A forest of juniper and oak lined the steep road, ringing with orchestral birdsong. I passed only one other car, loaded with bags of bruised apples – fodder for animals. The mountain road was poorly maintained and rock debris had not been cleared by the rangers of the Galicica National Park on the Ohrid side, who collected a fee from drivers entering the Park while they themselves sat smoking all day in their kiosk. On the Prespa side of the mountains, men with saddled horses were stacking logs along the road. Logging was one of very few jobs left for Prespans. When I came down to lake level, I drove over fallen apples and their fragrance filled the air. The whole of upper Prespa was lined with apple orchards.
Prespa had had three peaks of activity in its human history. At the turn of the first millennium AD, the Romans arrived and built towns, military stations and holiday villas on the fertile north-east shore of the lake. In the late tenth century, Prespa became the seat of the Bulgarian Empire of Tsar Samuil, terminated by a Byzantine rival. And in the late twentieth century, Prespa became a destination for Yugo-holidays.
Bird flocks crossed the sky in patterns that mirrored the swirls on the lake’s surface. The silence was so complete, I could hear the flap of wings above. I was discovering Prespa in one of its quiet centuries. There were no towns on Prespa, only villages. The banks were green with poplars and elms, juniper, pine and oak. Dotted in the rampant growth were ruins from the latest expired civilisation: the disused camping sites, workers’ sanatoriums, Pioneers’ hotels, and broken playgrounds of state-organised recreation.
Stenje was the first lake village you reached via this road and the last before the nearby Albanian border checkpoint, and this is where I found the only open hotel in the vicinity. Stenje was backed by the flanks of Galicica and bookended by a cliff. Typically, its name was meaningful in several languages: in Bulgarian and Macedonian stena is ‘wall’, in Greek sten is ‘narrow’, and in Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian stena or stjena means ‘rock’.
The small hotel by the beach didn’t have a name. The restaurant on the terrace played 1980s Yugo-pop incessantly. A wide beach led to the reedbeds. Parties of pelicans, cormorants, ducks and swallows bobbed on the surface, morning and evening. Seagulls and dogs rummaged in over-full rubbish bins.
‘You know there’s something wrong with a country when rubbish doesn’t get collected,’ said Tsape archly. He was the waiter in white shirt and black trousers, with a sleep-deprived face, and eyes that were watering with fatigue as if involuntarily weeping. Tsape wasn’t his real name.
‘In 1992 when the border opened and people started coming across looking for work, some guys called me Tsape. Tsape is goat in Albanian. The name stuck.’
Tsape drove a Zastava from the 1980s – the symbolic car of Yugoslavia. The hotel was a time trap. Framed on the walls were faded promotional tourist posters – a couple with 1980s hair and beige clothes smiling in a vale of snow; a 1970s man on water skis. The owner was surprised when I took a room for a week, and so was I.
His was the only hotel in Prespa that stayed open all year.
‘So we have somewhere to meet and watch TV,’ he said. ‘The winters are long here. Just snowdrifts and howling wind.’
The owner was also the head waiter, and his wife did the cleaning when she wasn’t working at the small textile factory nearby. Tsape too did night shifts at the factory, as night watchman. It was the only surviving enterprise.
‘My job is to stay awake from midnight till dawn,’ he said.
He made me feel like a regular customer, not a stranger. He’d joined me at an outside table in a rare quiet moment. Despite it being end of season, he was run off his feet. But why night watchman? Surely there wasn’t much crime here – there were hardly any people left.
‘After Hotel Europa burnt down, nobody feels safe,’ he said.
Hotel Europa was the large burnt-out shell a few miles up the shore. Even from a distance it looked like a set from a horror film.
‘Don’t go there alone,’ Tsape said emphatically.
He had been a construction worker in the early 1980s when it was built. Its first name had been Hotel Yugoslavia, and it had been used as a gated complex for privileged families, including staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In winter, the complex would turn into a private hunting lodge for the Communist Party elite. Boar, deer, ducks.
‘And in the 1990s, the new oligarchy moved in,’ Tsape said.
