To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  We drove through Kastoria, where fortunes were once made from fur-trading. Shop signs in Russian were everywhere: ‘Fur coats at warehouse prices!’

  ‘Cyrillic is fine if it signals Russian buyers, of course,’ Nick said. ‘No end to the ironies!’

  The irony was living testimony to the relativity of cultural meaning. Culture is all about created context. Meanwhile, no one was buying anything much in poor, pretty Kastoria, where old people with defeated faces sold plastic items at street stalls.

  An English officer, consul at Ali Pasha’s court in Ioannina, passed through here in the early 1800s and described Lake Kastoria – frozen, with buffalo-driven carts moving over it. Despite the warmth of the day and the beauty of the scenery, I could see it frozen, blackbirds overhead and wolves howling in the valleys.

  Like Lake Prespa, Lake Kastoria and its outlying mountain villages where the few people we met had sad eyes, lost siblings, and things they couldn’t put into words, left us feeling stricken.

  ‘I’m glad we’re leaving tomorrow,’ I said. ‘There’s something very heavy here.’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Nick laughed.

  We didn’t want to talk about illness, so as not to fall into that ancestral habit – we had both noticed that across the Balkans, ill health was a favourite topic of conversation and there was in fact a disproportionate amount of disease and early death – but a decade ago, in his early thirties, Nick had been diagnosed with advanced cancer.

  ‘And it’s weird, but just hours after I got the diagnosis, my mother received a phone call saying her mother was about to die!’

  His mother was trained in the catastrophic mindset, and here was catastrophe. When his grandmother died, the hearse arrived with a Greek flag on the bonnet. A war flag.

  ‘The dynamics in the extended family have been a minefield of unresolved identity issues,’ Nick said. ‘Like an extension of the Greek Civil War. As if the war never ended.’

  Family members were civil to each other, he said, but under the surface, tensions and the fear of association bubbled, which over time led to estrangement. It sounded familiar.

  ‘My immediate family in Oz,’ he said, ‘by virtue of identifying as “Macedonian”, were the black sheep of the extended family in Greece, with a constant underlying feeling that we were uncomfortable for the “Greek” family members. As if our very existence proved that they were not Greek after all. Rather than confront their self-made demons, they preferred just burying them.’

  But how do you bury something that’s alive? I asked about the health of his extended family.

  ‘Outbursts of extreme neurotic behaviour, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia. And an extraordinary number of strokes at a young age.’

  The struggle to own your name, your mother tongue and the letters of your alphabet, your past, your present, your children, the graves of your dead, to exist at all – this struggle, when passed down the generations undigested and further multiplied in a schizoid tug-of-war between cousins and siblings, is almost the definition of systemic illness. The entire system sickens.

  This is a side-effect of ‘Balkanisation’, of the violent splitting into hostile entities of a complex matrix that cannot be divided any more than the child presented to King Solomon could be cut into two children. Nick, loyal Nick, had almost become the sacrificial victim of his family, by manifesting the collective disease in his body.

  But his cancer had healed and he had been finally given the all-clear this year. To celebrate, he was travelling even more frenetically than usual. I kept wanting to tell him to sit still, be quiet for a moment, and stop looking up the latest news on social media. His restlessness infected me. It’s as if he was constantly being engulfed by events and their consequences, and had no distance from anything.

  But what about me? Even after years of retraining myself out of the feeling that good things only serve to invite catastrophe – despite my university degrees, fluency in various languages, travelling the world – even then, in my ancestral brain, I was not that different from the man who walked backwards ‘to trick the evil eye’.

  On the bone-dry St Achillius island of Little Prespa, reached by a long scenic walkway from the western side of the lakelet, all that was left of Samuil’s great episcopalian basilica was the beautiful curved wall with three window holes, and columns propping up nothing, witnesses that are perhaps just as well silent. And bullet holes, as if from many executions. In the days of Samuil, there had been a natural isthmus and the island may have been a peninsula. Even now, when the lake freezes over, as it would in the coming winter, the few children of the island walk to school across the ice, as if across frozen time.

