To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  The more I learned about this region, the more it struck me that the south-west Balkans, and the Balkan peninsula as a whole, were an arena both of marriage and of war not only between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but also between the Occident and the Orient, and therein lay their complexity and their trouble. The Orient had given birth to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism; and before that, the earliest practices of Asian Shamanism. It was in the Orient’s nature to contain all of these simultaneously, across time: to be polyglot. Not so with the Occident, or not to such an extent.

  We learn from the medieval epic La Chanson de Roland and also from Al Idrisi’s Book of Roger (twelfth century), that the Byzantine army had soldiers of twenty-seven ethnicities and faiths, including Turks, Persians, assorted Slavs, Armenians, Pechenegs, Avars, Hungarians, and ‘Strymonians’ (from the region of the River Struma, or Strymonas). As late as the end of the thirteenth century, when the armies of Charles of Anjou continued to assault the peninsula via the Egnatian Way, Byzantium and Bulgaria repelled them with the help of Turkic and other Asiatic soldiers. It was the ambiguous, many-faced, multi-theistic East pitted against the more singular righteousness of the West – and against one another, as in the case of Bulgaria and Byzantium. These internal Christian wars ultimately opened the way for the Ottoman Turks to enter the European stage.

  I looked at Ivanka and her dad, all three of us born of this peninsula’s baggy, natural cosmopolitanism, understanding each other perfectly, yet artificially estranged from each other by divisive internal politics.

  We rejoined a wild coast. As the hotels disappeared, the limestone mountain grew. I could see the odd hermit niche, and even a rope ladder hanging halfway down the cliff. It had been a while since anyone had climbed there. Perhaps Gotse Zhura had been the last.

  ‘In the distant past, the lake was higher,’ said the dad.

  Some of the caves now out of reach could have been reached by boat even just a hundred and fifty years ago. If we went far enough back in time, the lake would become a sea. Geological relics of its existence have been found as far as the Debar Lake, sixty kilometres to the north. It had been one giant body of water, inside the Dessaret basin, a tectonic depression formed three to five million years ago. It gave me vertigo to think that the time we have been here (forty-six thousand years for humans, less for sapiens) is but a blink in the life of the lake. And here I was, trying to understand the emotional life of just a hundred lacustrine years.

  I asked how deep it was where we were.

  ‘If you can see through, then it’s no more than twenty-three metres,’ the dad said.

  The reason for this extreme transparency is the multitude of sublacustic springs that feed the lake, including the ones that come all the way from Prespa.

  ‘This lake is Europe’s largest natural reservoir of clean water,’ said Ivanka. ‘The greatest threats are pollution and over-urbanisation.’

  A natural scientist told me that the lake’s retention period, meaning the time it takes to fully renew its water, is seventy-five to eighty years. That’s a lifetime! It was almost a miracle that the lake had retained its cleanliness, clean enough to drink, when all else around it – the state, the economy, the climate – had been eroding. The engine was too noisy for us to talk, so Ivanka and I lay on the hard boat benches and soaked in the morning sun, while her dad steered us south. The lake sparkled, full of sky. But the jagged tops of the mountain, where a white paraglider hovered like an albatross, looked hostile to humans. I was sure that Kosta had done this crossing by night. He had been one of countless lake escapees between the two world wars.

  ‘Many didn’t make it,’ the dad said. ‘They were eaten by the fish.’

  ‘Or the samovilas tricked them to the middle of the lake,’ said Ivanka, smiling.

  ‘We have no business in the middle of the lake,’ the dad said, not smiling.

  One of the lake’s folk legends involved the Slavic vila or samovila, the shape-shifting entity that takes the form of a woman, like a nymph who moves very quickly above ground and usually appears at full moon, in forests and other liminal time–spaces. I’d never before heard of lake nymphs, though.

  ‘This lake has its own samovilas,’ said Ivanka. ‘They sing to the fishermen, songs without words. Until they drown.’

  ‘There is a song from the 1920s, when many men escaped across the lake,’ said the dad, and sang the first lines:

  ‘Ohrid, Ohrid, ubav mil

  ti za mene ray si bil.’

  Ohrid, Ohrid, gentle, wise,

  lost to me, like paradise.

