The lake was serene, conscious, at one with the rocky mountain that rose above the red-tiled roofs of Tushemisht village and the apartment blocks of Pogradec. Lake and mountain were one. The world, when left alone, was one. I was filled with the exhilaration that accompanied arrival at the Lake every time – an exhilaration of wholeness.
Eduard was at his post with the kilims draped over his van, as if he hadn’t moved since June. His ravaged demeanour and rustic rugs contrasted with the new hotels built, or partially built, in haste and with laundered money. His wife was here too, a woman with fine Mediterranean features, who kissed me like an old friend, though we’d never met before.
I had returned to the lake in a less personal frame of mind, to learn about the Albanian side and explore mysterious Prespa. In Pogradec, my home for the week was a room in a block of flats on the waterfront. My room had woollen blankets, a high ceiling and a glassed-in bathroom on the balcony, which looked out into the building’s echoey courtyard. There was a summer stove on the balcony, exactly like the one from my childhood for roasting peppers in September that everybody had on their cramped balconies, which doubled as additional rooms. The neighbouring balcony belonged to my hosts: a retired professional couple whose American-educated sons were torn between emigrating and staying; one was abroad, the other was here. To supplement their income, they rented out this room to visitors. In the morning, the mother brought me hot doughnuts and surprised me by telling me, in broken Bulgarian, that her father had studied medicine in Sofia between the wars, but returned to Albania when the two countries severed relations in the late 1940s.
In the early morning when the lake was white and the first boats were going out for the day, I sat on the balcony with my coffee. The noises of the block’s inhabitants echoed in the courtyard as if inside a well – coughing, doors opening and closing, even the clank of my spoon against the mug was magnified.
On the beach below, two homeless pals – a black dog and a white dog – came to run along the waterline, full of the new day. In the morning haze, up in the hills, the abandoned observation tower of the border checkpoint was the only manmade feature on the empty flanks of Mali i Thate, Dry Mountain. It was the same mountain I had climbed on the other side with Angelo – Galicica – but from this side it looked impossible to scale.
Men on Chinese bikes from the 1970s, some with transistor radios attached and playing Italian, Greek, Macedonian or Albanian music, pedalled up and down the alley on early errands. Rubbish bins were being rummaged by the destitute, while the first gleaming Mercedes of the day, driven by gormless-looking young men, began their ritual glide up and down the promenade.
The centre of the town, marked by the empty monolithic architecture of totalitarianism, had been spruced up in recent years, and when you walked down the pedestrian square to the lake, beneath your feet were memorial plaques to some of the great artists, scientists and progressive politicians of the Balkans and other European nations. But everywhere in the cafes, jobless men of all ages sat with empty hands, staring into space. Along the promenade passed joggers in trainers, dog walkers, but most arresting were the elderly couples, arm in arm, who were taking the air before the heat of the day – the men in full suits and ties, the women in dark stockings. After decades of murderous Communism, rapacious Capitalism, and the collapse of the money ‘pyramids’ in 1997 that pauperised the already impoverished and exploded into violent anarchy – after all that, here was a picture of gentility out of time.
One of these was Mr Bimbli, a retired ichthyologist. I met him later that day at the fish restaurant he ran next to my building. Mr Bimbli straightened his tie (with a tie pin) and told me at length about the fish of the lake.
He had an old-worldly distinction about him; in his brown suit and old but polished shoes, and his reserved politeness, I couldn’t help feeling that he had walked out of a Bertolucci film. The fish of Lake Ohrid were the love of his life. He looked upset when I asked about endangered species, and instead of speaking produced a booklet he had written about each species in the lake, underlining for me each endangered fish, with its Latin name, some endemic to the lake: the Ohrid nase, from the half-extinct family of Cyprinid; the Ohrid koran (trout), or Salmothynus ohridanus. During Communism there had been strict laws, he said – and he had been chief inspector of fisheries. But from the 1990s onwards, in the ‘transition’, there had been overfishing in the lake.
