It strikes me as significant that in some Slavic languages – that is, in the more Eastern understanding of human suffering – the equivalent to the reductively Newtonian ‘mental illness’ is ‘ailing of the soul’ (dushevna bolest). And that ‘psychiatry’ and ‘psychology’ come from the Greek for ‘soul’. It is also intriguing that in some Slavic languages the words duh or dusha mean soul, and yet in others – ghost. The archaic meaning of the word was ‘person’.
Nomche had nailed it: everyone leaves an impression, the ghost of themselves.
One of the ‘Eight Miracles and Scenes from the Life of Naum’ depicted in the church was entitled Naum Treats the Nervously Afflicted, where two blank-faced youths are lying down – or are they levitating? – with their feet shackled in a wooden vice. Naum stands by in the courtyard, praying with his arms wide open, against a rich midnight blue. It’s a scene worthy of Chagall.
And here’s the interesting part: in nearly all existing versions of Naum Treats the Nervously Afflicted, demons emerge from their mouths. This is also a recurrent motif in the recorded oral histories. Healing is achieved through utterance. Utter your truth, find your voice, name your pain, let your demons be released, shed the past, howl if you have to but let go – this seems to be the principle at work. It is ironic that Clement and Naum preached against the pagan ways – ‘magic’ and ‘orgiastic dancing’ were singled out for opprobrium – when they too used the principle of exorcism and energy healing. The purging of ill spirits, dark entities and shadow aspects of the psyche is part of the repertoire of early Christianity, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism and the shamanic traditions of Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Either way the mute, the grief-stricken, the obsessive-compulsive, the catatonic, the sleepless and the merely melancholy seem to have found solace here. Maybe it was simply time away from their homes that healed them. Here, there was no besa, no perfection or death. You could swim in the lake and be as weird as you liked. Though records tell that patients who were taken in by the monastery were also put to work – cleaning, making bread. Witness accounts tell of many a child, young person or ‘bride’ who regain their speech, their cheer or their usual self after being pushed into the lake, and specifically into the icy springs of the River Drim. The cure rate was high.
What was it about this place?
Nomche was having difficulty squeezing back into his little house.
‘A miracle,’ he said. He looked relieved as he settled in his chair.
Over time, Naum had become a byword for justice, health, peace, hope, plenty and destiny. Together, Naum and Clement were the lake people’s conscience, their guardian spirits, and their gods. They were associated with phenomena involving blazing light, and legends told of how they communicated with each other across the lake with lights – another common image in Eastern Christianity and in mystical Islam.
The spooky well covered with an iron grid from my childhood was still here, and I peered in to see the glint of coins from past decades. At the time, you put your head on Naum’s tomb and the Yugoslav state pocketed your fee, just as they pocketed everything the monastery had. From monastery estates and taxes to businesses, stealing was continuous practice here. Among the delightfully naive frescoes depicting ‘Eight Miracles and Scenes from the Life of Naum’, two are dedicated to theft: A Monk Turns to Stone as He Attempts to Steal Naum’s Relics and The Horse Thief Leaves the Monastery but the Horse Returns. This is why the people of the lake need Naum to provide mercy and justice, still. Because the state has failed to provide it for a thousand years.
Nomche was from the poorest family in the Village of Mean People, I’d been told. In the days before his monastery job, he didn’t have two matching shoes – that’s how poor he was. The monastery had taken him in, and now he and his wife were fixtures. He would be impossible to budge from his kiosk. I imagined him fossilised before being removed, hunched in his chair.
‘A miracle,’ Nomche summed up his life. ‘Every day I thank Naum.’
Visitors began to trickle through the arch, and everybody bought a candle. The Quasimodo-like man stood by, looking fixedly at the melting wax that he’d scoop up with relish at the end of the day.
The many springs at the skirts of the mountain had been pagan sites before sandalled missionaries, desert hermits, self-proclaimed prophets and mystics started to arrive from Syria, Jordan and Persia. Thracian, Illyrian and Slavic nature rites were deeply connected with water. Communion with clean water is humanity’s precious link with eternity – even when all else is lost. Behind the monastery grounds stretched a mixed forest. It was an enchanted, shaded world full of bubbling springs. You saw water, heard water, inhaled water, water was under your feet even when you couldn’t see it.
At the main Naum Springs in the woods, I recognised the boatman – he was unchanged since ten years ago. He had one of those ageless faces. I’d remembered his name because he shared it with my father.
