The traffic of six empires had trodden over the Gjavato Pass. But if you forgot about this human density, you saw that Pelagonia looked the way it sounded: a landscape so ancient and empty, so prehuman that it could fit no political map.
From the sprawling city of Bitola and all the way to the Greek border, the shabby road had been patched up and the traffic consisted of trucks and beaten-up local cars. Fields of corn, fields of burnt grasses, and on the balconies of village houses – strings of bright-red peppers hanging like curtains, a festival of autumn. After the quiet Greek checkpoint, the expansive plain and distant mountains continued, only now the empty road and road signage were first-class and the cars more expensive, the result of decades of EU cash injections.
On the map, the road to Greek Prespa didn’t look like much, but it was. Soon, it started climbing west into the Verno Mountains. The scenic mountain town of Florina, with its thirty-three-metre hilltop cross for the thirty-three years of Christ, was quiet. Many business premises were for rent. By the time you reached this last town in Pelagonia, you were cut off twice: by altitude and by the border. After Florina, the narrow switchback road plunged and climbed through beautiful dark valleys, where the only presence was the odd drinking fountain with its stone basin. I was glad that Nick was waiting for me at the end of the road, or I hoped he was – my mobile phone had no signal. He’d flown from London to Thessaloniki and driven to Prespa. In the two hours it took me to drive over the mountains, I counted just half a dozen cars and a log-truck. The road curves were so sharp, the tyres screeched in protest.
Road signs for Prespa began to appear, though there was only one fork: south to Lake Kastoria, and onwards to Prespa. You couldn’t get lost on this road, only spooked. Disquiet stalked the sun-dappled mixed forests that rose on all sides. The only sound was the gentle bells of goats nowhere to be seen.
At the Vigla, or Sentinel, Pass, the highest point of the road where a Roman settlement had once been and a ski-resort operated in winter, the Vitsi Peak loomed close with its sharp Civil War monument. It was the site of the last battle of the Greek Civil War in the summer of 1949. A young couple had pulled over and were arguing viciously in what I took to be Macedonian, but it was Greek. The body language, the olive-skinned faces, the intonation, were the same. As I rejoined the road, an oncoming car found my presence irritating for some reason, and the bearded young driver gave me the fingers. Just driving here made you mean.
The road followed the steep valley of a river whose tributaries connected the Prespa basin with Lake Kastoria to the south, and with another mountain locally called Bellavoda, or White Water (2,177 metres), to the north, though it appeared on the map with a Greek name. In a village so small it was just a bend in the road, I stopped at a roadside cafe because there were people. Burly men sat talking, and a blind German shepherd dog came and sat by my feet like an old friend. I ordered a coffee. Inside, the house was full of musical instruments and photographs of armed men wearing white fustanellas and heroic moustaches, from the time of the Macedonian Struggle. A long-haired giant who looked like a brigand until I saw the gentle expression on his face, came to say hello, once the other men, rising heavily, drove off in their Jeeps. Clocking my registration plate, he switched to his local Slavic dialect. His name was Pavle.
It was an archaic dialect I hadn’t heard before but understood perfectly. He and his brother and their wives ran this establishment which was also their home, but despite the dramatic topography and the adventure tours they offered, including hunts for wild boar, there were few visitors. It was the legacy of Emfilios Polemos, the Greek Civil War.
‘You may not feel it,’ he said. ‘But it’s here.’
Oh, I feel it, I said.
‘In winter, it’s just a few of us by the fire and the wolves howling in the hills,’ he said. ‘Last winter, two bears came to the front door.’
The village was called Antartiko, the Place of Guerrillas.
‘The old name is Zhelevo,’ said Pavle. After one Zhele, probably a komita.
