To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Neim, a stocky, charismatic local Turk, had gone to school with someone in our family.

  ‘And of course, I remember Tatjana,’ he said. ‘How could I forget her?’

  We watched the resident homeless dog eat the remnants of a meat dish on the pavement, but not the rice.

  Back in the gated town, St Sophia sat in a small square lined with cafes and the remains of other churches. I came here every day to look for the monk of ten years ago. But instead of him, by the rose bushes sat a freelance guide with a paisley cravat and liver spots, who assured me that no such monk had been here.

  ‘No, he was here,’ I said, ‘we sat on this bench. I still have his CD of chants sung by nuns.’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ he said. ‘But this church has been a museum since before I was born, and before that it was a munitions depot for the Turkish army and then an arms shop. From about the mid-nineteenth century on. I’m even older than I look.’

  And smiling flirtatiously, he took me around the grounds. There was far more depth than spread here. History was experienced horizontally, but read vertically: one lot of ruins sat upon another, and only the top layers were visible to the naked eye.

  A couple of centuries after the Barbarian invasions, earthquakes, and Justinian’s Plague in the sixth century, the town was resurrected and set up as a religious centre by the Bulgarian tsar, Boris I. Over the next few generations it enjoyed a Golden Age of Slavonic literacy and learning, in which missionaries and writers from Bulgaria, like Clement and Naum and their followers, were instrumental. The two were disciples of the remarkable monks Cyril and Methodius, creators of the Glagolitic script. The brothers were commissioned by a Moravian prince to create a specifically Slavonic liturgy which eventually emancipated all the Slavs from the Greek and Latin scriptures (and therefore from ecumenical control). This is how the Glagolitic script was born. It was superseded by the Cyrillic alphabet, which was developed in the Preslav Literary School in Bulgaria, propagated across the southern Balkans by missionaries like Clement and Naum, and is now used in Europe and Asia by two hundred and fifty million people: at the westernmost end, the Macedonians and the Montenegrins; at the easternmost, the Mongolians.

  The early enlightenment-seeking monks endured ascetic decades of wandering and persecution by the Latin Church before they settled on these shores. Among a population steeped in paganism, it was early days yet for Christianity. Clement and Naum’s mission was to convert the locals to the ways of Christ. They were largely successful, and an early Slavonic Enlightenment took place on the shores of the two lakes. Then the Byzantines took over, and Lake Ohrid continued to be known as the Balkan Jerusalem, reputed to have 365 churches – one for each day of the year.

  St Sophia was the largest survivor. Its badly damaged frescoes had a gentle eccentricity. The Virgin is grim-faced, with Jesus in her belly, unborn but fully formed. In another, Sophia herself appears, small and Gothic in a corner, a phantom in a nightie. This represented the dream of Archbishop Gregorius at the time, whose lapidary inscription in Greek, dated 1313, still marks the façade of the church. In another scene the Virgin Mary is on her deathbed, and among those who appear to her is Jesus – but he is still a baby. Or was that her soul?

  The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a time of artistic flowering in the Byzantine world, and the way Eastern Orthodoxy of that period merges everyday reality with biblical and fantastical scenes is reminiscent of surrealism and the dreaming mind. It was appropriate that my memory of the vanished monk should be set here, where several reality planes meet in the frescoes. I wondered where the fifteen drowned people, from the accident I had witnessed a decade earlier, were buried.

  The lake is a gathering point, the monk had said.

  Like its Istanbul namesake, St Sophia had long run its course as a religious hub. Between 1400 and 1913, when Macedonia was wrenched from Ottoman hands, it had functioned as a mosque, with a minaret. But in the 1660s, the Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi reported seeing Christians being admitted to pray, for a small coin, while Muslims didn’t use the temple at all. St Sophia had been the town’s key conversion – the Ottomans customarily converted the biggest church into a mosque, or a fatih, a way of marking territory – but St Sophia the mosque had never taken off.

  A local historian told me that an inlaid stone with a medieval Arabic inscription had been removed by the authorities. It said: You who are of spirit and enter here will feel like a fish in water, but if you lack in spirit – like a caged bird you shall be. In its place, they had installed a faux-antique marble slab showing the Vergina sunburst – the one from the flag.

  Dear St Sophia, whose are you?

