To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  It is easier that the shadow rest with the other, not with the self.

  Here, where the landscape was starkly masculine, comfortless, almost turned against itself, it was hard not to feel that any great imbalance will remain in the land, as a reminder.

  Fraser’s party set off at night and rode for sixteen hours to reach the next destination. He captures the mood:

  Now in the black of the morning we had to climb further. None of us spoke. We were too cold to speak. We had to ascend broken clefts of rock … Day came with the thinnest haze hanging over the world and clouds still resting in the great black ravines beneath us which looked like monster graves.

  The torrents of innumerable centuries had worn out chasms … At the bends tumbling stone had obliterated the track. Rarely at such points was it more than twelve inches wide. At first one held breath, whilst the horse, picking its way as though on a tight-rope, walked round a precipice edge where was a sheer drop of a thousand feet … I turned my face to the slatey wall because to look into the gulf, which seemed to fall from my very knee, made me feel positively sick.

  Fraser saw long stretches of the Roman road, then they’d suddenly plunge into a precipice, suggesting that the shape of the valleys had shifted over time.

  Riding here around the same time, munching on oranges given to her by Elbasan’s governor, Edith Durham notes that this section of the Egnatian Way was completely destroyed by the Turks in the wake of the Ilinden Uprising, ‘in a blind rage, with the intent to destroy all communications as far as possible’.

  Non-existent as it was then, this had been a major trans-Balkan itinerary, the highway between the Adriatic and the Aegean. Those who sought passage into the Balkans and Asia had to take it. Even now, on the tar-sealed road, we were never far from hairpin bends and tumbling boulders. Which gave me and Tino some idea of what it must have been like for our ancestors to move across this terrain at all times, in all weathers, and pretty much until they dropped dead from their horses.

  My mother had given me an old family memoir. The author was a maternal uncle of Ljubitsa’s, a civil servant in Bulgaria, where he emigrated in the late 1800s. Subsequent generations would acquire university degrees and sedentary jobs, leading to my life of books and Tino’s nocturnal Internet vigils in stock markets and jazz clubs. We had long grown disconnected from the land. But our distant predecessors had merged with it. The early Gardeners had done it through gardening, the early Karadimchevs through road trade.

  The Karadimchev clan of my great-grandmother’s are traced back to 1700. There was an Ohrid man known as Dimche Karata, Dimche the Black. He was of darker complexion than usual – perhaps he had Arab blood. Dimche the Black amassed a fortune and left behind mansions by the kalé. He was a trader and so were his son and grandson, driving their caravans of horses and mules along the main trading route of the Egnatian Way: Salonica–Bitola–Ohrid–Elbasan–Durrës. They dealt in fish, mutton, olives, oil, wool, tobacco and other official and unofficial goods, and they also carried the mail between these remote stations, along the ‘government post-road’ – because there were no postmen in this corner of the Empire. Roads were too dangerous, conditions too gruelling.

  The grandson was named Dimo, after Dimche the Black, and this Dimo had forty horses and a special teskere (pass) from the sultan, which served as passport and trading licence. Travelling traders like him were called kiradjias, and this was the single most dangerous métier at the time. This is how we find our great-great-great-great-great uncle Dimo with his caravan. He was from Ohrid but spent most of the year on the road, where he was known as Dimo the Albanian. He wore the black-embroidered baggy trousers of white wool, a great hooded black woollen cape, and the white Albanian fez. He had a native’s command of Albanian and Turkish, and must have spoken Greek and a Bulgarian dialect, or both.

  In the 1700s, the British diarist Mary Wortley Montagu asked some peasants in western Macedonia, ‘What are you, Muslims or Christians?’ They replied: ‘We are Muslims, but of the Virgin Mary.’

  Later, in the turbulent months leading up to the Russian–Turkish War of 1877, the adventurous Briton Arthur J. Evans travelled on foot across the western Balkans, and observed that ‘an Albanian will attend a mosque at noon and a church at night with the greatest sangfroid’. I had seen with my own eyes the Albanian Muslim women buying icons of the Black Madonna and phials of ‘blessed’ water. The essentially pagan belief in the magical properties of painted frescoes, curative springs, saints’ relics, vilas and samovilas at full moon and the evil eye was shared by all.

  Christians in the Ottoman Balkans had no right to carry arms. When Greek insurgencies became frequent, the sultan enforced a disarmament law. With difficulty and not without violence, Christian households in all of Rumelia were disarmed, to ensure they’d never revolt again (it didn’t work). The only people allowed arms were the fierce Ghegs of northern Albania whom the Ottomans had always feared and never fully subjugated. Tino and I were on the road that nominally separated the Albanian north from the south, Ghegs from Tosks. Lake Ohrid fell along this very latitude. This road also cut through the heartland of the Albanoi, the Illyrian tribe first mentioned by the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy in the second century, and who were to give Albania its name.