  In the midst of the fighting in the winter of 1948, this island had seen the wedding of Nikos Zachariadis to his comrade in love and war, Roula Koukoula. Even if he had banned love for everybody else. He would hang himself many years later in exile in Siberia, after Roula betrayed him by voting for his excommunication from the Communist Party. They remained in an inner state of war to the ends of their lives.

  Nick and I walked to the far end of the island, past the ruins of a monastery and a humble church with stirring frescoes. Hundreds of birds were scattered like crumbs over sky and water. But Little Prespa is changing fast – or fast in lacustrine time. The causes are human: the irrigation of the bean fields, which silts up the lake with unnatural speed. The bean fields are to Little Prespa what the apple orchards are to Big Prespa: deadly.

  As the people of Prespa were driven away by war, the reedbeds – for centuries dwelling places for fishermen and their reed huts as well as sources of material for handmade goods – have been abandoned and are rapidly spreading, encouraged by the increased littoral mud. The shepherds whose livestock grazed the reeds and kept them under control are gone too. Until the 1960s, Little Prespa had water buffalo whose favourite food was reeds. Now, the spreading reedbeds nibble away at the wetlands, meaning less space for fish spawning, which in turn means fewer other species like waterfowl. After over a million years of self-regulation, it is twentieth-century war that may slowly kill Prespa, a process that has been under way for two generations now.

  ‘The water plants are dying and decaying in the lake, which adds organic material, which in turn ages the lake and leads it to a speedier death: turning into dry land,’ writes the Prespan naturalist Giorgos Catsadorakis. ‘The extreme old age of a lake manifests itself in what we call marshes, swamps, and peat bogs. The corpse of a lake we call dry land.’

  It was hard to imagine the death of Prespa, so far away in human time, but Little Prespa already showed the signs – the reedbeds were impenetrable forests inside the lake. Yet from our vantage point on the island, it looked like a place where nature, not man, would have the last word, where guano would always whitewash the ruins of our labours, where the illusions of empires and nations rightly come to the end of their road.

  A Greek archaeologist who fell under the spell of Prespa began excavating the island in the 1950s. The inhabitants of the small fishing community of St Achillius are probably descendants of Samuil’s Prespa – soldiers and workers, some of whom he brought with his army after his invasion of Thessaly to the south, whence he also brought the relics of Achillius, a fourth-century cleric. It was here, in Samuil’s church, that the archaeologist found the sarcophagi of Samuil, his son Gavril-Radomir and his nephew Ivan-Vladislav: three men of different temperaments whose fate had been war, finally in a state of peace.

  In another excavation on the island, a medieval necropolis revealed that the dead had Charon’s obols (coins) placed over their eyes – the fee to the ferryman for the journey across the Styx. Those who didn’t have the obol would remain in limbo, forever wandering the psychic landscape.

  Back on the mainland, we recrossed the isthmus between the two lakes, back to the east side of Little Prespa. Villagers on the run from the Civil War had escaped towards Albania along here with their children, dodging shells. British bombers dropped shell
s in an attempt to blow up the bridge at its western end in Koula, ‘Tower’, its name suggesting that this had been an old observation point on the lake, possibly used in Samuil’s time and even during the Romans’. Locals still find unexploded shells around Koula when the water level is low.

  In the morning, in the mouth of the fish called Psarades, we said goodbye on the square by the reeds. Nick drove to Thessaloniki for his London flight, and I drove west into Albania.

  A popular saying has it that Makedonia comes from maka, the Slavic for sorrow and strife. Of course, it isn’t true – the ‘barbarian’ Makednoi are mentioned by Herodotus ten centuries before the Slavs arrived, and the root of the name is a word for ‘high’ or ‘tall’, as the apparently tall Macedons of antiquity were called Highlanders by the Greeks in the south (though the word was pre-Greek). Yet in the emotional lives of four Balkan nations, Makedonia has come to mean sorrow and strife – and at times agonia. But also survival against the odds. The emotional life of Greek Prespa was clearly out of sync with its official history – but on the other hand, history is also made going forwards because it is a living thing. From a certain point, it’s up to the living, not to the dead, how history looks on the ground.

