had been the first female owner of a taverna, where the town’s bohemians gathered. Widowed early, she ran her business alone, and – one presumes – her love life too, because there was a song dedicated to her. Trena had forgotten the melody, but not the lyrics:

  ‘Three years I lay sick for you, Trena,

  and you didn’t come to visit once.’

  Trena took me back to where she lived with her mother and her young son in a leafy neighbourhood. Her father had died of alcoholism. As had her grandfather, and possibly the great-grandfather.

  ‘Alcoholism is the family trauma. I want no man in my life,’ Trena said. ‘I’m strong enough to cope.’

  She supported her mother too, who couldn’t survive on her pension.

  ‘I suppose I’m still carrying the family trauma,’ Trena said. ‘While telling myself that I’ve managed to avoid it, by avoiding men.’

  Her mother seemed pleased with this arrangement. She showed me her garden full of fruit, vegetables and flowers, filled bags with cherries for me, and was in awe of her daughter – like a housewife proud of her successful husband.

  ‘Come and see your son,’ she said to Trena, implying that Trena was not spending enough time with him. But that was because Trena was worked off her feet.

  ‘When Trena was invited to teach abroad,’ the mother said, and lit a cigarette, ‘I told her: if you go, I’m coming with you. I’m not staying behind like a cuckoo. Yok. You’ll take me with you.’

  I was surprised to hear her use the old Turkish yok for ‘no’, an emphatic negative. But I was not surprised that Trena had stayed in Ohrid.

  We sat in the garden and ate last season’s hazelnuts with honey, and the mother told me a family story which struck me as symbolic.

  It was the late 1800s, the time of the komitas, or guerrillas, who fought for the liberation of Macedonia from the Ottomans. In the mother’s native village north of the Lake – now a ghost village – there were four clans of which three had komitas up in the hills. Being a komita instantly made you a local hero and absolved you of seasonal work, so it was a popular if deadly occupation. It also meant that you and your mates could descend on a village and raid it – the peasants were obliged to serve the insurgency. The son of the fourth clan, one Velyan, was a pastoralist, too busy with his flock to join the komitas; he travelled seasonally between Elbasan in Albania and the Aegean. One day, Velyan got word of an imminent attack on the komitas by Turkish soldiers at a crossroads above the Lake. He sent word to the komitas, to warn them. But they were drunk and felt invulnerable, and dismissed the messenger. The soldiers attacked them, as planned.

  When the dust had settled, the dead were buried, and the surviving komitas had to report to the regional leader. The finger of blame was pointed at Velyan. A vendetta began against him, and since he was always the first to get word, he escaped with his family to Romania. So the komitas murdered his brothers instead – at the same crossroads. After many years, Velyan returned to his village, but nothing was forgiven or forgotten. Not long after, the komitas’ sons ambushed him at the same fateful crossroads and killed him.

  ‘At the same time,’ the mother went on, ‘misfortune pursued the dishonest komitas’ families. Children and young people died, as if cut down by a plague.’ Until there were just two young people left in the village: Velyan’s nephew and the daughter of one of the komitas. Velyan’s clan had lost its fortune as well as its men in the vendetta, while the komita clan had grown rich from plunder; rich, but wretched. It was decided that the two young people should be married, as a reconciliation.

  ‘That was my grandparents,’ said Trena’s mother. ‘But what galls me is that the truth was never spoken. Velyan’s name is still associated with betrayal. When they betrayed him. Why do we shoot the messenger?’

  Because it is easier that the shadow lies with the other, not with the self. What struck me about this tale is that the village didn’t need ‘the Turks’ to wreak destruction. They were quite capable of destroying themselves.

  Every time I went into the water, I felt instantly happy. Emotion and memory dissolved, only the present moment remained. And it was enough.

  Then I’d drag myself out of the water, put on my clothes, walk to the jetty and then to the square by the harbour, and once again feel weighed down by the town’s complicated past. A large mosque once stood here. During the interwar Serbian government (1918–39), a statue of King Alexander of Yugoslavia was erected in front of the mosque, facing the lake. When the Bulgarians returned during 1941–4, they dumped the statue in the lake. When Yugoslavia returned under a red flag in 1945, the mosque was blown up to make room for a square, now full of cafes. A statue of St Clement holds the town in his hands.

  While buildings and statues rose and fell, the Chinar remained a constant witness. Standing at the junction of the charshia (market) lanes, the Chinar was a huge plane tree, allegedly planted by Clement himself in 893. It was of ‘immense magnitude’, the English painter and polymath Edward Lear observed when he spent time here in 1848 – though at some point it had been split by lightning, and I found its branches clipped and its trunk held together by a metal corset. Over the centuries it accommodated cafes and barbers. This is where Christians and Muslims, men like my great-grandfathers and their Turkish and Albanian friends, came to get a shave, click their worry beads, drink coffee brought on a co
pper tray by a boy, crunch salted chickpeas, and shake their heads at the folly of politicians.