The andartes (Greek) and the komitas (Bulgarian-Macedonian) were bitter enemies of similar practices. Both had roamed the mountains, where they’d vanish, leaving the villagers they supposedly protected to suffer the consequences in the hands of the enemy band. But villages like this were the mountains. During the First World War, the French Armée d’Orient had a base here. I can’t imagine how the Senegalese and Cameroonians felt in these harsh mountains, but one French soldier left his impressions of the September harvest and, hanging in house windows, maize whose ‘bright yellow explodes next to dark red peppers and scarlet aprons that give, under the sun, a wonderful colour tableau’.
‘Always fighting,’ Pavle said placidly. ‘Why? Why are we always fighting? First the Turks. Then the Germans. Then brother against brother.’
Like many villages and some towns in Aegean Macedonia, Antartiko-Zhelevo had had a majority Bulgarian-speaking population. ‘Before the fighting,’ Pavle said, ‘there were two thousand five hundred people, five thousand goats and sheep, and one thousand head of cattle. Now there are thirty old people and a few chickens. We’re the youngest here.’
He was my age. By the fighting, he meant the Greek Civil War. There were two time planes here: before the war and after.
A man in a Jeep drove slowly up the road.
‘Come meet a visitor,’ my host shouted in Greek, ‘from Ohrid.’
The man joined us. There wasn’t much else to do here. He was another bulky type with a surprisingly gentle face, and though he understood nashe, he was reluctant to speak it and replied only in Greek.
Dopika (‘local idiom’ in Greek) or nashe (‘our lingo’ in Slavic) was how the local dialect was referred to here, in a careful avoidance of the taboo word ‘Macedonian’ or (more distantly but still undesirably) ‘Bulgarian’. In the Greek nationalist project, dopika served to diminish the cultural weight a real language might have, spoken by real people who were not Greeks. Or not entirely. The project was helped by the fact that the various regional Slavic dialects of northern Greece had never been standardised into a national language and remained at a somewhat debased, domestic level.
‘Before the fighting, there were twenty-five thousand people in Greek Prespa,’ Pavle said. He had warmed up and seemed keen to get things off his chest. At the end of the war, there were just one thousand people left by the lake, all in a state of trauma. ‘Now we are around three hundred. Even the lake is shrinking. When we were kids, we swam every day, the water clear as a teardrop. Now it’s full of …’
He couldn’t remember the Slavic word.
‘Reeds,’ a wheezy voice said. It was the old man in a wheelchair under the awning, so desiccated he was mostly head. He’d been there all along, listening.
‘Here’s living history for you,’ Pavle said. The old man looked at us but said nothing.
When the old man was a young lad with his flock on the hill, Pavle said, a German soldier came up to him and for no reason smashed his face with the butt of his gun and left him for dead. Once recovered, the lad was conscripted by the andartes of EAM (the National Liberation Front) to fight the German and Bulgarian occupiers near the city of Drama. No sooner was the war over than the Civil War broke out. Or rather, it had never stopped – for the different resistance factions in Greece had entered a bitter conflict, just like in Albania and Yugoslavia next door.
But Greece was already ticked off as belonging to the Western sphere of influence by Churchill and Stalin, in what Churchill called ‘a naughty document’. On 9 October 1944, in Moscow, Churchill said to Stalin: ‘Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria.’
He scribbled percentages on a napkin, for each of the Balkan countries:
Rumania – Russia 90%, The others 10%
Greece – Great Britain 90% (in accord with U.S.A.), Russia 10%
Yugoslavia – 50–50%
Hungary – 50–50%
Bulgaria – R
ussia 75%, The others 25%
‘I pushed this across to Stalin,’ Churchill wrote in his war memoir, ‘who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.’
So there was the fate of my family, of Pavle’s, of Nick’s, of tens of millions of others, scribbled on that napkin.
Starved and traumatised, postwar Greece swarmed with Nazi collaborators and proto-Fascist militias. Thanks to energetic British meddling, domestic Greek politics were manipulated into a state where it was possible to enforce the full disarmament of the leftist resistance fighters. Then deport them to prison islands en masse. The persecution and murder of resistance fighters by the Greek Nationalist Army and affiliated militias matched the Nazis’ work in Greece. Rural populations like the Prespa villages lived in a permanent state of White Terror, though Red Terror arrived soon enough too.
