Vlado knew all the family histories of the gated town and I had come to ask about mine. But the Gardeners, my great-grandfather Kosta’s lot, were not well recorded, unusual for an old family. It was supposed that at some point around the 1600s they had come from the Caucasus as gardeners.
‘Some Ohridians did come from Armenia and Georgia,’ Vlado’s wife said.
‘The bavchas of Ohrid and Struga were renowned throughout the empire,’ Vlado said. ‘Like the trout.’
My grandmother believed there was some ‘exotic’ mix in her father’s line, and the possibility delighted her. In early adulthood, Anastassia and her two brothers looked like their father Kosta – olive skin, close-set black eyes, thin noses. They were children of the Balkan Orient that, by the time they were born in the 1920s, had officially packed up and left. But the Orient hadn’t moved an inch, because the Orient had always been here: in the air, in the way people looked, ate, loved, and mourned.
Vlado Zhura sighed. He was diabetic but couldn’t resist the layered Ohrid torta.
‘Things are complicated here. There’s always been pressure on us, one way or another. Take my grandmother Chrisanta, we called her Santa. When she walked home from her night shift as cleaner of the wagons on the new steam-train railway, she’d be stopped by police. They asked her name. But she couldn’t always tell if they were Serbs or Bulgarians, and she only knew if she’d given the right name if they didn’t slap her.’
Chrisanta’s mother, Despina, hailed from Crete. They arrived with nothing and stayed poor.
‘So poor that my grandfather Argir said: If all the water in the lake turned to milk, still there wouldn’t be a spoonful for us. And my father said: If all the water of the lake turned to ink, still I couldn’t write that poverty down.’
But he did: Zhura senior wrote a spirited memoir, describing the life of a poor kid through the multiple nationalities of twentieth-century Ohrid. At primary school, he made his own writing pads from butcher’s paper and his own pencils from graphite and bits of wood. In the mid-1930s, he was thrown out of high school for refusing to learn German. Then the Serbs closed the high schools of Macedonia, to keep kids dumb. And a few years later, when the Bulgarian state set up shop in Ohrid, he was nearly executed for being in the resistance. But there is a happy ending. He married a Communist from a rich family.
In a portrait of them from that time, in peaked partisan hats, they look radiant with the bright promise of Tito’s Yugoslavia. And it did deliver – for them and their children. Within one generation, this family had gone from extreme poverty in a postcolonial backwater to being in the political and cultural elite of a new country. With his partisan distinction from the war, Vlado’s father became chief of regional police, retired at forty-five, and enjoyed a life of privilege. Vlado’s mother had been so devoted a Communist that she gave away all the family property to the state.
‘We were not impressed,’ Vlado said tartly. ‘We had to buy this house ourselves.’
Here, you inherit property, you don’t buy it. Your ancestors owe you a house, and you owe them your soul.
Vlado and his brother were first-generation, as the expression went – the first lot of Macedonian intellectuals under home governance, or almost. Vlado was aware of the politics of growth and of stagnation. The last twenty years had passed under the rubric of stagnation.
‘I hate politics,’ Vlado said. He had turned to the past, a safer place.
In his father’s memoir is a telling episode recounted by Grandmother Santa. It was the early days of the Struggle for Macedonia, and the Organisation’s outlaws were all over the mountains. One such komita, wanted by the Turkish authorities, was hiding in the gated town. When time was running out, just before the Turkish police burst into the house his hosts came up with a plan. What the police found was a dead woman lying on a high bed, with candles burning, flowers in her hands, and women wailing. They backed out respectfully. But under the ‘dead’ woman, hidden by thick rugs, lay the wanted komita.
To survive in Macedonia, you had to play dead. ‘Not here.’