‘At one point,’ he said, ‘the fish became so depleted, the birds went over to the Macedonian side. But they recovered, eventually.’
He quit his job fifteen years ago, unable to stomach the corruption. Now he ran the restaurant, where I ate a fragrant fish soup with orange rind, and where he sat at a white-napkined table morning and evening, writing something in a big ledger.
At dusk, the promenade darkened with throngs of people – friends, couples, families, sellers of corn on the cob and roasted peanuts – the whole town came out in the evening to walk under the chestnut and walnut trees, the olives and the willows, as it must have done since its beginnings, as far back in time as Ohrid itself.
‘How we longed to go to Ohrid!’ Lazar said. ‘We longed to see the other side.’
Lazar and Liridon had volunteered to show me around, though we’d never met before. They met me at the giant statue of Lasgush Poradeci in the lakeside park, past the Hotel Enkelana named after an Illyrian tribe and built in Communist-brutalist style, past the plastic water slide that disrupted the pristine view of infinity, past a plaque commemorating ten civilians of Pogradec executed by the Germans for hiding partisans, past the men who played chess under the chestnut trees.
Lazar and Liridon were a study in opposites. The younger Liridon was polite and reserved. Lazar was effusive, excitable, and stopped every few minutes to photograph swans in the lake, the shimmer of the shallows, the drifting clouds. His face was open and untainted, a young person’s face, but his hair was white. He was a high-school teacher and spoke English with native-speaker fluency, though he had never lived outside Albania or visited an English-speaking country – an East European phenomenon I recognised at once. We were the same age: the last generation to come of age behind the Iron Curtain.
Liridon, whose name meant Freedom, was born in the year Hoxha died – 1985 – and after graduating in history at Tirana University, he’d returned to his hometown.
‘In those days, we were like that poem by Lasgush Poradeci, where the River Drim longs for the sea,’ Lazar said. ‘All we could do was watch the lights of Ohrid.’
‘And I’d look at the lights of Pogradec, from Ohrid,’ I said.
Lazar wanted me to love his town, but he also wanted me to see the truth.
‘And the truth is, old Pogradec is being destroyed. It began under Hoxha and never stopped.’
It was hard to miss: along the water, ruins gaped open with their concrete viscera, broken glass and graffiti.
‘New tourism,’ Lazar said.
‘New tourism’ meant Communist-era buildings, and aesthetics to go with the ‘new Albania’ of Hoxha; ‘old tourism’ meant pre-Communist. And the wreckage of both new and old was everywhere, though I couldn’t always tell which ruin was from which era. Up in the hills the remains of fortesas, large bunker fortifications, and abandoned iron and nickel mines stood like sombre sentinels keeping watch over the town. Otherwise the hills were bare. Once forested, they were stripped of trees in the 1970s for maximum exposure and visibility, after one family’s sensational escape by boat. The family had hidden in the forest first.
‘And here was the old pontoon bridge,’ Lazar said. I waded into the warm water in my sandals. In archival photographs, people stand on the pontoon in fine European clothes, their faces hopeful. Albanians had only three decades of relative freedom, between the Ottoman colonists’ departure and the arrival of Communist totalitarianism. The submerged wooden stumps showed the contours of the old bridge.
‘Submerged, like the past,’ Lazar said. ‘You have to know
what was here to appreciate what’s gone.’
But even if you came to Pogradec in ignorance, you immediately felt it: this was a traumatised topography. An assault had taken place here, a savage plundering.
‘To understand a nation, you must look at its history,’ Liridon said. It was the first time Liridon had spoken. I could see from his face that he too found the wounds difficult to live with. He wore glasses and spoke in a measured, sane way.
Liridon’s people were from the mountains above the lake and had settled in the town only a generation ago; his parents were agronomists and non-practising Muslims. Lazar, on his father’s side, was from an old lake family; they had come down from the obliterated fortress on the hill, inhabited by an Illyrian tribe from the sixth century BC onwards. The language spoken was Illyrian, which may well be the root of the Albanian language. The people of the fortress drew lake water through uphill pipes. It was only in the early Middle Ages that they started settling on the shores. Lazar’s ancestors were Christians. Though Lazar had grown up in an atheist society (mind you, he said, my mother secretly dyed eggs at Easter, like everybody, and hid the family icons), in the early 1990s when the country opened its borders and Protestant missionaries arrived from Germany and the USA, Lazar became an Evangelical Christian.
