‘I grew up with katastrofata,’ Nick said.
He didn’t know what it meant at first, he just soaked up the vibes.
‘Growing up, there was anxiety about everything,’ he said. ‘Nothing was too small to worry ourselves sick about. Of course, the war was never discussed, it was too big. My mother picked it up from her mother. The anxiety. Even though she’s Aussieborn and was an adult before she visited Macedonia for the first time!’
Nick’s grandmother was from a nearby village, once entirely Slavic-speaking.
‘We don’t go there any more,’ he said. ‘It’s been completely Hellenised. Not a scrap of its old identity remains. When my grandmother visited in the amnesty of 1987, she couldn’t believe it. No one dared speak Macedonian. All the names were changed. People whispered about the war.’
Forty years after the war, people whispered about the war. They did even now, here – seventy years after the war.
‘My grandmother said: this is not my village, not my home.’ She never visited again. Her first husband had fought with ELAS against the Nazis, then joined the Democratic Army. Wounded in the last battle on Mount Vitsi, he died en route to the field hospital.
‘He is buried in the family grave in the village, but his name appears in very small letters at the bottom of the tombstone,’ Nick said. ‘Like a pariah.’
One of Greece’s many dishonoured heroes of the resistance. In the wake of the war, his family fell into the category of ‘enemy’. Atrocities were especially rife against the Bulgarian-Macedonian villages here in the north, seen by the regime as a fifth column, as doubly ‘bad Greeks’: for speaking a non-Greek language and for being Socialist-Communist sympathisers.
The 1913 border that partitioned Macedonia had left hundreds of thousands of Slavic-speaking Macedonians and Bulgarians behind in Greece. This determined their harsh fate. Cut off from their compatriots in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, they became an unwanted minority in a nation-state that was apparently allergic to ethno-linguistic and religious diversity. During the Metaxas regime in the 1930s, ‘Slav-speakers and Turkish-speakers … were mercilessly persecuted, their languages forbidden in public, banned in the school-yard,’ writes Fred A. Reed in Salonica Terminus. Things worsened immeasurably after the Greek Civil War.
Back in the village, the young widow who was to become Nick’s grandmother was urged by her in-laws to disappear, before the paramilitary units arrived and torched the house. Australia was the obvious destination: her father, a gardener, had already settled there.
‘My great-grandfather had arrived in Australia in 1929, just in time for the Depression!’ Nick said. He’d left his wife and children behind. The young widow too left behind her two small children in the care of her mother, and sailed to Australia. A year into Adelaide, she met a young man at a Macedonian party and soon, Nick’s mother was born.
The young man was a political refugee too – but from the Bulgarian Communist government. His family too hailed from Aegean Macedonia and had been expelled into Bulgaria in 1928 during the ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Bulgaria. By the late 1940s, he had fallen foul of the Bulgarian Communist authorities and, leaving behind a wife, a small daughter and a newborn son, he sailed from Naples to Australia on a ship called The Nelly.
‘His escape was dramatic and clouded in secrecy. And as the years passed, increasingly sounding like something out of Zorba the Greek.’
In the wake of his defection, his family were internally exiled by the Communist state, treated as ‘enemies of the people’, and lived harsh lives.
‘My uncle is an angry man. He says his life has been stolen.’
Meanwhile, Nick’s mother didn’t know she had half-siblings until they turned up. First her half-sister, then her half-brother, pale and serious in patched-up coats, just arrived from Greece with their grandmother, Nick’s great-grandmother – yet another woman whose husband had gone away on a gurbet that had lasted a lifetime. But now that they were reunited, they fought constantly, Nick laughed.
By the age of six, Nick’s mother was inseparable from her parents, accompanying them everywhere, on every trip to stores, governmental agencies, doctor’s appointments. Because her parents never learned English.
‘I know, it’s amazing, but it wasn’t so unusual,’ Nick said.
‘But why? Why did they burden their daughter like that?’