  The song was actually written by another ancestor of mine who also escaped to Albania. It was the song of the Ohridian exiles.

  The dad smiled in a conciliatory way. Like many lake people I met, he was not keen on turbulence.

  But Kosta had been. My great-grandfather Kosta, of the Gardeners, had been one of Ohrid’s most eligible and outspoken young men, well known in the charshia. So outspoken that on one occasion he walked up and down by the Chinar, clutching his birth certificate and shouting: ‘Look here! Look at this ferman. It says by signature of the Sultan that Kosta Bahchevandjiev was born in 1890 a Bulgarian! Who is the shitface to contradict me?’

  In the only portrait of him I have, he must be around thirty years old. He looks so intense, with his acquiline nose and fierce black eyes, that he almost burns a hole in the photo. When he rowed across the lake in 1929, he was running from the consequences of this patriotic episode, or similar. But many of the men who escaped were young and single, like the author of the song, whereas Kosta was married with three children.

  There were no surviving letters or stories, not a scrap of memory passed down from the four years after Kosta’s escape. It was a black hole in the family history.

  At the dawn of the twentieth century, before any of this came to pass, Kosta was studying at the School of Fine Tailoring in Salonica. After the First World War, in which he fought on the Bulgarian side, he moved to Sofia and set up a business. That is where he met Ljubitsa, a young woman from the Zarichinov-Karadimchev family in Ohrid.

  Why were these two young Ohridians living so far from their beautiful lake?

  Because the Struggle for Macedonia was not over. The Greek expression for it – Makedonikos agonas – reminds me that agony (agonia) is inevitably the result of violent contest (agon). They are practically the same word. The Struggle for Macedonia was, at various times, at the heart of domestic politics in Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, and shaped the course of both world wars in the Balkans. When the ‘Macedonian Question’ first emerged in the late nineteenth century, Macedonia was a large province of the Ottoman Empire, itself dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’ by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia.

  Macedonia’s main commercial city was Salonica, its administrative and military capital Monastir (Bitola). Its eastern boundary was Pirin Mountain, and its western boundary Lake Ohrid. In the north, it reached Üsküp (Skopje) where the province of Kosovo began. Macedonia and Albania remained under Ottoman rule long after all other peoples in the Balkans had won their independence. Those who finally wrenched Macedonia from the Ottomans in the First Balkan War of 1912 – Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece – were fighting over it in the Second Balkan War the following year.

  By then the new, successfully decolonised and rapidly modernising Balkan nation-states were vocal about their historic precedence – and hence their territorial claims to Macedonia. But what about the Macedonians – that is, the many-coloured blossom of humanity that inhabited the territory of Macedonia? Memoirists, chroniclers and travellers describe how Muslims, Christians and Jews had lived in relative harmony for centuries.

  ‘These poor people have the unenviable privilege of being claimed by three different nationalities,’ wrote the French officer and chronicler Edmond Bouchié de Belle shortly after the Balkan War of 1913 had poured salt into the Macedonian wound, leading to the devastating battles for Macedonia in the First World War, which cost him
his life too. ‘And each nationality used all available means of propaganda: the church, the school, even the bomb.’

  The three million people of Macedonia spoke a Babylon of languages: Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), Greek, Bulgarian and regional Slavic dialects, Albanian, Turkish, Aromanian, Armenian and Romani. The dominance of each language or dialect changed from district to district, and awkwardly, village to village. Salonica was a major Sephardic city. Aegean Macedonia had a majority of Bulgarian or Slavic speakers in the villages (both Christian and Muslim), but a strong Greek-speaking merchant class in the towns. This densely woven pattern could not be separated into individual threads, and therein lay the ‘Question’.

  The main religions were Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Social allegiance was determined by faith, and to a lesser degree by language. There were Orthodox Bulgaro-Macedonians, Orthodox Greeks, Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks and Torbeshes (Muslims), Muslim and Christian Albanians, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Aromanian Vlachs who were typically Christian but on occasion Muslim. There were even Turkish-speaking Christians – the Gagauz, whose descendants still live in the Balkans, including in Romania. No combination of language, faith, costume and visage was too outlandish in Ottoman Macedonia – the salade macédoine had a colourfulness impressive even by Ottoman standards.