‘Nikola,’ I said, and he smiled as if he too remembered me. I climbed into his boat and we glided noiselessly over the lily-covered pond, bubbling, fairytale-like, with all the springs that converged here before the water reached the lake. Multiple streams from Prespa and thirty underwater springs met here, resulting in up to ten cubic metres of water per second discharging into the lake. The pond lived in its own time capsule under the weeping willows.
Nikola was the first boatman of the springs. He’d set himself up in the impoverished 1990s, when he and his mother survived by gathering herbs and mushrooms and selling them at the market. Since then, a dozen others had set up shop, but they were after easy bucks, I could see it. He was the only poet of the springs.
‘Make a wish,’ he said. The bottom of the pond glinted with coins, some oxydised green, thrown in over the decades by visitors – a coin for a wish. But I couldn’t think of any – I already had everything I could wish for.
‘It’s the springs,’ he said. ‘I’ve had people weep in this boat.’ Yet others became still and serene, and there were also those who became obsessed with the springs.
‘A Japanese guy has been in my boat ninety times. You know the Japanese for spring? Mizu no izumi.’
Nikola knew the word for spring in dozens of languages. The reason why Nikola was light-hearted was that he lived above a giant spring that cleansed him daily. He had published books of photographs capturing the people of the Macedonian mountain heartlands, villages of old men and women, a land of wrenching beauty and neglect, but all his inspiration came from this spring, he said, even when he was far from here – like in Cambodia and Vietnam where he went last winter.
‘It’s like the Balkans,’ he said.
Broken and fragmented in some ways, eternal and complete in others.
On my last day, a cold wind blew from Albania. Mean Valley filled with mist. In the morning, I was chatting to Nomche in his kiosk when a gaggle of young nuns arrived in the courtyard. Black-clad in capes like crows heralding autumn, they went into the church and began to sing with honeyed voices like a choir of archangels. Nomche and I listened. They sang in Romanian.
‘A miracle,’ Nomche said.
When they came out, the nuns were giggly and light, with a crystalline, limpid quality that contrasted sharply with what the bulk of visitors brought as they trod heavily under the arched doorway: depression, apathy, addiction. The ailments of the Earth.
Like Nomche, I had started to ‘just look’. As the nuns fluttered down to the jetty, the head nun Nymphodora turned and called to me playfully:
‘Pray for us.’
I waved back. I didn’t know any prayers, and anyway it was not the nuns who needed praying for, it was everybody else.
On that last evening, I went down to the beach where the springs of the River Drim flowed into the lake. Each time we’d come to the lake in the past forty years, I would swim here with my dad – my dad who had given me the best of himself and asked for nothing in return. This was our place. It was thanks to him that I
could swim out and swim back to the shore without fear. Thanks to him that I had broken free, knowing he was behind me, willing me towards the light. Like him, I’d always loved water and sunshine.
I took off my clothes and waded in, instantly losing my footing as the icy jet cut me at the knees and swept me in. You couldn’t stay inside the root of the river for long, but you didn’t need to because its nature imprinted itself on you instantly.
The jet pushed me into the placid warmth of the lake. I swam out. The water was so thin I could barely feel it on my skin. The mountains rose on all sides, bathed in a red sunset. I knew their peaks and their mean valleys. Past and future fell away. I saw a water snake’s skin in the water – it floated transparent, the ghost of the snake. The further out I swam, the more it felt as if I was flying, and the lighter everything became. Then I turned round because I didn’t want to be caught far out from the shore at night, and swam back to the beach.
All is one. Don’t let me forget this, don’t let the bastards divide me again. Our tragedy is fragmentation. It begins as a state of mind and ends up as destiny. It is the tragedy of our family of nations who hobble across this great peninsula, this exquisitely set Earth, like an army of blind soldiers a thousand years old looking for a place to rest. Let them rest. Forgive them, forgive me, forgive us. Our fear drove us insane and melancholy.