‘Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, inat,’ Nick said, using the pan-Balkan word for it. ‘But also, I suspect, a delayed effect of trauma.’
A part of them remained frozen in time. And there had been the resentment of being strangers in a strange land, separated from their real identities while unable to go back, Nick said.
There was no way back. Not learning English was an act of protest. Oddly, they picked up Italian, from friends in the expat community. Even more oddly, they had initially spoken to each other in Greek – because their Macedonian dialects were so far apart that they had communication problems.
‘As a kid I went between my grandparents who each insisted on their dialect version of simple words like potato! Because of inat. I’d translate between them.’
Although Nick had three siblings, it was him, the first-born, who carried the burden. Sensitised from an early age, probably from the womb, he formalised his commitment to his exiled grandparents by becoming a professional translator from all the Balkan Slavic languages.
‘I remember my grandmother’s tears of happiness when I started writing the Cyrillic alphabet at Masso school: K, Л, М, Н, О, П … Those letters meant so much to her.’
One of his early memories was watching the Olympics on television. His grandfather, who didn’t contact his Bulgarian wife and children out of guilt and pain (he guessed their sad fate, and he knew there was no way back for him – he was, in the Communist state’s terminology, a non-returnee, a dead man), rooted for the Bulgarian gymnasts and weight-lifters instead. He was proud of ‘our boys and girls’ when they won gold, and Nick was proud with him.
Nick’s father, in turn, was one of the many young men who took the opportunity to emigrate from Tito’s Yugoslav Macedonia. He had arrived in Australia with a friend in the early 1970s, seeking adventure. Though Australia failed to live up to his imagination and he returned home, by then he was utterly unable to toe the Communist Party line, and his own mother, afraid for him and the family’s good name, urged him to leave again, back to Australia, whether he wanted to or not.
In Kanun terms, he had been banished by the tribe.
‘He’d run away from Tito, but who was on the first page of all our Yugoslav books in Australia? Tito. Tito, Tato, Mama. Tito came first!’ Another of Nick’s early memories is of a city full of the portraits of a man who had just died. They were on a visit to Yugoslavia. ‘Tito. I remember feeling bewildered by this mass sorrow.’
Nick’s father, homesick after all those years away from his homeland, had wanted to bring his young family on a visit to Yugoslav Macedonia, to see whether there was any way back. But there was no way back.
Nick was born of the confluence of three Macedonias which together made up all of geographic Macedonia. Because of the borders, it was a confluence of exile, but it also meant that he had multiple identities.
To the north, the then Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was his father’s birthplace.
Aegean Macedonia to the south, now northern Greece, was his maternal grandmother’s birthplace.
The province of Pirin Macedonia, in western Bulgaria, was his maternal grandfather’s home.
Each came with its own internal contradictions and conflicts. Nick was like an Atlas carrying the weight of Macedonia on his shoulders, trying to stay cheerful – too cheerful sometimes – and not collapse, not get sucked in by the ancestral vortex.
‘Maybe that’s why you’re always on the move,’ I said, but the same was true of me. Nick and I mirrored each other in some respects. Because our family histories mirrored each other. ‘Maybe restlessness is in our blo
od.’
He shrugged. His grandfather’s restlessness, my grandmother’s need to escape – these impulses had only been magnified in us by emigration. ‘I just want to see as many places as possible before I get too old to travel,’ he said. But he was only in his early forties.
In 1987, just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, his grandfather had arranged to meet with his grown-up son, the one he had left behind when he fled from Bulgaria. The dad had travelled from Australia to Yugoslavia, ostensibly for a family wedding but really to see his son, and the son had obtained permission to cross the border from Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, for one day. He had looked forward to meeting his dad his whole life. He was in his forties. But the Bulgarian border authorities kept preventing him, asking for more and more papers that he had to produce. Weeks passed. He could not cross the border.
‘My grandfather extended his stay, but in the end, he couldn’t wait any longer and made his way to Athens, for his return flight to Australia. You can imagine how he felt on that flight.’