  Only months later, in June 2018, this square by the reeds would witness a historic scene Nick and I wouldn’t have thought possible, hereditary catastrophists that we are. The Greek and Macedonian governments would sign the Prespa Agreement, healing the rift of the last twenty-five years over the name ‘Macedonia’. Or rather, of the last one hundred years.

  Or rather, healing the surface of it; underneath, a chasm of discord and denial still gaped, maintained by both sides. Macedonia would agree to change its name to North Macedonia, and Greece would consent. The deal would be signed here by politicians with hopeful smiles, but the road ahead would be a turbulent one as nationalistic Greeks continued to rage at their neighbours and their government for using the word at all, and the Macedonians raged against their neighbours and their own government for reducing them to ‘North’. When they were, are, here in the south too, still. But that is precisely what Greece had made taboo. Acknowledging the existence of a people who call themselves Macedonians and who are not Greeks, puts a dent in the ‘biscuit-factory line of history’ that goes neatly from Hellenic antiquity to Byzantium to the Macedonian Struggle and the modern Greek nation-state. All this might have been a lot easier, of course, had the manufacturers of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Macedonian national identity not gone to such extremes as to render the Bulgarian connection taboo and to claim direct lineage from warriors over two thousand years dead, respectively. This is how they produced their own biscuit-factory line, characterised by that bathetic blend typical of all Balkan nationalism (and possibly of all nationalism) and which makes it so unsuited to actual life: pettiness and grandiosity.

  Alexander would be pleased: his Macedon war goes on, though geographically much reduced.

  Driving the roads of Greek Prespa, a line from a poem came to me, by the poet Yannis Ritsos who spent years on prison islands (first in the 1940s, then in the 1960s):

  ‘The dead are increasingly in danger.’

  This applies also to the unborn, surely. We must do things differently for their sake, if not ours. What was striking on that sunny June day in Psarades the following year, when an addendum to history was signed, was that the two young prime ministers with tired smiles looked like cousins. And that – as with the Ohrid Agreement seventeen years before – it took a lake to imagine peace.

  The Albanian border was my aim. My final destination was St Naum Monastery. This journey was coming to an end. I needed to get back – not to Ohrid town, but to the Lake of Light. Prespa could be taken only in small doses, like medicine. To get to the Albanian border, I had to leave the lake again and for a long time follow a valley darkened by mountains, past comfortless Civil War ruins. Everything felt unstable, in time and space.

  In Psarades the previous night, while eating dinner near the police station, Nick and I had started whispering, even though we were speaking English. After just two days, Greek Prespa had instilled paranoia in him, and resentment in me. I looked with mistrust at the cops with their ignorant swagger, and was all too ready to say to them, in a voice that wasn’t mine: Do you have any idea how much these people have suffered! But what if the cops struck back with their own suffering? Prespa had taught me that their great-grandparents were probably exiles from Asia Minor, or poor pastoralists from Epirus, resettled here as part of the hellenising of the lake’s hinterland. What choice had they had in the matter? They too were survivors of history.

  It was no good, out-suffering each other, passing the parcel of pain as in some Beckettian play – I’ll bury you. No, I’ll bury you first. My people are more ancient than your people. No, we were here first, we’re the autochthonous ones. We’ve suffered the most. You? You have no idea what suffering means!

  We had to get out of this ontological loop.

  ‘It made sparkling sense that the vanquished, not the victors, should learn these secrets,’ wrote the child narrator of The Heroic Age when he grew up. This raw and beautiful novel by Stratis Haviaras is set in Civil War Greece. The child narrator is trapped behind the andarte line at Grammos with thousands of other kids. After time in a prison island for minors, he emerges with a new, life-affirming perspective, and that is the secret of his psychic survival.