This culminated in the 1944 Dekemvriana month in Athens, when militias opened fire on civilian demonstrators while British troops looked on. The resulting deaths and injuries sparked off an armed conflict in Athens which lasted a month and ended with the capitulation of the left. British troops under General Scobie took an active part. Their sudden new Greek allies were the thuggish Security Battalions and the Nazi collaborators of yesterday. Their sudden new enemies were their anti-Nazi allies of yesterday, the embattled Greek left. The situation went as far as General Scobie imposing martial law on Athens and ordering the aerial bombardment, during the Dekemvriana events, of a whole neighbourhood.
By 1946, when the Communist Party was made illegal, some hundred thousand leftists were rounded up and either executed, imprisoned or exiled. But the left regrouped in the mountains, and the full-blown guerrilla war that followed had its main theatre in the north-west of Greece: Pindus along the Albanian border and Verno here, for these remote regions provided two vital things for the newly formed Democratic Army of Greece (DSE): recruits and mountains. The Democratic Army was the military arm of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), and the inheritor of ELAS (the Greek People’s Liberation Army) which had been the military arm of EAM.
The extraordinarily vicious Civil War lasted three and a half years and was won by the Greek National Army of King George, first with the help of Churchill’s Britain, and after 1947, of Truman’s America. The Greek king was a British puppet and in the wake of Greece’s liberation from the Nazis, Churchill was hell-bent on reinstating him: he and the old ways were the best bulwark against Communism and the new ways. Greece was possibly the only country in postwar Europe where those who participated in the resistance against the Nazis were marked for elimination while Nazi collaborators were given political, military and judiciary power.
‘Once again, our young lad was taken by the andartes,’ Pavle continued. And when the Civil War ended, he was imprisoned on the island of Makronisos for having fought on the losing side. The official term for leftists was ‘Communist bandits’ or just ‘bandits’ – at the time and for decades after. The Greek Civil War – the first real war of the Cold War – ended with 158,000 dead and one million displaced, many permanently.
The old man pressed a button on his wheelchair and glided past us with a nod.
‘He has perfect recall but won’t talk,’ Pavle said.
Why not?
‘Fear.’
Fear? He survived the Nazis, the Civil War and Makronisos!
The two younger men sipped their coffees in silence. Fear, like grief, does not always need a current object.
‘But I am not afraid,’ Pavle said. ‘Write this down. I am not afraid to speak our language. For twenty years we’ve been waiting for the old lake road to open. To bring some life back to Prespa.’
His Greek wife, who didn’t understand dopika, had been sitting beside him all along, playing with his long hair like a bored child. She didn’t let me pay for the coffee and invited me to come again.
They were a haunted bunch, living in the shadow of these blood hills. It was said that in the last months of the war, the earth turned red with the blood of the slain. The other brother’s wife was a gaunt, pretty woman with a face so stricken that you couldn’t look at it for more than a second. She was either ill or freshly bereaved. The brothers were known in the area as ‘the priest’s sons’.
I drove over the broken road out of Antartiko and several old men and women sitting on a bench waved at me with wordless smiles. Most of the village houses were abandoned, trees growing through the windows as if reaching out to grab you and tell you something.
The road to Little Prespa took the long, lonely time that roads to nowhere take. Just past the Prevali ridge, when I had almost given up hope of seeing the lake again, it appeared. What I was seeing was Little Prespa, and it didn’t look small at all. It looked so majestic that my pulse quickened. The road descended. The flatlands at lake level were tame, agricultural. Monocultural, in fact: everywhere were bean fields, fasoulakia. But there were no people. I drove over the inlet between the two lakes, which had been a single lake before the water level dropped and mud was deposited in such large quantities by the nearest rivers that it had eventually been diverted into Little Prespa.
