To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  I hear a sorrowful voice –

  Macedonia is weeping.

  Be damned, oh Europe,

  Babylonian whore.

  You want us to be slaves.

  Erol spoke in the voice of Kosta.

  ‘Here in the Balkans,’ he went on, ‘we have another problem: accelerated change. In just twenty years, we’ve been expected to catch up with what the West has achieved in three hundred years.’

  In just twenty years, the little republic had experienced post-Communist shock, mass emigration, autocracy and civil near-collapse. It was about to experience an emotionally fraught name change too, dictated by ‘Europe’ in the guise of Greece.

  ‘It’s a lot,’ I agreed.

  ‘And we’re only human,’ he said, and smiled for the first time that day.

  Erol was trying to carry the tekke, his father, his dead brother, and the lake’s Sufi legacy. It was a heavy load.

  The Turkish community of Ohrid was dramatically reduced. Waves of emigration had shrunk their ranks: during the discreet purge of Yugoslavia’s Muslims between 1954 and 1967, seventy per cent of the town’s Turks emigrated to Turkey, and when I had coffee with the son of the town’s oldest Turkish family – the Ohrizade family, from the Persian for ‘son’, zade, and so ‘sons of Ohrid’, who had arrived with the Seljuk Turk colonists in the late fourteenth century – he told me that all his relatives in Turkey mourned for Ohrid for the rest of their lives. ‘Ohrid, Ohrid, gentle, wise …’ Did I know that song? His family were traders. He sold lighting, his grandfather had manufactured and sold cartwheels, then they had a logging business because Macedonia is rich in forests, he said, then tea, and finally – sulphur, mined at Kosel nearby and exported to Istanbul. And of course, they’d had extensive orchards, though no longer.

  Traditionally, much of Ohrid’s wealth lay in its fertile land. Evliya Çelebi wrote of the the lavish orchards, the twenty-six fruit compotes he sampled. Wealthier Muslim families had had orchard estates just outside Ohrid in ‘beys’ villages’. One such estate village survived: Orman. My curiosity was further piqued by a town chronicler who wrote in the early twentieth century: ‘Many an aga’s garden, vineyard, entire estates, went to mistresses, taverna chanteuses and other amours. This is how the last of aga fortunes went out, like candles burnt to a stub in the heat of the agrarian reforms and la dolce vita, leaving nothing for their descendants.’

  A walking distance from Ohrid, Orman was a giant orchard fed by a river that emptied into the lake. A fully preserved Roman bridge crossed the river. Boris, or Borche, was waiting for me by his grandfather’s house. He was a friend of a friend, an excitable man of Erol’s age who had dedicated his life to organic fruit cultivation.

  ‘Orman has a microclimate,’ he said, ‘because of the arc of the rising sun.’

  We sat in the garden with his old Auntie Rouska, and ate cherries from a bowl, so plump and sweet they nearly brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘The cherries of Orman have been voted the best in Europe!’ Borche said, and it was a fact – the cherries had a certified geographic location and had won prizes.

  ‘Life was better during Yugoslavia,’ said Auntie Rouska.

  ‘Auntie, please,’ said Borche, and to me: ‘She’s deaf.’

  ‘And better yet in the agas’ time,’ Auntie Rouska went on.

  ‘My great-grandfather and my grandfather were employed at an estate here,’ Borche said, trying to steer the conversation. ‘They grew wheat, rye, potatoes, and produced dairy, which they also sold in the gated town.’

  Borche had left his life in the city to run his own organic orchard and farm, with a cousin. It was a family business, of course; everything was kept in the family and now he wanted his son to get involved.

  ‘I want to prove that it’s possible to produce quality fruit with minimal treatment,’ he said. ‘Because that’s the future.’

  ‘The agas were fine people. Better than us,’ said Auntie Rouska. ‘Generous. Each house had three bulls. Usually gifts from the agas.’

  ‘Auntie, please,’ Borche said.

  ‘This land we’re on,’ Rouska went on, ‘was a gift from one aga. A woman in our family was his lover.’

  Borche tried to explain, but choked on a cherry.

  ‘The tower over there’ – the aunt pointed at a turreted house lost in greenery – ‘is part of an old estate. The aga’s daughter owns it. She’s married to a Macedonian, lovely couple. They come in summer.’