  This cosmopolitan abundance was a legacy of the land’s intermingled ancient civilisations, the settling of Sephardic Jews in Ottoman Europe after their expulsion from Spain, and other movements of people over the last two thousand years, not least the numerous Slavs who had interbred with the autochthonous inhabitants of the ancient world – Thracians, Illyrians, Macedonians and Romoi, or Romans (as Greeks referred to themselves in the Byzantine era and beyond). It was to prove a nightmarish kind of abundance.

  Macedonia had been a prominent civilisation at the time of the Macedons of Philip and his son Alexander in the third to fourth century BC. But Macedonia of the late nineteenth century and Macedonia of antiquity overlapped only partially on the map. The geographical contours of Macedonia had shifted over time.

  In his deeply observed chronicle Macedonia (1906), the most valuable source on the region from that time, Henry Brailsford describes a village above Lake Prespa where two brothers lived. One said he felt Greek. The other felt Bulgarian. How can one mother give birth to sons of different identities?

  Identity – or rather, the pressing and sudden need for it – was at the heart of the Macedonian Question. The mother is not quoted on how she felt. She probably wasn’t too fussed as long as her sons were not recruited into some guerrilla band and killed before they reached thirty, as was the common fate of Macedonian men. In another village on the boundary between Albania and Macedonia, the Scottish writer John Foster Fraser asked an innkeeper:

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ replied the man, ‘I find it best to be Greek.’

  ‘There was a Greek band in the neighbouring hills,’ Fraser notes drily.

  Like Kosta’s and Ljubitsa’s families, many of Macedonia’s Slavic speakers at the time identified as Bulgarian, if they identified at all, though a separate Macedonian identity would emerge. They belonged to the Bulgarian Exarchy, which had wrestled power back from the Greek Patriarchy in Constantinople in 1870. The Greek Patriarchy and the Bulgarian Exarchy waged a merciless war over hearts and minds, resulting in many dead bodies. Entire villages in Macedonia would give different answers to the emissaries of the governments that courted or threatened them, sometimes all within one week. And the whole time, they lived in fear for their lives, in case they gave the wrong answer. Like Vlado’s great-grandmother going home in the dark.

  Identity as tyranny: that’s what the Macedonian Question became, over time. Fraser writes:

  What amounted to civil war began. Greek ‘bands’ adopted the methods of the Bulgarian ‘bands’. Greek-speaking villages which had adopted the Bulgarian Church were obliged to renounce their religion and become Greeks proper, or have their houses burnt, or worse. The villagers, who would like to be left in peace, yielded, and instead of Bulgarians became Greeks. When the Greek ‘band’ withdrew, down came the Bulgarian ‘band’ to reconvert the village and make the inhabitants Bulgarian again. Thereupon the Greek ‘band’ cut a few throats and fired a few houses just to remind the peasants they must be Greeks or be killed … The bishops and priests of the Greek Church in particular not only countenanced but urged crime as a means of compelling Bulgarian Macedonians to proclaim themselves Greeks.

  Travelling across Mount Athos in Greece a few years after Kosta rowed across the lake, the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor ‘fell in’ with a lone walker from Macedonia. He ‘didn’t seem quite certain whether he was Greek or Bulgarian’, Fermor writes. ‘He was a melancholy, bearded chap.’

  To not seem quite certain could have deadly consequences. To this day, the nations once involved in the Macedonian Question cannot agree on a single version of the past, or even on compatible versions, which is why each writes their own sanitised version, and in each the protagonist nation has the last word on victimhood. When you consider these versions closely, they all contain truths as well as lies in the shape of omissions, evasions and self-deceptions. In some cases, these form the very backbone of the cleansed national narrative. The Scottish writer Neal Ascherson has called this syndrome of selective national memory the ‘biscuit-factory line of history’ – one that favours homogeneity over ambiguity.

  To be uncertain could kill you, but to be certain was equally dangerous when the winds changed so frequently. When my great-grandmother Ljubitsa was nineteen and freshly graduated from the Bulgarian high school in Ohrid, she was sent to Sofia with her younger sister Tsareva (from tsar, ‘the kingly one’ – because one had standards!). It was an unsettled time. It was always an unsettled time, but this particular time was newly into the First World War. Every day, explosions thundered in the hills above the lake.