The Young Turks supported the komitas – they had a common enemy in the decaying High Porte. The Young Turk movement, which would beat out a modern nation-state from an obsolete empire, started here, in Macedonia. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in Salonica and studied at the military academy of nearby Monastir (Bitola), named after its many monasteries. The complex ethnogenesis of each modern nation-state, large or small, in the Balkans was in some way reflected in a similar process by its neighbour. But ‘to describe the ethnogenesis of Macedonia as “complex” is to understate egregiously its tortuous, labyrinthine obscurity,’ warns Fred A. Reed in Salonica Terminus, an overlooked masterwork of contemporary political literature, and it’s true: everything here was so connected and contradictory at the same time, that I was getting vertigo trying to follow the different strands before they became passionately entangled and descended into a heated power struggle, followed by disintegration. A familiar cycle.
Vlado smiled, and his whole face became florid, not just his nose.
‘Whatever happens here is déjà-vu. That’s why this lake has more patron saints and hermits’ caves than Palestine. There’s a lot to pray about. Not that it’s helped.’
Vlado the child of sworn Communists was a sworn atheist.
Every time I stopped in a sleepy lane to catch my breath and take in the lake view, an old lady would materialise from behind a rosemary bush:
‘Whose are you, girl?’
Something about the way I look must have given me away. Only twenty years ago you’d be invited up from the street for a cup of coffee and small crystal dishes of home-made jam, or blago, served with water. You would sit in shuttered salons and they would weigh you up and family-tree you, searching for some ancestral disgrace, some thread they could pull and unravel you back to where you are nothing. The gated town held on to the discreet charm of its bourgeoisie. Ohridians knew their town was very old, and this was their wealth. Despite recent knocks to their pride, their prejudice and starched linens were preserved in the shuttered houses above the Lake – like Marta’s house, like the houses of my relatives.
I pictured Anastassia handling those irritating doll’s-house spoons and thinking: One day I’ll get out of this place. She found Ohrid’s conservatism suffocating: a girl must be somebody’s and the boys have the right to polygamy, you pander to your elders no matter how awful they are, and keeping up appearances is a full-time job.
Even now, inside the gated town you felt as if you were watched by the houses. The tap-tap of your steps on the cobblestones was magnified by the lake. The silhouettes of night walkers moved against the great pink walls of St Sophia, lit up with projectors at night, as in some shadow theatre. When I sat under my cherry tree at night, sensing the vast presence of the lake, I almost expected to see the outlines of my own mind projected on those walls, as in some open arena of the collective unconscious where everything is laid bare.
Ohrid is still a bastion of Eastern hedonism and puritanism. Together, these seeming opposites continue to prop up the Eastern patriarchy. In Anastassia’s girlhood, Ohrid had several hammams, or public baths, and it was the custom to make a day-long visit there on Sundays, taking a packed lunch, and in the courtyard of the hammam you’d purchase chilled refreshments like boza, the fermented-millet drink beloved in the Balkans and an acquired taste for the rest of the world. You went in groups – the women separate from the men, though Christians and Muslims bathed together. You would then scuttle down the back lanes, hiding your flushed post-hammam face behind a shawl. A woman was never to walk down the charshia twice on the same day. To walk down the main street twice was to exhibit yourself.
I went to see the site of the old Gardeners’ house where Grandmother Anastassia had lived in the 1940s and where her mother Ljubitsa had lived with her daughter-in-law, the twins and Tatjana later. The spot was next to the former central hammam (in use as late as 1959), and though it
’s on the flat, the Lake looms big and blue at the end of the street.
Then the Yugoslav state ‘estranged’ the house from the family, as the official term went – under Communism, owners were literally estranged from their property, family members from each other, nations from their neighbours and from their recent histories – bulldozed the whole block and built a shopping arcade called ‘Amam’, a warren of shabby little shops which were, ironically, as Oriental in nature as the hammam had been, but minus the charm. Fragments of the old baths, built from rose marble, were preserved inside a dingy disco club.
It was here, my twin aunts told me, in her bedroom, that my great-grandmother Ljubitsa would pray to St Petka-Paraskeva. Ljubitsa lived with a sense of unfulfilled potential, a queen deprived of a crown. Her intense mental energy had been sucked into the petty politics of family. A sense of enclosure dominated her life.
‘Ohridians. They shut themselves in dark rooms and worry about death and their reputation,’ said Gotse Zhura.