  Across from the Chinar used to be the Radich Hotel, a barometer of Ohrid’s mercurial twentieth century. Under the Serbs, it was renamed the ‘King of Serbia’. When the Germans arrived in 1941, the owner Radich displayed a swastika, and later that year when the Bulgarians took over, the hotel became ‘Hotel Great Bulgaria’, that country’s tricolour was hoisted, and Radich sent Tsar Boris III forty kilos of lake trout. All the while, Radich went on greeting visitors with the Japanese ‘Banzai!’ – May you live a thousand years! Radich’s own son, in the resistance, didn’t live to see thirty; he was killed by the Germans. Then the Communist state ‘nationalised’ the hotel and turned it into an officers’ club for the Yugoslav People’s Army, and the only reason Radich wasn’t shot as an ‘enemy of the people’ was because of his dead partisan son. The building was demolished in the 1960s and the land restored to the Radich descendants in the 1990s, who are apparently still arguing over it.

  Next to the Chinar is a public drinking fountain with multiple spouts. Surprisingly for a town set on the water, there was no drinking water until 1821 when the Albanian Djeladin Bey commissioned this fountain; previously people in the gated town bought it from pedlars. There was no sewerage, either – on rainy days, each household would pour their collected waste into the gutters, and the fetid mass would run down the streets into the lake. On the façade of the nearest shop, a stone inscribed with an Arabic tarikh, or dedicatory poem, still marks the launching of the fountain:

  What the great Alexander did not bring,

  Djeladin Bey did – the water of eternal life.

  Now the Chinar was boxed in by benches where locals sat in the shade, and boys cycled past with coffee trays on chains. Every day, I came down from the gated town to drink from the fountain, repeatedly explain to a shopkeeper who said we were distant cousins that I didn’t know how he could obtain a Bulgarian (read EU) passport, and have Turkish coffee at a restaurant that backed onto Ohrid’s last functioning dervish lodge.

  One afternoon, I met the lodge’s caretaker. She was the widow of the last sheik, or head dervish, and her son owned the restaurant. Her name was Slavche, a diminutive of Slava. She was a tall woman with a fine-boned face who moved with the air of one who knew her stature. It was not the time for deep conversation – it was Ramazan and they were fasting – but she did ask: ‘Whose are you?’

  At the table was another woman. Her husband had put on his white Albanian keche, or skull cap, and gone into the mosque to pray with a handful of other men. I mentioned the family name.

  ‘Oh,’ Slavche said, and smiled. ‘The darling Tatjana! I see her as if it were yesterday. My son adored her. She was his teacher.’

  She took my hand, her face shook, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

  ‘I remember the day we buried her. The whole town came to see her off. It was a scorching day. The sun was shining and she was lying in that coffin. Her mother broke out in eczema. A remarkable woman, her mother.’

  Now all three of us were crying. The other woman hadn’t known Tatjana or her mother, she was crying for company. I suddenly realised that I’d never met Tatjana either. Later I learned that Slavche’s younger son who had been Tatjana’s student had died in a car accident. Slavche never mentioned her own loss, not now or later when I returned for her story. Her friend at the table was a Christian from a nearby village who had married an Albanian Muslim; to escape family opprobrium, they had moved here. Perhaps she had something of her own to cry about.

  Watching the comings and goings in the charshia was a tradition. Men in keches, men on battered bicycles carrying humble groceries (a loaf of bread, three eggs in a plastic bag), elderly men with faded rolled-up umbrellas and old-fashioned trousers, young women in the painted-on jeans that are perpetually in vogue in the provinces of southern Europe, and Muslim women in headscarves. Some moved around with their overfed sons or grandsons, in whose demeanour you could glimpse that Oriental mix of henpecked and despotic. This wasn’t a Muslim phenomenon, it was an Eastern phenomenon, and down in the charshia the East was as ever-present as up in the gated town.

  Their habits were the same. Only their styles were slightly different.