  As if reading my mind, the guide turned to me: ‘Whose are you, my dear?’

  Ah yes, he nodded approvingly. His uncle had been a master tailor, like my great-grandfather Kosta; they’d have known each other through the guilds.

  ‘And of course,’ he said, ‘I remember Tatjana and her mother.’

  I asked his name.

  ‘Mustafa Shain,’ he said, and we shook hands. He was a Turk. A Muslim who showed visitors around the Christian heritage of a town that still had nine working mosques – this was truly an Ohridian occurrence.

  ‘A Rumeli Turk,’ he specified with pride.

  This was the self-designated pedigree of ethnic Turks in the Balkans and it stands for cosmopolitanism and a role in the Balkan mosaic. A Rumeli Turk is a European Turk. Rumelia is how the Byzantine world was referred to, prior to modernity. The entire Balkan peninsula under the Ottomans was known as the land of the Rumeli, European Christians.

  Mustafa Shain and I stood at a glass well, the older foundations showing beneath.

  ‘It’s the way we are here,’ he said, ‘each tribe came and left a trace.’

  We too were the living traces of those tribes.

  During the first Serbian annexation of Macedonia (sarcastically called here ‘Serbia: 1’, as in a football match), his family changed their name to Shainich, to pacify the Serbs. Then, during the second Bulgarian annexation of Macedonia in the 1940s (‘Bulgaria: 2’), they became Shainov, to pacify the Bulgarians. In the space of forty years, Ohrid was claimed and annexed by Serbia and Bulgaria twice each: that’s four changes of hands since its liberation from the Ottomans.

  Mustafa shrugged. He had lake-blue eyes. ‘But we are all linked like a chain, and nothing can separate us, not even God. That is why we must embrace, not fight.’

  And then, to my alarm, he embraced me with such passion that I did have to fight him off.

  ‘Look here, you’re one of us.’ He straightened his paisley cravat after the embarrassing scuffle. ‘You must let me take you out to dinner.’

  Pulling myself away, I passed a group of women with covered heads. I thought they were Turks. That’s why Mustafa was hovering by the church – to cater for the large numbers of Turkish tourists in Ohrid, who moved in groups, following a nostalgic, whitewashed historic itinerary of Ottoman sites. But then I heard the scarved women speaking Russian. Like the ultra-pious adherents of the Islamised new Turkey, the Russian ultra-Orthodox headscarves were a way of showing allegiance to the powers of the day. The Russians, like the Turks, always moved in groups.

  I left them to Mustafa. Ohridian men were consummate chancers. They flirted until they dropped dead – I saw men so ill and old they could barely move, and still they tried it on. This was a southern, water-borne sensuality induced by sunshine and tourism, but also a release from small-town life. Winters were long and dull. Marrying your cousin had lifelong consequences, but a summer fling didn’t. And flirtation was a form of compliment here, whether you wanted it or not.

  Evliya Çelebi, an omnivorous sensualist, waxed lyrical about the lake’s inhabitants:

  ‘Because the climate is so pleasant, the men and women, boys and girls here are very handsome. All have silvery complexions, a high stature and wonderful looks. Their beauty is well known throughout the world. Many a visitor has l
eft their heart here.’

  You wonder what he got up to. And looking at Ohridians today, who are on the short side, I wonder what happened.

  Unlike Evliya’s, Edward Lear’s sexuality was painfully repressed into his work and adventuring. And yet he was not immune to the sensuous allure of Ohrid. He spent several months travelling through Albania and Macedonia on horseback and wrote a compelling diary. ‘Of many days passed in many lands, in wandering amid noble scenery, I can recall none more variously delightful and impressive than this has been.’ In his Ohrid watercolours men loiter at corners, dressed in long woollen capes, fezzes, baggy Turkish shalvar trousers, or traditional white Macedonian or Albanian kilt-like fustanellas over trousers. The only women who appear are peasants with donkeys; the gated-town women and the Muslim women of the sarays are nowhere to be seen.