‘I was baptised here, in the lake,’ he said. ‘At the age of twenty.’
This was especially meaningful in the light of the total annihilation of Albania’s clergy by the Hoxha regime – they were picked out for the most brutal tortures and executions.
We walked along the waterline.
‘As kids we’d walk here and look for empty Coca Cola cans that had drifted from the Yugoslav side,’ Lazar said. ‘And display them at home, like trophies. We had nothing, but above all we had no information, and we were so hungry for the world!’
We had crossed into the old town, some of which had miraculously survived the bulldozers. Old Pogradec was a network of narrow lanes and two- or three-storeyed houses. You could still see the original low arched doorway, Ottoman style; the high windows, and the courtyards shadowed by immense vines, known throughout the Balkans by the Turkish word asma (with a stress on the last ‘a’). Vines and roses everywhere. Some houses, dilapidated or derelict, were a beautiful blend of Europe and the Orient.
And here was the age-old Balkan method of warding off evil: a string of garlic hanging above the doorways; I saw it elsewhere in Albania too, including the distinguished old town of Korçë. It seemed that no amount of compulsory atheism could stamp out the belief in fate as a tangible force. If anything, the paranoid savagery of Enverizm, as the regime became known, had made people more superstitious. As if its fathomless cruelty only confirmed the existence of an irrational, wrathful force. And conversely – of the possibility of magical cures and narrow escapes.
‘Paganism,’ Lazar shrugged disparagingly.
Liridon smiled; he took the historian’s long view.
Lazar knew everyone in the old town; women sitting outside their doorways kept inviting us in for coffee. The red-roofed house of Lasgush Poradeci was here too, and his poems were featured on plaques in the old town. Unlike some of his fellow writers, poets and journalists, he had not been imprisoned or put to work in the mines. But the regime tormented him in more subtle ways: Sigurimi agents shadowed him every time he left the house, his work fell out of print and he lived out his last decades in quiet desperation. Considered Albania’s greatest twentieth-century poet, he just couldn’t bring himself to abandon metaphysics and write in the correct form instead: Socialist Realism.
‘He was ignored,’ Lazar said. ‘For a writer, that’s a kind of death.’
Poradeci – a pseudonym he took to merge his identity with the town on the Lake – spent his last decades in his garden, tuned in to the Lake’s seasons. His English translator, the late Robert Elsie, said that his verse was essentially pantheistic – which is true of Albanian culture in general. Lazar was a poet too, all his work inspired by the Lake. The family house where he lived with his parents was in the heart of the old town. Next door, the Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary had been rebuilt from its ruined state – just walls and floor, no roof – after the fall of the regime.
‘In my childhood, it was used as a storehouse, then a car mechanic’s,’ Lazar said. ‘They poured concrete on the floor, and over the frescoes too.’
We could see the patch of concrete on the floor where cars had been dropped underground for repair. The priest, a tall, self-contained man in a long black cassock and with a boozer’s nose, welcomed us in the rose-filled courtyard. He had been a horticulturalist until the 1990s, when he’d entered the seminary. Under the arched gallery, he showed us framed photographs of a medieval Bektashi tekke nearby called Shen (Saint) Constantin, destroyed during Hoxha. There was something very moving about seeing these memorialised images of Sufi life in a church, only a generation after both had been targeted for total annihilation by the regime.
A statement of tolerance by the Bishop of Tirana sat next to a citation from the Book of Matthew: ‘You people who suffer under the oppression of unrighteousness and evil …’, translated into English by Lazar.
‘Albania would never make problems for Europe,’ the priest said quietly, ‘because we’ve always had mixed marriages. This is why fundamentalism can’t take root here.’ Both his children were married to Muslims, they’d had a church wedding, their children were baptised here – and they also celebrated Bayram and other Muslim festivals.