  ‘Yes, the agas came in summer with their families,’ Borche said. ‘But most of the time it was just the estate gardeners and farmers here.’

  ‘We worked hard,’ said Auntie Rouska, ‘beating butter in cauldrons, cutting the rye with scythes. But it was a balanced, seasonal life. The agas took fifty per cent and left us the rest. Sometimes more.’

  ‘During the war,’ Borche said, ‘some men were working in the fields. The Germans thought they were partisans, rounded them up and lined them up for execution, fifteen of them. In the field over there.’

  Borche’s grandfather had just returned from a German prisoner-of-war camp where he’d been interned as a resistance fighter. Before that, he’d served with the Bulgarian army. In the process, he’d learned German. ‘And it was thanks to his German that these men’s lives were saved. He explained this was an aga’s estate and not a partisans’ hideout. The Germans let them go.’

  After the war, brutal nationalisation began. People watched their fields, orchards and vineyards become cooperatives. Many emigrated to Turkey.

  ‘You didn’t know who you were working for,’ said Auntie Rouska. ‘Or why.’

  ‘Come.’ Borche got up restlessly. ‘I’ll show you the orchards.’

  ‘Come see a sight, a rabbit in a turban, a wolf in a dress,’ Auntie Rouska recited by way of farewell.

  It was an old song from Orman but she had forgotten the tune.

  The orchards were heavy with fruit – plump cherries that could send you into a sensual frenzy, Evliya Çelebi style; and there were also figs, hazelnuts of the Nutella sort – but no apples.

  ‘Oh, the apples.’ Borche stopped in his tracks. ‘Oversupply killed them. The prices plummeted, we kept making losses. I’m a third-generation apple grower. It broke my heart to uproot the old apple trees.’ Among the old apple trees had been one that gave a thousand kilos of fruit per season.

  ‘But in their place, we planted lovely cherry trees.’ Borche filled a bag with cherries for me. He was not one to dwell on the past – he was too excited about next season.

  I didn’t want to leave this orchard where everything tasted so good. The original landlords were gone but the workers had stayed and bought them out: from feudalism to capitalism, via Socialism.

  Back in the gated town, I sat under the weeping willows of Sarayishte beach to watch the orange sunset, and opened the envelope Slavche had given me. A black-and-white photo was inside, of her younger son in shorts. His teacher Tatjana, my aunt, is behind him, hands on his shoulders, their faces radiant with the lake’s light behind them. They stand in the ruins of the Lower Saray, once a gorgeous mansion built by forced labour for Djeladin Bey, and now a stage for summer concerts.

  During the Yugoslav Wars, when the virus of ethno-religious nationalism spread here, and when even in tolerant Ohrid minds and windows were closed, as she put it, Slavche was framed and tried for ‘Albanian separatism’. I wondered if that ordeal had contributed to her husband’s early death and her son’s fatal accident. She was acquitted, but the grotesque trial unfolded over many months, during which she was jailed. It was a dreadful time, she said, but they allowed books inside. In her cell, she read Churchill’s autobiography and that kept the black dog away, she said, an attitude which contrasted with her son’s bitter disillusion with ‘Europe’. After all, it was Churchill who memorably said that the Balkans produce more history than they can consume, seemingly unaware of his own country’s contribution to this excess. One way or another, Slavche had preserved her
sanity, grace, and faith in life. She had, in the wider sense, remained on the Road. She was not a fakir, but her spiritual resilience was almost a miracle in itself.

  Sandals on, I waded into the transparent water. The land is riven with the anguish and contradictions of linear roads, but the lake contains multitudes. It cannot be imprisoned by chronology. The lake is where all roads end. The boats seemed to float on air. I plunged my arms into the lake, forever fresh and green without spring without autumn.

  The valley where we lived lay under two old mountains. Great powerful waters flowed from both. In spring, when the weather opened up, the earth and the sky shone with the light of those waters. In the gardens, in the furrows, the water was everywhere.

  And across the valley was the lake, itself like a sun.

  Zhivko Chingo, 1961

  THE POETRY AND THE HUNGER

  Two thousand feet above the lake, within earshot of a waterfall, is the Monastery of St Petka. It is built into a cliff and looks down on a lush precipice – figs, cherries, plums, almonds, a jungle of sweetness all the way to the water’s edge.