Just hours after the dad had left Yugoslavia for Athens, and with the poisonous intent totalitarian regimes specialise in, the son was finally allowed into Yugoslavia.
‘Everyone in the family strongly believes that this was too much of a coincidence,’ Nick said. ‘So there must have been a Bulgarian State Security agent tailing my grandfather in Yugoslavia all along, and once it was clear that my grandfather had left for Athens, then the border officials were tipped off to let my uncle cross the border.’
He did. Only to be told that his father had left a few hours before.
‘And on hearing the news from his father’s Yugoslav family, he just – howled,’ Nick said. He had collapsed. He had crossed the border alone, and now he was alone in his sorrow.
‘He howled like an animal, and the mountains picked up his howl and echoed it back. I think my uncle never got over that moment.’
A moment of irreversible loss. A parting like a death. The role State Security played makes this story not just tragic, but evil. This is how Communist regimes punished their non-returnees: by tormenting their children. The son did meet the father, years later – he travelled to Australia for it – but only in the last weeks of the father’s life when dementia meant that the old man didn’t know he was looking at his long-lost first-born. The son was never seen by the father.
The village and the mountain around it had gone black under the starry sky. The only sound was the treacly glug of water in the reeds. We went to our cold rooms in a stone house, and I slept like a stone at the bottom of the lake.
In the morning, when I walked across the sun-struck square, past the police station with its bored cops and their swanky ‘Hellenic Police’ motorboat, an impatient Nick and a smiling boatman in a captain’s peaked cap were waiting for me at the pontoon. I was an hour late, not realising that Greece and the Republic of (North) Macedonia ran on separate times. A border wasn’t enough. Closing the lakeside checkpoint wasn’t enough. They also had to have different time zones. Even though, strictly speaking, they were Macedonia and Macedonia.
The smiling boatman was from the Macedonian-speaking villages across the Albanian border. He’d come over in the 1990s, like the woman who looked after our guesthouse for five euros a day, and who told me: ‘We’re all nashi, our people here, and the Greeks know it.’
‘We all speak Macedonian here,’ the boatman said, and we set off in his new boat. ‘Just not near the police building.’
From our new vantage point on the lake, Psarades looked small, isolated, as if tossed into the water from the top of the cliffs.
‘The real residents’ – the captain pointed at the hilltop cemetery. ‘We’re all just visitors here.’
Because his mother was born in Greece and his father in Albania, he’d been called a Greek there and an Albanian here, though they were Macedonians. He didn’t mind. He enjoyed himself like someone who had processed cruder forms of struggle in his life, and was now tuning in to the longer view. The lake view.
Two pelicans with enormous wingspans – three metres, the captain said – flew over us, landing not far from the boat, and bobbed about on the water. Prespa has one of only two European colonies of the globally endangered Dalmatian pelicans: the other one is on the Danube.
The captain told us an origin myth about the formation of Lake Prespa.
‘A long time ago, there was a spring in the middle of a valley. Two shepherds came to drink from it, but fell asleep and forgot to turn it off.’ It is not said whether the shepherds survived the flooding, but towns were lost under the water which eventually became the lake. The spring remained forever open.
‘Fishermen in Albania say that sometimes when the water is very still, they can see the outlines of lost houses in the water.’
When we asked about the water border, the captain pointed and said:
‘Where there’s sun, it’s Greece. Where there’s shadow, it’s Albania.’
We could wave to Dry Village across the water and almost make out Bojko’s parents’ house. We docked at the cave Bojko had pointed out, and Nick and I climbed the hundred and seventy steps to the top of a vast chilly cavern forty metres above the lake. A humble church nestled at the echoey top, and the karst was nibbled by niches where fifteen monks had lived from fishing and hunting. Only juniper grew here, and in early summer, tiny orchids. On the shore across, there had been nuns. Perhaps they visited each other in those coffin-like chuns, and exchanged herbal recipes. The inside was painted in the early fifteenth century at the time of the Serbian lord Vukashin. The only reason Vukashin had retained his fiefdom during the early Ottoman decades was the remoteness of lower Prespa.