‘This is normal here,’ he said. ‘Bektashis come to light a candle. As ever.’
Albania had been severely tyrannised from within and from without, but its most enduring quality remained tolerance, a live-and-let-live attitude that once characterised the entire Balkans. This seemed to me almost miraculous – and it has gone largely unacknowledged by outside observers.
Lazar’s father had been the first person to ring the church bell in 1991, after the fall of the regime – a sound the town hadn’t heard for decades – he was an atheist, but it was a question of freedom. There were two mosques in town, two Orthodox churches, three Protestant churches and one Catholic – remarkable for a place where any form of worship except Enverizm had been banned under pain of death. Though these days, Lazar was a private believer. He had grown sick and tired of dogma, he said, and in Christianity there are many doctrines, just like in Communism.
‘I’m a poet,’ he said. ‘I need to be free. These days I’m simply a child of God.’
Lazar’s grandparents had built this house, thanks to the fact that his grandfather had been a partisan. Though their old family property in town had been taken by the state, and not returned to this day.
‘We’re waiting for the building to fall down. You see, here there’s no restitution like in other post-Communist countries. You can only repossess your property from the state when it falls into ruin. So, by the time it’s yours again, it’s only the land you get. Yes, it’s crazy. Welcome.’
His parents were expecting us under the thick vine of the courtyard, where a long table and kilim-lined seats were set up next to the summer kitchen. In the garden grew roses and vegetables and I felt a lump in my throat – because this reminded me of the house of my great-uncle and auntie in the fertile pre-Danubian north of Bulgaria, a vanished world that had not vanished after all because it lived on here, in a land that until now had seemed ‘other’, a mirage of twinkling lights.
Lazar’s mother had made crème-caramel, and we ate it with grapes and Turkish coffee. She was from the ancient city of Gjirokastër in the south; her father had been educated in a military academy in the Soviet Union, and posted to the northern border of Albania with his wife. Life in the north was harsh in the extreme. There were frequent clashes on the border with Montenegro: with diversanti, or saboteurs, the regime’s term for those trying to cross the border into Yugoslavia. Killings of diversanti and soldiers were a daily event on the border in the late 1940s. But locals were protective of the
family. Don’t worry, local women said to them, while you’re in our besa, we’re answerable for you with our lives. Eventually, the family were allowed to settle here in balmy Pogradec, another border town but on a lake that was incomparably gentler. Grapes grew here, and the besa lost its edge.
We climbed onto the flat roof, which was like the floor of a yet unbuilt storey – and entered a forest of aromatic blue and white grapes. The same gnarled tree had been producing the small juicy sort known here as bolgarka, ‘the Bulgarian’, for fifty years.
‘I pick them myself,’ Lazar said. ‘This year I expect about a hundred kilos.’
Each household made its own wine. Wine was such an integral part of domestic life that, in the old days, children were given bread soaked in wine and sugar.
‘And opium drops,’ Lazar said. ‘To sleep better.’
Down in the garden, he kicked a concealed trapdoor under a vegetable bed. ‘There’s a bunker under that. Actually, there’s a whole system of tunnels leading into the bunkers of the neighbours’ house.’ They had found the tunnels when planting the garden.
The clannish nature of traditional life in Albania had prompted the building of houses linked by small lanes and underground channels, and the Hoxha regime had capitalised on this culture of intrusion by harnessing it into a machinery for systemic surveillance that corroded communities from within, like gangrene. Every street had had its informant. Even among the children.
As a child, Lazar had successfully applied to the prestigious English Language College in Korçë, but his place had been snatched at the last moment by the son of a Party functionary. He resigned himself to learning English on his own. He was thirteen when he met two Greek girls at the drinking fountains of the old town. They were visiting relatives.
‘I said: Hello. What is your name? The prettier girl said Maria, and gave me some chewing gum. I was so proud of myself!’
To the Lake Page 21