  Dimo the Albanian carried arms at all times, and that was, I imagine, the most important part of his identity because it meant survival. At the time of the story told in the memoir, he was courting the daughter of the richest Christian family in Ohrid, friends and treasurers to the late ruler Djeladin Bey. Djeladin was a nephew of the formidable Ali Pasha of Ioannina, an Albanian ruler whose pashalak, or fiefdom, was a state within the Ottoman state. The Albanian pashalaks were a unique phenomenon across the Ottoman territories: autonomous from the sultan though nominally answerable to him, they gradually began to undermine the absolutism of the High Porte. The most powerful was Ali Pasha, who ruled Albania and southern Macedonia from Epirus to the lakes here. His nephew Djeladin (of Tashula fame) was in charge of Ohrid and Prespa. But after a long and bloody career, in 1822 Ali Pasha’s defiance of the sultan had him beheaded and his fiefdom parcelled up among feudal lords still loyal to the sultan. A similar fate befell Djeladin, who fled Ohrid and died in exile in Egypt (possibly drowned in the Nile by secret agents of the High Porte). Both despots left behind young Christian widows. The lakes and their hinterland became more vulnerable than ever to casual brigandry.

  One day, around this time, returning from Elbasan with a consignment of olives, Dimo the Albanian’s caravan was stopped by a band of a hundred armed men at the pass of Chafassan. Fortunately, the band recognised Dimo – why, he was one of them, he’s all right! – and shared with him their exciting plan. But the plan was to sack Ohrid, and specifically the gated town. They would share the spoils with Ohrid’s own Albanian grandees, who would open the gates for them; Dimo the Albanian would be rewarded too. They asked him to take some missives to the Albanian grandees in Ohrid, under besa.

  Dimo took the letters, gave his besa, and descended into Ohrid with the olives and the cold sweat that comes with impossible dilemmas. The sacking of the town would take place two days later. Ohrid hadn’t been sacked since the barbarian invasions. Dimo went straight to the kaimakamin (the town’s chief administrator) and showed him the missives. The kaimakamin was a local Albanian or Turk, and his loyalty was to his town. At once, he sent messages to the local beys, informing them that the town’s cannons up at the kalé would shortly be turned in the direction of their mansions.

  The town was saved, but as a result of the broken besa, Dimo had to go into hiding. Eventually, thanks to his wife’s influential family, Dimo received another teskere from the sultan and returned to his old trading route and cowboy lifestyle.

  When he had just turned seventy-five, Dimo’s body was found by the Elbasan–Durrës road. His horses were there, with their cargo untouched. It had taken them over a generation, but the men from Chafassan or their sons had come for him. Dimo
was buried on Albanian soil. He may well have had another family in Albania. Somewhere between Durrës and Ohrid, Tino and I may have distant cousins.

  Dimo was killed four years after Lear passed through here, and I wonder whether the caravan laden with black wool that blocked Lear’s narrow and precipitous path, somewhere before Elbasan, could have belonged to Dimo. And whether Lear tipped his awkward fez to the bulky, fully armed, black-cloaked seventy-one-year-old in the saddle – our great-great-great-great-great uncle.

  ‘What’s the moral of the story?’ Tino smiled.

  ‘That you can’t have your cake and eat it,’ I said.

  ‘That sooner or later, you’re forced to choose between loyalties,’ he said.

  ‘Still, Dimo did pretty well. Do you see yourself here on horseback?’

  Tino spluttered with laughter and lit a cigarette. We could barely drive this road.

  The postscript to this story picks up the theme of social, cultural and economic change. Dimo’s wife’s family were the treasurers of Djeladin. The townspeople found Djeladin Bey’s trunks buried at the foundations of their mansion, full of gold and silk: a layer of gold coins, a layer of silk, and so on. Were they so scrupulous as to keep Djeladin’s treasures buried, even after he was gone? It seems they were.

  And another odd detail: they were one of four Ohrid families to be ‘cursed for all times’ by Ohridians for their role as collaborators of the Greek Patriarchy in the crushing of the Ohrid archbishopric in 1767, and so contributing to the rise of Greek influence in Macedonia. The curse was meant to deprive these families of progeny, but it didn’t work, or not reproductively, for Dimo and his wife Arsa had six children.

  ‘Maybe curses work in other ways,’ Tino said.

  ‘Have you sometimes felt like you’re cursed?’ I said.

  We laughed, but the feeling of unease remained. Tumours, envy and pride, blindness and discord, sorrow and rage, stalk every clan. Once you let besa in, it’s like a vampire – it’s difficult to see it off.

  Meanwhile, the Shkumbin led us into the fertile plains of Elbasan, where olive trees, orange groves and vines began to appear, the ‘grand melancholy’ lost its edge, and the air softened with Mediterranean light. A century ago, the finest silk in Europe was spun here.

  Elbasan’s low-lying centre was dominated by the ruins of the Venetian fortress and crowded with young people all dressed up, the European-style cafes full, and a vibe of idleness in the air. Albania is Europe’s youngest nation. Youth is its great wealth. At the town’s entrance, a large, overgrown Communist-era cemetery was being spruced up by gardeners – hundreds of simple gravestones of fallen partisans with a red star carved into their marble slabs. The dates showed how pitiably young these men and women had been. From atop one of the towers of the Venetian fortress, we saw that Elbasan was at the bottom of a wide, sea-bound amphitheatre. To the north were purplish alpine peaks and in the south was the mythical Tomorr Mountain, its top worshipped every August by both Christians and Bektashis, to this day. It was tempting to drive on to Durrës for a glimpse of the Adriatic, but Tino had work in the morning and I’d be climbing a mountain. This was my last week by the lake.