  The steepest section of the Via Egnatia climbed through here on its way east, and even the name of the village below the monastery is traced to the days of the trade route, when travellers stopped to taste the famous food of an innkeeper, one Vele. Vele would feed, or goshtava, the guests, or gosti, and the name stuck: Velgoshti. But to me, this is the Village of Cherries. I have never seen so many cherry trees.

  The Village of Cherries is symbolic of the lake’s fortunes through the twentieth century. It had the first komitas in the lake district and even some local Turks joined them. Which didn’t stop the komitas from cutting the throats of two village women for having relationships with Turks. The aftermath of the Ilinden Uprising in 1903 brought fresh violence in the form of mercenaries, not all of whom were Muslims. The end of the Balkan Wars in 1913 awarded the lake to Serbia, at which point seventy-five men were lined up in the square and every fifth was shot. Among them was a returning émigré; he’d just sailed back from America, to be shot on his first morning home.

  The monastery was above it all, literally. It radiated peace, like the face of Petka carved in the stone. Petka was ubiquitous, like Sari Saltik. I’d seen so many churches dedicated to her across the Balkans that I had to look her up.

  Petkana-Paraskeva of the Balkans was born in the second half of the tenth century on the Marmara Sea – on a Friday (petak in Slavic, paraskevi in Greek). After witnessing atrocity as a child, Petkana went blind. By the time she regained her sight, she had spent so long with her gaze turned inwards that she was set on a path of contemplation. Having spent five years of silence in a monastery, she set off on foot from Constantinople with a group of pilgrims, but following a vision she split off from the group and walked across the Jordanian desert alone. She lived as a cave hermit for forty years. A Berber woman befriended her and brought her food and news of the world. The news was more of the same: children were born, grew up, and fought terrible wars. Returning to her native town Epivates to die, Petkana was buried as a stranger – outside the city walls – but in the centuries to come, her remains became much travelled, as various Balkan rulers claimed them even though she had never set foot on their side of the Bosphorus. By being invoked across the entire peninsula, she could be said to have achieved the peace she aspired for – by imaginatively uniting a collection of peoples divided by the same brutish politics she turned her back on, in search of the bigger picture.

  What I like about her is that she is not a distressful martyr. She lived a silent life and died a natural death. The arc of her story is typical of the canon of Oriental ascetics.

  My twin aunts and I had been driven up to Petka’s monastery by the husband of one of them, a retired bon-vivant who went along with the twins’ whims. He had a routine of his own: at dusk, he cycled from the Turkish neighbourhood where they lived to the lake front where he threw bread to the swans.

  ‘Me, I’m a messenger.’ He winked at me. ‘I run errands.’

  ‘You’d be bored without us,’ the twins said.

  ‘What would you do without us?’ the twins said.

  ‘Your life would have no meaning,’ said the twins affectionately. And he agreed.

  The twins were a duet. Identical in face and inseparable in deed, my aunts agreed on everything and formed a unified front, though they had an ongoing discussion about which one was the dominant personality. I liked being with the three of them, there was always fun to be had and little of the heaviness I associated with this feminine line. The only drama was the weather, discussions of what to wear in case the wind changed and caused ‘draughts’ from which you could ‘catch your death’, and whether to take snacks on our expeditions or wait until lunchtime.

  Each week, the four of us drove up to a monastery above the lake, for coffee. Each of these monasteries was overlooked in space and preceded in time by anchorite caves dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, and cave churches elaborately painted in the thirteenth and fourteenth. This week, it was St Petka.

  From the monastery courtyard, the lake looked like a crater filled with blue light. A stone bore a humble plaque dedicated to the locally born writer Zhivko Chingo, and quoted a line from The Great Water, his coming-of-age novel set in a postwar orphanage on the lake, though the lake is never seen by the imprisoned children, only sensed beyond the walls.

  ‘The only thing which is truly yours is that which you give away,’ the plaque said.

  My aunts were not poetic types. They had inherited some sturdier, down-to-earth streak in the family. Every other week, with quiet loyalty, they’d visit the town cemetery to refresh the flowers and candles at the graves of their mother, their sister Tatjana and grandmother Ljubitsa. The men’s graves too – their grandfather Kosta, their uncle, and their estranged father.