  For these conservative girls who had been embedded in the bosom of family, to find themselves in the big smoke with just distant relatives to fall back on must have been a shock. Ljubitsa, smart and with a solid education, found work as a clerk, and her sister enrolled in a high school – education was high priority in the Zarichinov family, even for girls. In Sofia, Ljubitsa started going out with an officer. There was a ring, later returned or perhaps thrown in the lake. For, even from across the border, the Zarichinov family were keeping an eye on their girls. Soon, Ljubitsa’s future was decided. She was to marry a fellow Ohridian from a suitable family, who just happened to be living in Sofia too.

  Ljubitsa and Kosta married in 1920 and their first two children were born in Sofia. Mitko inherited his mother’s cautious pridefulness and Anastassia inherited her father’s combustible temper. Sofia of the 1920s was a bustling, cosmopolitan, on-the-make city, halfway between the languid Orient and the industrious West, teeming with crooks and poseurs, clandestine Communists and mutually murderous agents of the hydra-like Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (VMRO) – the offspring of the Struggle for Macedonia – tobacco barons and tubercular ladies of leisure, foreign consuls, and traumatised exiles from the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey.

  And everyone needed a good suit – which is how Kosta found himself running a bespoke-tailoring business. Ljubitsa helped. He had twenty young apprentices, the most senior known in the trade guilds as kalfa, master-apprentice. Thirty years later when my mother was a girl, when Sofia had been levelled by Soviet-inspired architects and the old town with its Oriental bazaars bulldozed to make room for a later version of the twentieth century, her mother took her to a lane where a tailor called Asparukh still had his workshop. He was Kosta’s head kalfa, who had held his baby daughter Anastassia in his arms.

  The family lived very well for a few years, but Ohrid was calling. Ljubitsa’s sister Tsareva also married an Ohrid man in Sofia called Dimitraki (or Taki) who, after serving in the First World War on the
Bulgarian side and losing the use of one hand, went silent – post-traumatic shock. Unlike her sister, Tsareva opted to remain in Sofia. She enjoyed being free to walk down the same street twice. But Ljubitsa missed Ohrid.

  Back in Ohrid, Kosta and Ljubitsa found themselves in the midst of ‘Serbia: 2’. Anastassia and her brothers went to the Serbian school, the only school now, and soon spoke Serbian. This was an era of political and cultural repression. The authorities closed down all but five high schools in southern Macedonia – for education breeds independent thought. Two generations of Macedonians were deprived of higher education. The Secret Police were at every corner and the once rich lake district became the poorest corner of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia ended in violence – as it had begun.

  In Footnotes on My Town a local writer, Nikola Janev, wrote: ‘between 1914 and 1941 Ohrid was dying, physically and spiritually. Every day an old house collapsed and ivy invaded the ruins. The little intelligentsia we had was mowed down: the vast part remained in Bulgaria, a smaller number were dispersed within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the remaining few somehow stayed close to home.’

  Kosta was constitutionally incapable of toeing the line. Some people are like that: they would rather call you a shitface and be shot than goose-step. My grandmother Anastassia was like that, she got it from him. Kosta’s brothers had already cut their losses and emigrated to Romania. In countless local histories of that time, I found the sentence: He escaped across the lake, often followed by and was never heard from again.

  ‘Trpejca,’ Ivanka said, rising from the hard bench. I too wrenched myself from the dreamy lull of engine, water and sunshine.

  Trpejca, pronounced Ter-pey-tsa, sat on a piece of rocky coast jutting into the water. The houses were embedded in the hill like semi-precious stones.

  ‘Welcome to Saint-Tropez,’ said a short man with badly burnt fair skin we’d accosted at the beach for a quick coffee at his small restaurant, St Tropez. He was an uncle of Nate’s, cousin Tino’s wife. Trpejca-Tropez with its pristine sand and nearby cave churches had welcomed holidaymakers for decades in the era of Yugoslavia, but that was followed by a slump during the Yugoslav Wars and Macedonia’s own civil war.