  Lear was pelted with stones by Muslim women and children in Ohrid. Shaitan, Shaitan! they yelled at him, thinking he was Satan stealing the images from real places and people. The locals had never seen a street artist before. He ended up escorted by a bodyguard issued by the then Governor of Ohrid, Shereeff Bey (nephew of Djeladin Bey). Here’s his visit to the Upper Saray in the kalé:

  The Bey himself, in a snuff-coloured robe, trimmed with fur, the white-turbaned Cogia, the scarlet-vested Gheghes; the purple and gold-brocaded Greek secretary, the troops of long-haired, full-skirted, glittering Albanian domestics, armed and belted – one and all looking at me with an imperturbable fixed glare … The Bey, after the ceremonies of pipes and coffee … expressed his willingness to send guards with me to the end of the world, if I pleased, declaring at the same time that the roads, however unfrequented, were perfectly safe.

  As he and his dragoman (translator-guide) continued their intrepid way west into Albania, Lear bought himself a fez – to try and blend in and stop being taken for some ‘profane magician’.

  But even if all travellers’ accounts – from the twelfth-century Arab writer Sharif Al-Idrissi, who reported that it took him three days to circumnavigate the lake, to Victorians like Lear – speak of Ohrid’s compelling aura, by the time my great-grandparents were born and the English writer and illustrator Edith Durham arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, life was grim for everyone. Socially and politically, the lake was a festering backwater. Ottoman colonisation lasted longer in Macedonia and Albania than anywhere else on the peninsula. The ravages of a decayed autocracy resulted in civil collapse and the rule of banditry. The Turkish soldiers whose job it was to keep the population down and quash rebellions, were neglected by the High Porte in Istanbul, and so impoverished that they wore socks stolen from women and raw sheepskins over their threadbare uniforms.

  In the lanes around St Sophia, where workshops sold traditional crafts, one stood out. The artist-jeweller was doing something bold: blending old filigree silver lacework with contemporary design. Her jewellery captured the Lake.

  ‘Because the Lake is inside me,’ she said, and she did have the bronzed, wind-swept look of someone who spent her days on the water. Her name was Marta and she lived with her mother in one of the handsome wood-clad houses that hoard their secrets in towering stacked-up floors above the street. A plaque on the house recalled a key chapter in the Struggle for Macedonia. The Turkish groups walked right past it with their guides: histories of struggle and strife didn’t fit with their Ottoman nostalgia.

  Here had lived Marko Bosnakov, son of wealthy traders and one of the ‘Salonica conspirators’. Marta was his great-great-niece and thus indirectly associated with the legacy of the extraordinary Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (VMRO). Along with the original Irish Republican Army, they were Europe’s earliest modern independence fighters to turn to terrorism. The history of the VMRO is as tortuously tangled as the Balkans themselves.

  The journalist Henry Brailsford wrote that ‘Macedonia, in 1903–4, was … a desert swept by a human hurricane. It is in these conditions that the Bulgarian insurgent movement [the VMRO] has grown up, a constructive organisation opposed to a negative and destroying force – a government within an anarchy.’

  The anarchy was the late Ottoman Empire. Marko Bosnakov had become involved with the Organisation at the turn of the twentieth century, while studying in Salonica’s Bulgarian College where the sons of prominent Ohridians were sent. The aim of the Organisation was to ignite a popular movement for the liberation of Macedonia from the Ottomans, and Salonica (Thessaloniki) was its metropolis. These men had no illusions and their motto reflected this: ‘An end with horror is better than horror without end.’ Later, a branch of the Organisation simplified it to ‘Freedom or Death’. That had been the slogan of the Bulgarian national liberation movement a generation earlier – ‘Svoboda ili Smrt’ – mirroring the even earlier Greek liberation movement with its identical ‘Eleftheria i Thanatos’.

  The Organisation had many cells. Marko joined one founded by the gemidjias, or Boatmen of Salonica, who weren’t actual boatmen but described themselves poetically in their manifesto as ‘a group of people who have made a covenant with death by boarding a boat on a turbid sea. We’ll either crash, or navigate out of the storm.’ Their dedicated underground work of propaganda and national consciousness-building meant that within a decade of its inception in 1893, every village and town of Macedonia supported their credo: ‘Macedonia for the Macedonians’ (initially, this included Greeks and Turks, but things didn’t turn out according to plan).