  It struck me now why Nick and his mother kept returning to Greece, even though it hurt them so. It was precisely because there was no acknowledgement that Nick felt compelled to become a monument to his ancestors’ lives. He came to represent those who had been erased. He was the ghost haunting the denied hinterland.

  A month later on social media I saw Nick on a potholed road deep in the mountains of south-west Bulgaria near the Greek border. He had gone to visit his maternal grandfather’s village on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Nick had retraced his grandfather’s steps, returning for him, bringing back the errant spirit so that the howl would stop echoing in the ancestral landscape. He looked lonely on that godforsaken road, yet his expression said in no uncertain terms: Here I am. I made it.

  But how many returns would it take? Will we know when to stop?

  When I came across the term ‘family homeostasis’ to describe how families unconsciously strive to preserve the status quo, no matter how unhealthy, it made sense. Family homeostasis is the definition of moving on without moving on. In some families, it is embodied by a house. This is how inheritance issues grip generations in the name of invisible loyalty: the house becomes a mausoleum to the dead and the living alike. In our family, as in Nick’s, after generations of emigrants there was no physical house for the spirits. We embodied them ourselves. In our maternal lines, the knowledge of loss and the fear of further loss had cast a deep shadow.

  That was the dark force at our heels, the force that had manifested in mysterious pains, tumours, estrangements, and cellular anguish: the spectre of fear.

  As with families, so with nations. The people of the lakes had been one people who, across time, borders and benighted policies, had become enemies. Trauma is Greek for ‘wound’. A traumatic homeostasis had been preserved by ensuring that at any given time, someone or something in the family – in the nation, in the region – was wounded, that pleasure was spoiled by someone wearing black at the head of the table, that a shard from some past wreckage was lodged in the circulatory system, and the crisis maintained.

  We were all good people, of course. We meant well, tried hard, felt deeply – and we were also unwitting servants of The Pain. This causes us cognitive dissonance that is so difficult to live with that we end up wilfully blind. Cognitive dissonance is when individuals or groups (such as nations) fail to reconcile their sense of being good people with the reality of having behaved destructively towards others, and themselves.

  And here’s the first infernal catch: we needed the relief of external justice before we could be well. We needed
an apology, a commemoration, a gesture at least – from the State, from History, from the Patriarchy. From Europe, that Babylonian whore whose great powers had decided on the shape of our biographies for generations, from our men who were absent or not perfect enough, from our mothers like Furies, from our children who ignored us, from the whole Earth that is witness to our suffering.

  But here’s the second infernal catch: what if relief didn’t come, not even after one thousand seven hundred years? For me and Nick, time was running out, and illness had been a stark reminder. We had to set ourselves free – and by doing so, release our ancestors too. Nobody was going to do it for us.

  Actions, events, even intentions leave a blueprint on Earth, because all is energy. In Prespa, the real source of my water dream, I finally grasped this – not just with the mind, for the mind alone can’t accommodate all of reality, but at the energy level. Strife had seeped into the matrix, creating an imprint we the distant children of this geography picked up, in a cycle of reinfection. Along with the crystalline beauty which gave us a chance to rise above, transcend, do things differently. If we don’t, the task will fall to those who live after us.

  As with the private, so with the collective. It seems intolerably cruel, as well as fathomlessly stupid, that yet more conflict may visit the Balkans within my and Nick’s lifetimes, but it is possible. We both felt it. War thrives on denial. And here, the necessary work of self-knowledge has not been completed. Self-knowledge is needed for reconciliation – that is, for lasting peace. Not more monuments to the ‘winning’ side, not more national martyrs, not more borders and armies. Just more kindness and more understanding. We should try to make peace for those who can’t because they are trapped in the past. Even the young can be dead to the present, when sufficiently brainwashed by their elders. Cronos loves to devour his children.

  Prespa, where I had no family history but where others’ histories reflected my own, showed me this with absolute clarity. It is up to us to release ourselves from the cult of war. If we want a more peaceful world, we must learn peace ourselves. It’s the hardest thing.