To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  TO THE LAKE

  ALSO BY KAPKA KASSABOVA

  Street without a Name:

  Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria

  Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story

  Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

  TO THE LAKE

  A Balkan Journey of War and Peace

  KAPKA KASSABOVA

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Kapka Kassabova

  Maps copyright © 2020 by John Gilkes

  First published in 2020 by Granta Books, London.

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permissions to quote from Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland by Neal Ascherson, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory by Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten, An Anthology of Modern Albanian Poetry: An Elusive Eagle Soars ed. and trans. Robert Elsie, Edward Lear in Albania: Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans ed. Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie, The Heroic Age by Stratis Haviaras, Broken April by Ismail Kadare, Remnants of Another Age by Nikola Madzirov, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-026-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-124-3

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949938

  Cover design and art: Kimberly Glyder

  TO MY MOTHER AND THE CHILDREN

  OF EXILES AND REFUGEES EVERYWHERE –

  MAY YOU FIND YOUR WAY TO THE SOURCE.

  THE DEAD OPEN THE EYES OF THE LIVING.

  AND TO THE LAKES,

  THEIR BOUNDLESS GENEROSITY.

  A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Introduction

  Give me wings

  Longing for the South

  PART ONE: SPRING

  Ochrida hangs on a hillside

  Macedonian Girl

  Biljana washed her linens

  Whose Are You?

  Lake Ohrid

  Across the Lake

  Girl of the waves

  One Thousand Seven Hundred Years

  I knew this rock

  The Keeper of the Black Madonna

  Swaying between joy and sorrow

  Roads

  The valley where we lived

  The Poetry and the Hunger

  We are the remnants of another age

  Besa

  The lake is a crystal

  Mountain of Bones

  PART TWO: AUTUMN

  In the village

  Poets of Pogradec

  The streaks on their faces

  Libertà

  Lake Prespa and Little Prespa

  Vale of Ghosts

  The king had goat ears

  Of Men and Islands

  I saw everything clearly now

  The Howl

  A man was tormented

  How to Heal the Insane and the Melancholy

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Epigraph Sources

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  This book tells of two ancient lakes. Some places are inscribed in our DNA yet take a long time to reveal their contours, just as some journeys are etched into the landscape of our lives yet take a lifetime to complete. So it is for me with these lakes.

  Lake Ohrid has exerted a pull on me since early childhood because my maternal grandmother was from there, and she was an influential figure in my early life. As an adult, I often thought of returning to the Lake properly, but sensed that I wasn’t ready. To journey to the place of your ancestors, you must be prepared to see what it is easier to deny.

  What finally propelled me was a concern that as time passed, something might happen insidiously. That unless I understood my maternal family’s existential landscape, I might repeat old patterns. That as we continue to witness in this century conflicts of a civil and fratricidal nature, divisive politics between and within nations, patriarchal autocracy and revisionism, mass emigration and displacement – as we witness this, unless we become aware of how we carry our own legacies, we too may become unwitting agents of destruction.

  Generations of my predecessors had lived by the Lake. I hoped they could serve as a gateway to the Lake and to this surprisingly little-known corner of Europe. The lake region is home to epic landscapes and rich histories. It is a realm of high altitudes and mesmeric depths, eagles and vineyards, orchards and old civilisations, a land tattooed with untold histories. A couple of years earlier, I had explored Europe’s far south-east to seek out the human stories of a triple border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. The lakes occupy the south-west of the Balkan peninsula and are likewise shared by three countries.

  The twin lakes of Ohrid (hard ‘h’) and Prespa are embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds of western Macedonia and eastern Albania. They are relatively close to the Adriatic and the Aegean, but whichever way you approach them, they don’t feel close to anything, not even to each other. Forbidding ranges must be traversed, and lonely roads travelled. Here passed the strategic Roman Via Egnatia (or Egnatian Way) on its way from Dyrrachium on the Adriatic to Constantinople on the Bosphorus. Later, Orthodox hermitages and churches were hewn into the limestone, later still Islamic caravanserais and dervish monasteries appeared. Thanks to the Via Egnatia, built in the mid-second century BC to connect the Roman world and used for nearly twenty centuries, the lake region became for a while, in the words of the historian Alain Ducellier, ‘the nerve centre of the Balkans’.

  The Via that shaped history was itself shaped by geography. It followed the valley of the River Shkumbin between the great mountains of Illyria, bypassed the twin lakes, snaked between mountain ranges that now straddle the (North) Macedonian–Greek border, before descending into the Pelagonian plains; reached the Aegean and continued, parallel to the coast, all the way to the Bosphorus.