Now nobody hunted, except poachers from the Albanian side who came over and used illegal snares. But Tsape and the rest were forgiving of their neighbours’ petty crimes because the Albanian side of the lake was barren, just like Hoxha’s regime.
‘They’ve been through hell,’ Tsape said.
‘They’re long-suffering people,’ agreed the owner.
Besides, there were bigger crimes on this side, like the burning of Hotel Europa. Some believed the arson to be the work of the owners, but there were other, more outlandish theories involving curses. Prespa was an outlandish kind of place.
Of course, I ignored Tsape’s advice and went to see Hotel Yugoslavia for myself.
It was accessed through a concrete arch of linked hands sculpted in Communist-brutalist style to hold the sphere of the Earth. A driveway overgrown with weeds led to once glamorous terraced grounds that now bristled with snakes. Only a hundred metres away from my car, I felt as if invisible shapes were approaching me from all sides. The impression was so vivid, I very nearly turned back and ran to the car.
The fire had started in the restaurant. The complex was similar to other derelict Communist-era sites I’d visited: though its demise had happened in time of peace – 2004 – it felt like a war ruin. The forest had moved in. Families of rats squeaked in corners. I climbed the carcass of the building with a metallic taste in my mouth, crunching over broken glass, steel and concrete. The lake was a shock of serenity through the building’s gaping wounds. The rooms were gutted. Rubbish and graffiti everywhere: WHO ARE YOU-GOSLAVIA?
In one room, a dirty blanket in a corner looked momentarily like a covered body. When a crunching noise came from above, as if someone was walking over broken glass one floor up – but there were no other parked cars – my nerves gave out and I rushed down the broken stairs, got into the car and sped back out of the driveway and through the concrete hands holding the crumbling Earth.
A few hundred metres from the ruined complex, in a sparse pine forest, was a sanatorium for respiratory diseases whose buildings looked derelict with their broken windows and rust – until I was startled by people shuffling about in flannel gowns and rubber slippers among the pine trees and broken benches.
But what really spooked me was that they didn’t appear to see me. As if I weren’t fully here. As if I were a ghostly visitor from another time.
The sanatorium, Tsape told me later, hadn’t stopped accepting patients since it opened. ‘Because illness doesn’t stop,’ he said, and coughed through his cigarette smoke, laughing – a future patient of the sanatorium. In a stroke of metonymic felicity, the name of the sanatorium and of the whole area was Oteshevo, possibly meaning Consolation. It was in a quiet new hotel in Oteshevo, near the sanatorium, that the Greek and Macedonian prime ministers would come for lunch after signing the Prespa Agreement the following summer. To console themselves, knowing the road ahead would be bumpy.
Tsape leaned over the table and lowered his voice, though there was just me, him and the amiable hook-nosed old cook sitting in the flicker of the outside lights, while a gust of cold wind rose from the lake and blew sand our way.
‘When we worked on the buildings for the Ministry and demolished the old ones …’
The old buildings had housed political prisoners, who were of ‘bourgeois’ origins, or Bulgarian-identifying, or other types of ‘enemy of the Yugoslav people’. In 1948, they had been taken to Golem Grad island to hack rocks from the cliffs, with which they made the first buildings meant for recreation.
‘And the road by which you came from Ohrid,
’ said the cook, ‘they built that road too.’
‘One day during the demolition’ – Tsape cleared his throat – ‘we found the remains of a man inside a wall. A skeleton in boots.’
The cook’s face confirmed it.
‘They had cemented him in,’ Tsape said.
Alive?
He raised his eyebrows. His face did have something of the goat about it.
In Balkan lore, walling in someone’s shadow – or living body – is meant to strengthen a building’s foundations, but this episode had the flavour of a political execution. The story of that man remains untold, but what is certain is that Yugoslav apparatchiks had come to holiday with their families where political prisoners’ mouths had been filled with quicklime. Apparatchiks like Tanas Spassé’s father: victims of one cruel regime, beneficiaries of another.
‘Some say that when the construction work was done, the prisoners were taken to Golem Grad island, shot, and pushed into a big hole,’ the old cook said.
But the bodies had never been found.