Little Prespa stretched towards Albania into a wetland wilderness, the water green with vegetation and brown with reedbeds. On the map, Little Prespa is a mini-me of Prespa, shaped by geomorphological and human forces into almost identical jagged teardrops.
The road began climbing the hilly peninsula that jutted into the lake like the head of a fish whose mouth was Psarades. I passed a small chapel called St George and a sign warning there were bears. Once over that pass, large Prespa appeared below, with its elusive gleam. Small, sharp, black hills rose from the water all the way to the north – dozens of them, a mirage. Prespa expressed something that cannot be put into words, or even feelings. High above the lake, I pulled over and sat in the car. I could not go on without adjusting to the majesty of the scene. Like the hills themselves, this place lifted you up and cast you down. In the still air, the juniper trees looked painted in silver. I wept without knowing why.
In the village square by the reeds, Nick was tucking into a green salad. Darkness was falling. I stumbled out of the car, hugged him, sat down at the table, and because Nick started laughing, I too laughed. My head was spinning.
‘Can you believe this road?’ I said.
‘I know. It’s a relief to see you, I have to say.’ Nick poured me a glass of wine. ‘I was starting to worry.’
Nick had an instantly winning quality, a warm and unaffected exuberance. With an unerring magpie’s eye for the telling detail, an encyclopedic memory and boundless curiosity, he was especially interested in the former Soviet world and the Balkans, but really, his interests were omnivorous. Nick was a polyglot: he spoke five Slavic languages, Spanish, some Greek, some Romanian, some Mandarin, and some Hebrew (his partner was Israeli). His friends periodically asked: Are you sure you’re not a spy?
‘I recommend the catch of the day,’ he said.
The fish was delicious, and of all the Prespan villages, Psarades alone still felt like a fishing village. Even its name meant The Fishermen. There were five restaurants open, mostly empty.
‘European subsidies,’ Nick said. ‘As with the bean plantations.’
But after those mountains, I wasn’t surprised that not many visitors made it here. It really was the end of the road.
Another Australian, a man from Perth, sat at the next table; he’d left here as a teenager fifty years ago. He always thought he’d bring his wife and kids, but they preferred Bali, so here he was like a cuckoo in the old family house. Of the two thousand people of this village once called Nivitsi, sixty were left. He spoke a mangled mix of lingos.
‘Australian Lerinski,’ Nick grinned, and the man nodded. Lerin was the old Bulgarian name of Florina and of the region.
‘I grew up with Lerinski because of my grandmo
ther,’ Nick said. ‘It’s the first language I heard, before English.’
Nick grew up in Adelaide. His maternal grandmother had lived in a street full of exiles from Lerinsko, the region here. One day, on his way to school, one of them cornered him at the bus stop. ‘And she told me how, after the Civil War, she’d gone in search of her children. They’d been taken by the Red Cross to Poland. It took her years, but she found them and brought them to Australia.’ Another time, another old woman from the diaspora stopped him and without preamble told him how, when planes dropped American napalm on their village here in 1949, she and her mother were buried alive in a bomb crater. Next to their house. ‘They dug themselves out with their bare hands. She carried her mother on her back to the next village. She’d never told anyone about it and needed to get it out.’
I pictured young Nick walking with his schoolbag and that woman’s burden.
The final phase of the Civil War was called by survivors the catastrophe. Entire villages were obliterated by the army and paramilitary units. Children were burnt alive in houses, with mothers forced to watch, in revenge for the fathers joining the andartes. When women and children were forced away from their burnt houses in the direction of the nearest border, they often had nothing except the clothes they stood in; everything down to the last chicken had been taken by militants.
In the ethnic Macedonian villages of northern Greece and the Macedonian diaspora in Australia, there were code expressions like ‘She’s from Bapchor’, to indicate a person who had been through unimaginable horror. Bapchor was one of the ‘napalm villages’. Today it’s neither on the map nor on the ground.
To the Lake Page 29