  Not many Muslims had ever lived in the gated town other than grandees in their sarays; the residents of Imaret, the former Islamic complex at the top of the hill; and the rulers in the kalé. In the early decades (the late 1300s) of the Ottoman conquest, those among the town’s Christians who could afford it emigrated en masse to Venice. Many who stayed took Islam. The newly Islamicised became known as ben Allah, sons of Allah. Some say that the remainers saw themselves as guardians of the relics of Clement, ‘our golden one’, buried up at his monastic grounds at Plaoshnik Hill which was to become Imaret. And so the new arrivals and new converts took the lower parts of town, by the Chinar, where they built mosques and dervish monasteries, where the Via Egnatia passed, where the markets sprawled in the mud, where later the rag-tag armies of this pasha or that bey would block the view of the Lake as the Ottoman Empire began its long agony.

  Meanwhile, being Ohridian became synonymous with having gardens. Muslims and Christians alike owned extensive orchards, vegetable plots and vineyards. The monk Naum is credited with introducing viticulture to the Lake, though it’s hard to believe that vines weren’t grown here earlier. There’s a local saying about the Lake’s hinterland: so fertile, it could birth a human. The old Christians stayed in their gated town and tried not to mix with outsiders, especially not people from the outlying villages, seen as deeply inferior. Whose are you? Your name gave your origins away. Snobbery will be the last thing to die here.

  Many of the men were merchants, traders, drovers and dealers who travelled for extended periods to Berat in Albania, Elbasan and Durrës (Durazzo), Venice, Salonica and Istanbul, Dubrovnik and Trieste, and later in the years of national revival to Leipzig and Vienna, Paris and Moscow. They’d leave the family in the hands of the oldest woman. These matriarchs were known as kiramanas, matrons in Greek. Many of the men secretly took other wives in other towns and villages, and had other families while away on business. Polygamy was open for Muslims, furtive for Christians. Perhaps that is why the gated town developed a matriarchal system of surnames: the women made sure they left their mark.

  Whose are you?

  I’m the daughter of Angelina.

  So that girl would become Angelichina. The absence of the men made the women more powerful within families and communities.

  Up in the gated town, people kept an eye on each other from behind twitching curtains, whispering, shuffling around at night to check up on the neighbour’s tree, the one that cast a shadow, or the neighbour’s wall, the one he was building illegally. I met siblings who lived in the same house but hadn’t spoken for years, for reasons long forgotten but not forgiven. There was even a word to describe women who listen, then spin gossip: portirka, from the word porta, or doorway.

  Just how attached this community were to their customs can be gauged by the fact that well into the twentieth century, when most Christian town women in the region wore modern European dress, here many stuck to traditional costume: an embroidered shirt, a thick black woollen belt wound around the midriff where you could tuck various objects and money; a heavy woollen skirt with an additional apron-like layer, and long embroidered arm warmers worn under wide sleeves, medieval style. How women managed to walk the steep lanes in this get-up is beyond me.

  But there’s more. The women of the gated town also wore the ‘varosh veil’, a thin white scarf that covered the forehead down to the eyes, and a black face cover indistinguishable from the Islamic veil. A town chronicler of the early 1800s wrote that ‘women were not supposed to go to church, or anywhere else for that matter’; their only outings were on Monday, market day, and Sunday, bath day.

  Down in the charshia of the lower town, people watched each other openly over the rumbling of voices and water
fountains, the spinning of chickens on grills, the tumble of dice in backgammon sessions. Homeless dogs sunned themselves on the pavement and were treated as public pets. The only thing that interrupted this calm was the local madman.

  Every day after lunch, he conducted his routine. He was a short man and wore his shirt open at the top, with tufts of black hair poking out. He bounced up and down the charshia with a grin and a radio blasting songs in different languages, and sang along with the lyrics, punctuating them with shouted swearwords. In Macedonian, then in Albanian, then perhaps in Serbian, Turkish and Bulgarian. The next day, the order was different, but the routine was always multilingual. People tolerated him with smiles.

  ‘And anyway,’ said the waiter at Neim’s Restaurant, ‘is he mad or do the rest of us hide it better?’ The waiter was a tall, grey-eyed Albanian who had returned to Ohrid after twenty years in Zagreb, to look after aged parents. He preferred Zagreb, but—

  ‘Fate,’ he shrugged, as he served my order – a homely dish called tavche gravche, an Ohridian diminutive for beans in a clay pot. ‘Balkan fate. You can’t run away from family.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  The restaurant was named after the owner, Neim – pronounced ‘name’, so that the running joke was to ask him in English ‘What’s your name?’ and he’d say ‘Name’ – and it was the last establishment of the charshia, past the Evropa Bureau de Change and the Shogun barber’s, and before the start of the new town, which wasn’t in fact new.

  When I asked the waiter how life was for the ethnic Albanians here, what with the current political deadlock, he said:

  ‘We have always lived in peace. But who knows?’ And his jaw hardened fatalistically. He relaxed when he asked what family I belonged to, and heard the recognisable surnames.