  The lakes are engendered by springs, surrounded by springs, and connected to each other by underground streams. They are at the juncture of two and in places three national borders – Greece nibbles at the southern end of Lake Prespa and almost swallows up the teardrop lakelet at the bottom of it, Mikri (Little) Prespa. Here, at the confluence of powerful civilisational forces from antiquity to the present day, mingle the currents of two warm seas and the icy winds of mountains nearly 3,000 metres (9,000 feet) high.

  Ohrid and Prespa are Europe’s oldest lakes. Ohrid may even be the world’s second-oldest. Ordinary lakes last only a hundred thousand year
s at most before they fill up with sediments, but a handful – Tanganyika, Baikal, Ohrid-Prespa – have endured for over a million years. Despite recent probes, scientists cannot be precise about the age of Ohrid-Prespa; they may well be up to three million years old.

  Lake Ohrid is fed by tributaries, sublacustic springs, and most remarkably – by underground streams from Lake Prespa, which travel through the limestone Galicica Mountain (pronounced Ga-li-chi-tsa, 2,254 metres high). These sister springs account for a quarter of the lake’s incoming water. The porous karst ensures that the icy waters arrive at Lake Ohrid naturally filtered. This extraordinary transfusion, along with the bubbling lacustrine springs, can be seen at the St Naum Springs in Macedonia and the Drilon Springs in Albania as it happens, second by second.

  Prespa sits 180 metres above Ohrid, and seen from the air, the pair look like eyes in an ancient face. The area of the lakes and the Galicica Mountain between them form a reserve with an extremely rich biosphere. Brown bears, wolves and golden eagles inhabit the higher parts. Some say that the lakes’ geomagnetic location creates a very high vibrational quality. Some even believe that Ohrid Lake is inside an ‘energy vortex’, and a popular, if scientifically null, local hyperbole fancies yet another lake under the mountain – a ‘buried’ lake. There is also talk of a subaquatic mountain, caused by ongoing tectonic shifts in the region – which is not unlikely. But what is certain is that the subterranean communication system of the two lakes is the only one of its kind in Eurasia.

  Ten years ago on a visit to the Lake, I encountered a young monk who asked me where my grandmother was buried. I said Sofia. He said that it didn’t matter, that her spirit had returned here, because Lake Ohrid is a ‘gathering point’.

  On that same visit, I witnessed a freak accident. It was a warm September day. I stood on the cliffs of Kaneo above Ohrid town. From there, you could see the entire shore. I photographed a tourist boat gliding over the mirror of the lake. Thirty minutes later, the boat capsized and sank without trace, as if the lake had swallowed it. The people on it were visitors from Bulgaria. Fifteen drowned, the rest were rescued by locals. With eerie symbolism, that boat was called Ilinden, after the tragic Ilinden (St Elijah’s Day) Uprising in 1903 which had aimed to free Macedonia from Ottoman rule. Ilinden is commemorated every year in Bulgaria and the Republic of (North) Macedonia, though in an instance of retrospective nationalism the two countries’ governments periodically argue over who took part in it – Macedonians or Bulgarians, or both, and whether and to what degree there was a difference between the two.

  Tourists come to Lake Ohrid each summer, but the region’s deeper currents remain hidden. The Balkans are a complex civilisational weave into which diverse and sometimes conflicting versions of reality are read by the natives, and projected by outsiders. This Rorschach-test phenomenon has produced and endured more than one apocalyptic war. In the Balkans, as in many places across the world where a new–old nativism is rising again, melting pots are endangered. The lacustrine realm that is shared today by the three countries is one of the oldest surviving civilisational melting pots in Europe and the Middle East.

  A salade macédoine in French means the ultimate ‘mixed salad’. ‘With luck a traveller in Macedonia may hear six distinct languages and four allied dialects spoken in the same market place,’ wrote the British journalist Henry Noel Brailsford in 1905, when the region of Macedonia was part of a decayed empire and my great-grandparents were Ottoman subjects. A century later, as an indirect result of this tower-of-Babel effect, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was embroiled with Greece in a generation-long dispute over patrimony. It finally reached a formal resolution during my journey, with the Prespa Agreement, which saw the country’s name change – rather quickly, and for some, painfully – to Republic of North Macedonia. Although the region continues its tradition of confusion, complication and conspiracy, (North) Macedonia and Albania cling by the skin of their teeth to an old habit of tolerance.

  Since the end of the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) ‘the Balkans’ have been erroneously conflated with the former Yugoslavia, which occupies the western Balkans only, and the name has been widely replaced in international bureaucracy by ‘South-East Europe’, but in this book I call them the Balkans. This is in a spirit of reclaiming the natural, once neutral, name of the peninsula, after the epic Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria. Although the toponym was initially imposed from the outside, it has become over the centuries a self-designated cultural identifier conferring a transnational kind of citizenship on its diverse people, even when they disagree on other matters.