Throughout the day and later when lake and sky went pink, then charcoal, then disappeared from view, when the wind blew sand into our coffee cups and the phantom of Hotel Europa loomed white in the coastal darkness, locals came and went at the nameless hotel for gossip and a tipple.
There was a fat entrepreneur with shifty eyes who exported tobacco grown in the Pelagonian plains to the east and who was a living relic from centuries of fortunes and misfortunes made from tobacco, the Oriental sort known as ‘aromatic gold’ and once exported to all the corners of the earth. There were the odd German, French or Dutch campers or cyclists who would walk to where the cliffs brought an abrupt end to the beach and the road, open a map, and surrender by staying the night.
There was the cheerful taxi-driver Dervishevski whose surname went back to a story of two brothers murdering a dervish and escaping revenge by coming to the lake. He specialised in driving ill people from remote villages to the regional hospital, an oversized crucifix hanging from his dashboard. He told me of his healing powers, which he’d acquired through a lake stone that had special properties.
‘Feel the energy’ – he placed his hand on my forearm. He was convinced that the lake’s healing energy permeated certain stones. He was rotund yet firm, so that when he ran, his flesh didn’t shake, as if it were full of silicon.
‘It’s the stone’, he said. ‘It reverses your biological age.’
For years, he had been plagued by rage against a ‘businessman’ who had cheated him of his savings. His life’s savings. ‘But when I found the stone,’ he said, ‘the rage began to melt away. Now I’m free. I realised how crazy I’d been. I’d been blessed by the lake all along.’
Next to the hotel stood three houses – the owner, an emigrant to Australia, had built them for his sons, identical so they wouldn’t bicker.
‘But the sons don’t come,’ said Tsape.
‘Life is pretty quiet here. It’s true that the few tourists who come are poor, but we see the lake every day, instead of seeing dollar-signs like Ohridians,’ said a small friendly man who was the textile factory manager. ‘Still, the shortage of women is a problem. Are you married?’
He invited me to his table for a coffee and said: ‘I knew you were one of us before you spoke.’
Because ‘our’ people are easily recognised, he said, by three things: torbeto, chorapeto, muabeto – a sweet folk expression that puts three archaic Turkish words into the diminutive Macedonian form. It meant your wee bag, your wee socks and your wee chat; and by ‘our people’ – ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘We’re all the same people in these parts. It’s just that wicked politicians keep trying to divide us.’
‘There are many mysteries in Prespa,’ he went on. ‘For instance, I saw giant human bones in a tomb on Golem Grad island when they dug them up. The shin bones and jaws were huge. A race of giants.’
I heard this from others too. But the most likely owners of the giant skeletons were island-dwelling monks, the last of whom was spotted on the island in the late 1930s. Unless it was the political prisoners.
One evening, I shared fried fish – belvitsa, a kind of bleak – with a squat, bespectacled customs officer from the nearby checkpoint who was skiving off his night shift. His name was Nezmi and he was from a village on the eastern shore called Nakolec, which in Slavic meant ‘on stilts’ – because remains of Neolithic water dwellings had been revealed over the centuries, whenever the lake receded.
‘Nakolec is the oldest inhabited place on Prespa.’ He pushed the plate of fish my way. ‘The antique graves they excavated are of unknown origin. You see, the Skirtoni were old. We were the first people here. The Macedonians came later.’
Nezmi was an ethnic Albanian. He had waited for the others to leave before speaking to me openly, he said.
‘They found stones with Illyrian script in Nakolec.’ He watched my face for amazement.
But the existence of an Illyrian script is unproven.
‘Many of the place names are Albanian,’ he went on. ‘But they don’t want you to know that.’
It was hard work, sifting fantasy from reality. Nezmi was a native of the lake, his half-century’s experience of it was genuine and his love for it deep. But he was vulnerable to political manipulation like everybody else here, where the poison of ‘antiquisation’ and other metastases of ethno-racial identity propaganda from both the Albanian and the Macedonian sides had invaded people’s minds.