Yet the source was here all along. Every possibility is still at the source. All it asks of you is to stop struggling. Wade in, one September evening when the sky is African-red and the lake could be Tanganyika – it is the same lake – wade in and free yourself of the burden you’ve been carrying for centuries, become anything. Trout, eel, any of your ancestors still a child at one with the water and not yet ready to do the things that would lead to your birth, to the person you think is you, though what you are in the end is water, a spring that renews itself every second as it rushes in ecstasy to the lake.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my mother for sharing, over the years, stories and memories, and so enriching my understanding of the past and how deeply connected to it we are. Thanks to my relatives in Ohrid for their warmth and humour: Snezka and Krste, Biljana and Stefan, Tino and Nate, Maja and Jordan, Ognen and Hristina; also Bojan in Germany, Kiril in Portugal and Boyka in Sofia. Thanks to Vlado Zhura, Dejan Panovski, Nikola Puleski of Ohrid Town Council, specialist guide Katarina Vassileska, Chris Mounsey of Balkan Tracks, Christopher Buxton, Hristo Matanov for his counsel on Tsar Samuil’s end days, and Alexander Shpatov for the Sultana conversation. Thanks to Andi Kosta and Ledi Zeqollari in Pogradec for their time.
Huge thanks to Nick Nasev who was not only an astute and enlightening travel companion, but also very generously gave of his time, energy and vast Balkan expertise – as well as his extraordinary family story. I know I haven’t done it full justice here, but I hope it is a beginning, and that others may be encouraged to tell theirs.
My deepest appreciation to the vital Sarah Chalfant and Alba Ziegler-Bailey of the Wylie Agency who understood and supported this book from the very beginning and gave me the confidence to continue. Many thanks to Laura Barber at Granta for her sensitive and committed editing – and for being an all-round literary angel. And thanks to Sue Phillpott for her brilliant and devoted work on the copy-edit.
My love goes to TD who healed me, and Maggie McKechnie who enabled me to see the pattern behind the repetition. Another great teacher, Dónal Creedon, helped me to see where all war and peace begin – within us. I thank you for showing me that we have a choice.
GLOSSARY
bavcha, bahcha – a garden
belvitsa – a type of bleak, a fish endemic to Lake Prespa
besa – an oath, part of the Kanun
bey – a title for a local governor in Ottoman times
charshia – a market, usually along the main commercial street
chun – a traditional Ohrid Lake boat
detsa begalci (Bulgarian, Macedonian) – refugee children of the Greek Civil War, most of whom ended up in Eastern Europe; associated in Greece with paedomazoma (literally ‘the gathering of children’)
ferman – an official document during the Ottoman Empire
gurbet – work abroad, often for long periods
High Porte – also Sublime Porte; the central government of the Ottoman Empire
kalé – fortress
Kanun – a medieval code of honour in northern Albania
keche – a soft skullcap, Albanian, normally white
kiradjia – drover, caravan-owner, travelling trader in pre-modern Albania and Macedonia
komita, komitadja – freedom-fighter, literally ‘member of a secret committee’, during the national liberation movements at the end of the Ottoman era; the medieval meaning was ‘governor’ – as in the Tsar Samuil dynasty of the Komitopouli
koran – see pastrmka
pashalak – fiefdom, semi-autonomous domain in the Ottoman Balkans; from pasha, high-ranking official
pastrmka (Macedonian), koran (Albanian) – a species of trout endemic to Lake Ohrid
samovila, vila – female shape-shifting entity in Balkan folklore
saray – mansion, stately quarters, for Ottoman rulers and their households
tekke – a Sufi lodge
varosh – inner town, old town
VMRO – the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, originally a secret political organisation with many branches, aiming to liberate Macedonia from the Ottomans. Today, the name of political parties in North Macedonia and Bulgaria.
EPIGRAPH SOURCES
vii Walden by Henry David Thoreau
9 ‘Longing for the South’ by Konstantin Miladinov (my translation)
25 The Burden of the Balkans by Edith Durham
45 ‘Biljana Washed Her Linens’, Ohridian folk song (my translation)
97 ‘Girl of the waves’, Albanian Tosk song (my rendition of an unattributed translation from Albanian)
115 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
133 ‘Swaying between joy and sorrow’ by Jalal ad-Din Balkhi-Rumi (trans. Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin)
151 Pasqualia by Zhivko Chingo (my translation from Macedonian)
177 ‘When Time Ceases’ by Nikola Madzirov (my translation from Macedonian)
201 On Lake Doiran by Geo Milev (my translation from Bulgarian)
225 ‘Pogradec’ by Lasgush Poradeci (trans. Robert Elsie, edited by me)
249 Broken April by Ismail Kadare
297 Bulgarian Folk Tales (my translation)
313 The Heroic Age by Stratis Haviaras
357 The Miracles of Naum of Ohrid by Stojan Risteski (my translation from Macedonian)
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