  Among the plots they planned and carried out was an act of public terrorism in Salonica. The aim: to shock Europe into helping Macedonia to shake off the Ottomans. After painstakingly digging a tunnel under the city streets, carrying out the soil in handkerchiefs from a small grocery shop that Marko had hired from a wealthy local, and helped by other locals who were in on the conspiracy, they blew up an entire district, including the buildings of the Ottoman Bank. A French ship was set on fire, to give France a jolt too.

  The Ottoman administration was shaken to its core, but Europe did not intervene. France expressed haughty disapproval of the Organisation’s methods, though in principle it sympathised with the plight of the Macedonians; the only immediate result was that their plight worsened as terrible reprisals were inflicted on civilians. The Struggle for Macedonia was the most dramatic late chapter in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, itself a process dubbed by the European Powers ‘the Eastern Question’. But what was the answer?

  Most of the conspirators blew themselves up and ten bystanders were killed in the explosions. Marko, the youngest of the lot, was captured and given a life sentence in the Libyan desert. He lived to thirty, long enough to hear of the liberation of Macedonia in the Balkan War of 1912. Just as amnesty was announced, he succumbed to malaria. His last wish was to rest in Ohrid, so friends cut off his head and buried his body in a desert oasis. As you do.

  ‘But we don’t know where the head is,’ Marta said. ‘We know they brought it to Ohrid. Perhaps it’s in some churchyard here in the gated town.’

  Marta was a true Ohridian. She spoke of unpleasant things with quiet dignity.

  ‘Enough about that,’ she said with passion. ‘I hate politics!’

  She’d had a relationship with an ethnic Turk and it had caused a scandal. Everybody here said they hated politics. ‘Politics’ had come to be equated with injustice and manipulation.

  In photographs, Marko has the same slight look as Marta, his black, deep-set eyes shining with intelligence and intensity, like hers. Her latest collection she had called Storm on the Lake: four striking silver necklaces.

  ‘There are four stages in a lake storm’ – she touched the necklaces one after the other.

  ‘One, calm. Only the fishermen know it’s coming. The rest don’t believe it.

  ‘Two, imminence. All four winds appear and blow geometric patterns on the water.

  ‘Three, here it comes. That’s what people say when they see the storm coming and stand transfixed on the shore. There’s nothing to be done.


  ‘Four, it has passed. Now, the aftermath.’

  Just then, church bells rang, slow, deep-voiced, archaic. I couldn’t tell whether they were ringing in celebration or in doom.

  ‘In the old days, the bells had a range of ringing patterns for different occasions. Slow for death, faster for a birth,’ said my new friend Vlado Zhura, while his wife – also a distant relative – served the moist, layered Ohrid torta with the world’s smallest coffee spoons.

  ‘How can we forget Tatjana?’ she said. ‘Tatjana and her mother Velika.’

  When people spoke of my aunt Tatjana and her mother, they were invoked together. Tatjana had been the apple of her mother’s eye.

  Vlado was the unofficial archivist of the gated town. A retired journalist of some renown, he was a well-spoken, stubby man with a cauliflower nose and affable personality. Due to poor health, he was confined to their shuttered house at the top of the old town, full of books in many languages. Their sons were my age and both lived here, with the parents. From their high balcony, the gated town looked ready to tumble into the lake.

  ‘The highest bell in town was rung to help orient fishermen in heavy fog. Instead of a lighthouse. Or in case of fire, to alert the townsfolk. Same thing with the muezzin’s call to prayer, it had a range of chants. When someone died, the name was said as part of the call to prayer. Did I mention that Djeladin Bey appointed exclusively Christians to the top jobs?’

  Djeladin ruled for fifty years (1780–1831), Vlado told me, and is remembered for three things. One, his punishment of debtors. A boat trip to the middle of the lake would be arranged, where the charged were brought in cages. Those cages must be still at the bottom of the lake. Two, that his estates and Ohrid’s top jobs were managed by Christians: the chief of police, the chief of carriage transport, the chief tax inspector, the chief of the Tailors’ and Silk Embroiderers’ Guild of which my ancestors were members. But above all, Djeladin was remembered for his Christian wife Tashula, brought to Ohrid as a slave from a massacre of rebels in the Macedonian town of Naoussa, and for whom he had built a private chapel here. Their only child died in infancy, and after his death Tashula lived a long, quiet life in the fishing community of Kaneo under the old town, and was still invoked in songs.