Gotse Zhura was an expert on religious art and also Vlado Zhura’s brother. Like Vlado, he was a bit of a legend. They lived on separate levels of the same house and kept their distance. By claiming archival expertise in different parts of the Lake, they’d negotiated their sibling rivalry: Vlado covered the town’s families, and Gotse had the Lake’s frescoes.
He was a short, robust man of Dionysian energy. As a boy, he’d got into a fight and lost the sight of one eye. The resulting squint gave you the feeling that he was looking at you and something beside you, perhaps your shadow.
‘Ohridians,’ he said, ‘are like an Indian caste. Fossilised.’
True, he was one of them, but he’d rebelled. He had encouraged his daughter to study abroad, even if it pained him to see her so rarely.
‘Ohridians are turned away from the Lake,’ he said. ‘All they see is the past. As they age, their grip on their children tightens. Their favourite topic? Illness.’
It sounded familiar.
We had driven to Imaret-Plaoshnik at the top of the hill, even though it was just three hundred metres from his house. After a lifetime of climbing rope ladders to cave niches, Gotse had injured himself and couldn’t walk. Like his brother, he was confined to the house, and unlike his brother, he’d been drinking to anaesthetise his pain. We’d been drinking together, in fact, from a bottle of home-made plum rakia.
He used to come every morning to meditate on Clement’s Hill, Plaoshnik.
‘Though I’m an atheist and a Communist,’ he said. ‘Even after forty years of hanging out in cave churches.’
In his younger years he’d take an old gun and a knife, and camp in lakeside caves, like the hermits – waking at dawn, swimming, fishing. To get the vibe.
‘Each hermit dwelling has its own vibe.’
Everything here led to something else, he said, everything was connected.
‘You know Chelnitsa?’
Chelnitsa, or the Front Church, was a curious place, named after its position right next to the Front Gate of the old town. The gate had been walled up in the thirteenth century, after a Byzantine ruler of Macedonia and Thessaly, one Theodore Komnenos Doukas, was crowned here. According to tradition, the gate through which a ruler passed en route to his coronation had to be walled up – so that no other ruler would follow him. A doomed wish for permanence. The Komnenos dynasty ruled the lakes, without kindness, for a century.
‘There’s a tunnel under that church that pops out in the cave church above St Petka Monastery. Though I’ve never walked it myself.’
That was a long way – the monastery was high in the Petrino Mountain above the lake.
‘Over the ages, whenever something was partly destroyed, a secret sign was left, a nishan.’ A Turkish word. ‘When you explore sites, you look for the nishan.’
This is how he excavated old churches, including one buried inside his wife’s family house by St Sophia. It is now a gallery with a fountain. The family’s name was a nishan in itself: Shandanov, meaning candelabra, indicates the proximity of a church, and the family had always known about the remains in the basement.
At Imaret-Plaoshnik, the swallows were singing. We sat down on a ruined basilica wall, Gotse wincing with pain at each move.
‘Fuck pain,’ he said, ‘I won’t let it get me down. Not when I have this!’
The glittering Lake stretched out like a carpet of infinity. Gotse pointed with his cane at the marble turbe, or tomb, where one Yusuf Sinan and his brother were buried in 1493.
‘The oldest surviving Islamic site in town,’ Gotse said.
Yusuf had been one of Ohrid’s enlightened beys. Imaret, the former Islamic complex here, was his bequest: a public kitchen-shelter for the poor, regardless of creed. Mansions of Muslim and Christian grandees had stood here, gardens, vineyards, a Muslim cemetery. All that remained of Imaret was the name.
Across from the tomb was a three-naved church: Clement’s ninth-century monastery of St Panteleimon, built on the ruins of a fourth-century Roman basilica, destroyed and rebuilt as a mosque in the fourteenth, and rebuilt to resemble its original shape within my lifetime. But what was the original shape? A seam of lead ran across the walls like a wave, showing the tideline of epochs. The original shape was out of view.
‘Ironically,’ Gotse said, ‘Clement never actually lived here.’