But the narrative of the church had been tampered with more recently: the Cyrillic lettering had been rubbed out, and either left blank or replaced with Greek script clearly newer than it should be. Christ held a blank book. This recurred in all the Prespan churches we visited. Diligent whitewashing had ensured that no Cyrillic script could be proven to have existed at all.
Charming scenes of miracles and natural phenomena abounded: the wind, human-faced and full-cheeked, a lake monster with teeth ingesting a white mass, maybe a swan.
‘A cave is a mneme, a damaged cell of memory preserved when all that existed in the open air – peoples, crafts, cults – has rotted away,’ writes Neal Ascherson in Stone Voices. His subject is the hermit caves of western Scotland and the Hebridean islands, once home to St Columba and early Christians of the north-west, who had ‘turned their backs’ to the warmer south as a gesture of penitence, to face the harsh Atlantic gales. Here, in the south-east, hermits had turned their backs to the violent land, to face the timeless light of the lake.
Looking at Mary’s defaced countenance, it made sense that this place was called Virgin Eleusa, the Merciful One. Her face, even scraped out, managed to exude understanding. The space itself exuded quiet humanity. Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, is also the mother of all the Muses, and this cave held memories that were almost palpable, even after centuries open to the elements. After the cave, the light of the lake blinded us. Along the small jetty, a line of thin-necked cormorants perched like a welcoming party in black. Red ducks with black-tufted heads bobbed nearby. We were of no consequence to them.
A liberating thought: to be of no consequence.
‘Great crested grebes,’ the captain corrected me, then took us to a place in the lake where the three territorial waters converged.
‘This is the deepest point of the lake,’ he said. ‘Fifty metres.’
We could wave to Nakolec and Pretor but go no further. The water boundaries pushed you away from the lake and back into its tormented hinterland. Even under a foreign occupier, the hermits of Prespa had been freer to move between islands and shores than the Prespans of today, who live in sovereign nation-states.
Back on the road, there was a place Nick and I wanted to see, on the fish-like peninsula that jutted into the lake with Psarades as it
s mouth. It was known as the Zachariadis Cave. It wasn’t signposted from the main road but we could see the steps hacked into the hill. We took the steps, hard-going in the midday sun. And that was after breakfast and a good night’s sleep, much more than the guerrillas had enjoyed.
Below us opened the silent fields of green beans, tied at their tops. But no people. Who ate all these beans? Later, I learned that the subsidised bean monoculture had killed off other cultures including animal husbandry, and that many absentee Prespans made profits from their bean plantations but lived elsewhere. The forest at the top had been a refuge for the Democratic Army at the end of the war, as they were pushed into the lake, and Yugoslavia. Then Tito slammed the door shut and it was endgame.
The villages of Psarades and German had been their arms and provisions bases. And up here, inside this cave, had been their HQ. Somewhere higher up, in another cave, was their field hospital. Nick climbed into the cave despite the feral smell.
‘There’s nothing here,’ he reported, emerging cheerfully.
If Nick’s grandmother’s first husband had survived his wounds en route to the field hospital, Nick would not exist.
The forest held unspecified distress, and I was keen to leave. We took the stone steps down and just then, a park ranger rushed up towards us.
‘Ah, good!’ he said in Greek, and smiled. ‘I saw your car. We have a bear with cubs in the cave. I came to check that everybody was OK.’
We thanked him, and I suspect I said to Nick, ‘I told you it smelt feral!’
On the side of the deserted road was a small monument.
‘Oh my God, this is new!’ Nick said.
It was a humble granite piece bearing the mountain-like triangle, symbol of the Democratic Army (the DSE), and marking this spot as the centre of its activity between 1946 and 49. It had been erected by the Greek Communist Party (the KKE) this year.
To the Lake Page 30