  The women’s graves were apart from the men’s. ‘That’s because when Kosta died, Ljubitsa said to us: For God’s sake don’t bury me next to him. I’ve had enough of him in this life,’ said Snezhana.

  ‘He was possessive,’ said Biljana. ‘In the early days, he’d check her shoes to see if she’d been out without his permission.’

  ‘But in later years, he lightened up. He liked to provoke,’ said Snezhana. ‘He was a daredevil.’

  ‘But with Ljubitsa it fell on deaf ears. She was dead serious,’ Biljana said. ‘Everything was taken literally. Two and two …’

  ‘Was four,’ Snezhana said.

  ‘She cleaned a great deal,’ Biljana said.

  ‘Cleanliness, morality, education …’ Snezhana said.

  ‘And early marriage,’ Biljana said. ‘To avoid disrepute. Those things were set in stone.’

  ‘Tatjana had a romance with a lovely man,’ Snezhana said. ‘But …’

  ‘Grandma put pressure on her,’ Biljana said. ‘Always on her case.’

  ‘She said, You are to marry and start a family by twenty-three,’ Snezhana said.

  ‘And she did,’ Biljana said. ‘She married at twenty-three.’

  ‘She married the wrong guy,’ Snezhana said.

  ‘He was not right for her,’ Biljana said.

  ‘Tatjana sang in a choir and had a degree in English Literature. She named the boys after English writers. She was broad-minded.’

  ‘She had friends all over the world. We stayed in touch with some of them.’

  ‘But with time, we lost touch.’

  Ljubitsa had married Kosta at twenty-three.

  ‘She didn’t want him,’ Snezhana said.

  ‘He asked for her hand three times,’ Biljana said.

  ‘It was only under pressure that she said yes,’ Snezhana said.

  My grandmother had married at twenty-three. My mother? Married at twenty-three.

  The twins had married in their mid-twenties, just as their sister was dying. They had grown up in an all-female household, with their mother and grandmother, both immaculate home-makers. Ljubitsa kept her granddau
ghters on a short leash. To avoid further disrepute.

  ‘What about those four years after Kosta’s escape?’ I asked.

  The twins shrugged. ‘She didn’t talk about that,’ Biljana said.

  ‘She prayed to Petka a lot,’ Snezhana said. ‘She came up here to pray.’

  ‘Then one day, she smashed the icon of Petka against the wall. And took a job at the printing press,’ Biljana said.

  ‘She loved the printed word,’ Snezhana said. ‘She read the papers religiously. And always had a book.’

  ‘Grandad Kosta too,’ Biljana said.

  ‘They read the papers together and talked politics.’

  In Macedonia, you never ran out of political talk.

  That night in 1929 when Kosta vanished across the lake, Ljubitsa became an abandoned wife with three children to feed. And where were her well-bred family in her hour of need? Once a woman was married, she was no longer the responsibility of her family but of her husband. Too bad if the husband was gone. But one of her brothers did show her kindness by buying her a sewing machine. So at night, she sewed and embroidered. She was also reduced to renting out part of the creaky old house. I picture that proud daughter of the gated town walking down the charshia, but never twice in one day. Her social standing had collapsed but she did keep her children fed and educated.

  Four years later, when they joined Kosta in Sofia, he was suffering from severe burnout. It was the Great Depression, there was no work.

  Every evening, the reunited family would sit around the table in their rented rooms in the neighbourhood of Banishora, between two streets called Ohrid and Struga. This was where the banished lived – Macedonians like them, exiled from the Yugoslavia of King Alexander; and refugees from Aegean Macedonia in northern Greece, where the government of General Metaxas was carrying out a brutal campaign of hellenisation. Unsavoury VMRO agents with bulges in their leather coats circulated around these struggling households, collecting ‘voluntary’ donations for the Organisation.

  In these reduced circumstances, it was more vital than ever to keep up standards. The family would sit around the table, always perfectly laid by Ljubitsa with dinner plates, cutlery and napkins, but there was nothing on those plates. They were broke, and too proud to ask relatives for help. Why the fuss with the plates, then? Because Ljubitsa was keen to make sure the landlady next door heard the clatter of plates at dinner time. She was assumed to be eavesdropping, Ohridian fashion, and Ljubitsa didn’t want her to think them poor.