Nezmi had two university degrees. ‘Yet I’m paid as a college leaver. Because I’m ethnic Albanian.’ But everybody’s salary was low in Macedonia, that’s why so many were emigrating. On his salary alone he couldn’t survive; he lived from his family’s apple orchards. It was harvest season soon. Cheap workers would come from Albania to pick the apples, which he sold to Bulgaria.
The night had turned bitterly windy, and wrapped in all the clothes I had brought, I was drinking aromatic yellow Muscat rakia from a water glass to keep warm. Nezmi was delighted by my interest in the lake.
‘It’s a crazy lake,’ he said. ‘Unstable, with a mind of its own.’ Two mountain winds collided over Prespa – a westerly from Galicica and eastern gales from Pelister.
‘It’s just as dangerous below as above water,’ he said. ‘There are at least four vortices where things and bodies disappear.’ In the 1990s, fifteen children drowned by Golem Grad island. They’d been caught in cross-winds. Some of the bodies had never been recovered.
‘My childhood friend drowned too. For three years, his dad walked up and down the beach here, looking for his body. Every morning.’
His friend’s body had been sucked in by a vortex near the island where fishermen say giant carp lurk, two hundred and fifty kilos apiece, he said, and I tried not to look sceptical. But neither would I go swimming there. These holes sucked you in and spat you out in their own time, depending on water level, currents …
‘And who knows what else,’ Nezmi said. ‘Prespa hasn’t been properly studied. It’s too dangerous for divers.’
He sighed.
‘But the water has been retreating. We’ve lost seven metres.’
Prespa’s levels had fluctuated through time, but the recent dramatic drop seemed permanent. The times when the lake was known to freeze completely were times of low water, like now. In the 1960s when Nezmi was born, the level had temporarily risen so that one of the churches in Nakolec had become an island. Nezmi was a Muslim, but in his village as elsewhere on the lake, churches and mosques stood side by side.
‘We’re peaceful,’ he said. ‘It’s the lake. Water has that effect on you.’
But emigration haunted the lake. Nezmi’s dad went to Australia in the 1960s, and Nezmi spent the 1990s in America.
‘The only way to avoid the Yugoslav Wars. I didn’t want to fight.’
When his country was tipped into violence ten years later, he had déjà-vu.
‘It was horrific,’ he whispered, though the o
nly other person under the flickering lights was the owner-waiter clearing tables, who agreed. ‘People became divided overnight. In Bitola, they chalked crosses on Albanian houses and burnt them down. Thank God it didn’t reach the lake, but it came close.’
Nezmi went on to tell me a tale from the checkpoint – not this one, but Chafassan where he’d worked before – involving nine hundred kilos of marijuana he’d found in a Bulgarian truck, and another one involving 1.6 million euros’ worth of undeclared branded sports shoes. He had done his job well, he said, but what did he get in return? A demotion to the quieter checkpoint here. For interfering in government-backed smuggling.
‘This is our country,’ he concluded, and packed his keys and wallet back into his uniform pockets. ‘They want us to live in a poor, criminally corrupt, third-rate country. They won’t let us into the EU. They let Greece bully us. And we live with it.’
Who were they?
‘The great powers. They’ve always decided our fate for us. Like this business with our country’s name.’
Europe, you Babylonian whore. But he had a point.
‘Anyway, come to Nakolec sometime and I’ll show you the ancient stuff. Some of it’s under water but it was there before us and will be there after us.’
He trudged off to his car, then up the road to the checkpoint without which the mountain would be as wild and pitch-black as the first settlers had found it six thousand years ago.
Nezmi was right about the earliest-known inhabitants of Lake Prespa, the Thracian-Illyrian tribe called the Skirtoni. Herodotus wrote about them: ‘On high stilts over the lake are wooden huts, reached from the shore by a long narrow bridge. At the beginning, they all gathered wood for the huts together but gradually a rule was introduced that whoever got married would bring three new logs … and thus acquire a private hut with a trapdoor on the floor which led down to the water.’ When the Slavs arrived, they adopted this way of life. And when the Slavist Konstantin Irechek passed through here in the late nineteenth century, he noted that the inhabitants were mostly ‘Bulgarian Muslims’, followed by Albanians. Identities have changed more frequently than the lake’s fluctuating levels.
To the Lake Page 25