  ‘The Balkans, that’s us,’ my grandmother used to say – meaning her family. But in as far as ‘the Balkans’ came to be equated with the fragility of peace and tolerance, hers was a broader insight into the human condition. Our world is unstoppably connected, yet increasingly self-fragmenting. Some might say ‘Balkanised’. In a term now a century old – it was first used in 1918 in the New York Times – to Balkanize is ‘to divide a region or body into smaller, mutually hostile states or groups’. The French se balcaniser is self-reflexive, implying full agency, which hardly makes it happier. But before ‘the Balkans’ as a political designator acquired a negative hue, and contrary to the lazy and inaccurate stereotype of ‘ancient hatreds’, the peninsula had long housed a polyphonic, sometimes cacophonous, diversity. It still does.

  In a wider context the two great opposing global forces at present, and I think at all critical times in human history, are these: fractiousness and harmony, war and peace, ignorance and understanding. Because of their transcontinental, transcultural geography, the southern Balkans have been a strategic theatre where these dichotomies have been played out with especial force, even ferocity. The geographic region of Macedonia sits in a highly seismic part of an already seismic peninsula. In 1963, the capital Skopje was destroyed by a massive earthquake. Thousands were killed and injured. My grandparents drove from Sofia to Skopje with supplies and camp beds – my grandmother’s brothers and their families were left without homes, and my grandparents camped with them in the parks of the ruined city. They lay awake at night in their tents, listening to the earth roaring underneath them. To this day, the clock at Skopje’s central railway station is frozen at the hour of the earthquake.

  Sometimes, I feel like that clock. It’s an irrational feeling, out of joint with the present: ruins all around, stuck in a long-ago moment of disaster. I knew that this stopped-clock legacy had come down from my mother but I wanted to find out where that came from, and how others carried it. I wanted to know what creates cultural and psychological inheritance, and how we can go forward with it, instead of sleepwalking back into the geopolitical abyss. The abyss is home to the bones of our predecessors who could not escape dark forces. Some of those forces are still with us – they never went away – the better to let us know that the abyss is always open for business.

  Geography shapes history – we generally accept this as a fact. But we don’t often explore how families digest big historiogeographies, how these sculpt our inner landscape, and how we as individuals continue to influence the course of history in invisible but significant ways – because the local is inseparable from the global. I went to the Lakes to seek an understanding of such forces. I knew from my Border journey that sometimes history’s thoroughfares are disguised as geography’s outposts, the better to fool us that the past is another country.

  From roughly the time of Herodotus, the ‘father of history’ (fifth century BC), and for the next twenty centuries or so, the Greek word historia meant the multifaceted, multidisciplinary, often narrative exploration of a subject in the spirit of total enquiry. The subject of Herodotus’ Histories was ostensibly the Persian–Greek wars, but his deeper subject is how human destiny plays out across vast stretches of time, memory and geography, and against the ever-moving canvas of the known world. Only in the late Middle Ages did ‘history’ come to be associated specifically with the past, and gradually as
a discipline lodged entirely in the past, cut and dried, and separate from the rest of earthly experience – which is in essence boundless and not always linear. It was the original view of historia that I sought through this journey.

  It was impossible to travel these ancient roads without seeking out earlier writers on the Lakes and the region. They have been delightful companions. Elsewhere in this book, some private individuals’ names have been changed. When it comes to place names and terms describing national and regional identities, I have taken the utmost care to work with unbiased sources and firsthand accounts when writing about the past, and with current self-identifiers when writing about the present. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was renamed the Republic of North Macedonia in February 2019, which is why I use this new name in its current context only. Before this, the country was known locally and internationally as Macedonia or the Republic of Macedonia, and the varying usages in this book reflect this situation. I take the same approach with other place names that have changed over time.

  Given the complexity and sensitivity of some of the material here, if anyone feels that their particular viewpoint is underrepresented despite my striving for inclusivity and fairness, I ask for forgiveness.

  Kapka Kassabova

  The Highlands of Scotland

  Give me wings and I shall soar

  Back to our lands, our shores

  Set eyes on our places

  See the faces of Ohrid and Struga

  Where the lake is white and true

  And when the wind blows – dark and blue.

  Konstantin Miladinov, 1861

  LONGING FOR THE SOUTH

  It so happens that I am the fourth generation in a female line to emigrate. A hundred years ago, my great-grandmother emigrated from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the Kingdom of Bulgaria. Her only daughter, my grandmother, emigrated from the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia to the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. My mother, an only child, emigrated with her family from Bulgaria to New Zealand, and I emigrated from New Zealand to Scotland. My sister moved back to Europe too. For each of us, emigration has meant separation from our parents.