But actuality didn’t matter to the people of the Lake. Continuity did, and Clement was a symbol of continuity. For Gotse, this spot was the most sacred place in Europe.
‘And sacred places belong to nobody,’ he said. He had turned his back on the small-minded old town and dedicated his life to the Lake. He knew he belonged to the Lake, not the other way round. We all did. Gotse Zhura died by the Lake in the spring of the following year, but while we sat on the hill, the spectral blue of water, mountain and sky presented a picture of the world at peace so sublime, so immortal, that we both offered thanks.
Lake Ohrid
Age: 1–3 million years
Depth: 300m maximum; average 15m
Altitude: 695m
Highest peak in the area: Galicica Mountain, 2,270m
Catchment area: 2,600 km2
Islands: none
First known name: Lacus Lychnitis (Lake of Light)
ACROSS THE LAKE
It was early morning and the water was transparent like a membrane, newly born. My guide was a young woman called Ivanka who happened to be a cousin of Tino, my cousin and Tatjana’s son. I had booked the boat trip without knowing this – yet again, I had landed in the lap of distant relatives.
The faces of the gated town had begun to feel too familiar after a week. There were streets I had started to avoid, and I was keen to get out on the water. The eastern shore in particular interested me. I wanted to find out how my great-grandfather had escaped in 1929 by making the lake crossing myself. Had he crossed the whole length of the lake to the Albanian shore in the south? He had been with a friend. In the era before the motorboat, they would have rowed thirty kilometres.
‘Anything’s possible if you’re desperate enough,’ said Ivanka’s dad in answer to my question. He was a placid man with kind eyes, and the boat was his. I asked him if he remembered my aunt Tatjana, his sister-in-law.
‘How can I not?’ he said simply, and wanted to say more, much more, but couldn’t find the words. Besides, I was a stranger to him. ‘Tino grew up with us, after her death.’
His own girls had set up the first hiking tour company in Ohrid.
‘Dad encouraged us all the way,’ said Ivanka, and unfolded a camping table. We breakfasted on succulent tomatoes, sheep’s feta, burek (stuffed pastry), and triple drams of ‘breakfast rakia’ made from grapes – golden and smooth, only forty per cent, said the dad.
‘When my sister and I trained as mountain rangers, we were the only girls out of a hundred!’ Ivanka said. ‘They hadn’t expected women so we had to do the same press-ups as the men. But we did it. Dad always believed in us.’
Dad
was not one to take credit, but he did his bit for the business, with the boat. Of course, the business was family-run. If you were to succeed at anything here, you did it as a family.
‘It’s a super-conservative culture,’ Ivanka said. ‘My sister and I are exceptions – doing something active, daring to dream, not just marry and have kids.’ Getting out on the lake with the wind in your hair helped you dream, I felt it already.
We passed the forested peninsula of Goritsa, once Tito’s summer estate. It was still the property of the president of the republic, occasionally in use.
‘We went in to see the villa, once,’ said Ivanka. ‘It’s like a museum. Tito’s portraits are still on the wall. Creepy.’
The few shore miles after that were lined with aged Yugoslav-era hotels whose names provided a chronological rewind of the country’s self-image, from Communism back to antiquity: ‘the Granite’, ‘the Cement’, ‘the Metropol’, ‘the Philip of Macedon’, ‘the Dessaretae’. Above them perched the Lake’s monasteries. The most mysteriously named among them was St Stefan Panzir of ‘the Chain Mail’, after an army of soldiers in chain mail who perished on that spot just south of the Egnatian Way. But who were they? Nobody knew for certain.
One reasonable guess, based on oral histories, is that the battle foreshadowed the First Crusade and the rising tide of bellicosity in Western Christendom against the East. The Islamic East and the Christian East, both. The Normans invaded Albania from the Adriatic during the years 1080–85, and were defeated here by the Byzantines, the then defenders of Lychnidos, whose archbishop had taken refuge with hermits in the cliffs. And what made the Byzantine army so strong? The huge numbers of Turkic mercenaries and other Orientals and ‘barbarians’ in its ranks.
To the Lake Page 7