  Dimo the Albanian’s story marks the end of an epoch: his was the last generation of traders to travel this ancient route. The accelerated agony of the Ottoman Balkans brought the reign of the brigand to this land. And as the era of the bandit waxed, trade over the mountain passes waned. Traders swapped the Ohrid–Elbasan–Durrës–Italy route for a land route to Budapest and Leipzig. Leather and fur merchants from the lake frequented central Europe’s fairs where they bought Canadian and Siberian furs and brought them to the lake, to manufacture luxury clothes and sell them in Istanbul and Bursa.

  We were back at the lake, back into the drizzle. Along the lakeside road the odd boy stood with rain dripping into his collar, holding trout for sale. Time had slowed down. It had passed fast on the road to Elbasan. Mountains gobbled up time, while the lake gathered it. There was always more time by the lake.

  The rain had drained the water of colour.

  ‘No matter how many times I see this lake,’ Tino said, ‘it’s different.’

  In the dusk, the outlines of Pogradec looked a blend of feudal and Communist. The streets’ asphalt was broken and people crossed without looking. Giant gilded statues dotted the tidy lakeside park, and at first I thought they were remnants from a past age that the townspeople had forgotten to take down, that the gloomy bronze men with long coats and hard faces were all Enver Hoxha and his commissars. But they were not: they were made fifteen years ago and included the poet Lasgush Poradeci, in a fedora and a wind-blown raincoat, his face turned towards his beloved lake.

  Men on old bikes pedalled slowly in the mist, and others sat in bingo clubs, their hands empty, staring into space. The concrete blocks were blotchy with water as if the town was crying.

  ‘You have to find someone to show you round,’ Tino said. ‘On a sunny day.’

  Along the lake front, a man with a deeply lined face where suffering had accumulated – an Albanian face – was packing up his battered van from which he sold home-spun rugs. His name was Eduard.

  ‘Come back to Albania,’ he bid us as we parted ways – him insisting on paying for our coffees at a waterside cafe where a familiar ballad played that sounded Italian to me and Yugoslav to Tino; and it was both – though the lyrics were Albanian. During Hoxha, you could get ten years’ forced labour for listening to foreign music.

  It was quiet at the St Naum checkpoint – as quiet as it had been at Chafassan – and both sets of passport officials waved us through with end-of-shift faces. The bells of Naum Monastery tolled for vespers. Like Chafassan, this checkpoint was opened in the early 1990s. For nearly fifty years, there had been no crossing point between the two countries of the lake. But you could not draw a real line between the Albanians and the Macedonians of the lake, only a fictional one – a line in the water.

  The mountains were a divide but the lake was a gathering point of all that is shared by us, the people between the Adriatic and the Aegean, forever voyaging, forever recycling. Tino and I were of different nationalities but we looked so similar, we could be siblings. We had known each other since childhood, since before birth – through our mothers and grandmothers who had carried these mountains and each other until they could carry no more. Perhaps our restlessness, our tendency to dream of the road, began as far back as Dimo the Albanian.

  We passed the last bunker and we were in Macedonia again.

  The mountain road took us back to Ohrid. This was the road I’d walked in memory of Kosta: past the graffitied Italian bunker, past Trpejtsa where Nate’s ancestors were buried. The limestone mountain loomed above us. The road was shiny with rain. No other cars. I read to Tino the messages I’d copied from the visitors’ book in the Archangel Michael cave.

  ‘Dear archangel, I would like another dog.’

  ‘We are Ukrainian painters, grateful for the beauty of this place.’

  ‘From England, with thanks to archangels everywhere – on the way to Mount Athos on foot, from the Lincolnshire Jews.’

  ‘My biggest wish is for my daughter to be cured.’

  ‘All I want is to be with the man I love.’

  ‘I have a few wishes.’ Tino put on some John Coltrane. ‘But just one dream. A world without borders. Cynics will laugh.’

  ‘But cynics don’t dream,’ I said.

  ‘They’re scared,’ Tino said. ‘Anyway, when are you coming back?’

  Although I had gained new insight into family dynamics, and had got to know the Macedonian side of Lake Ohrid and my hospitable family here, it was clear that the wider journey had only just begun. I had to find out how the familiar patterns looked within the greater, yet lesser-known, landscape of the lakes. There was Albania, and there was Lake Prespa at a higher altitude, veiled in cloud and legend, barely explored, mysteriously under-written. I sensed that the rest of the journey would be less predictable
. But for now, I felt so emotionally and sensorily saturated that it was vital to get away from here, to digest.

  ‘You and I both like roads. Because a dream is like a road, isn’t it,’ Tino smiled, and for a moment he looked just like Tatjana in one of her radiant photos. Tatjana who, like my grandmother Anastassia, had yearned for personal freedom but had not been able to claim it. The Kanun had been too strong.

  The Kanun feeds on fear and guilt. Whereas a dream, like a road, takes you out of the tribal maw and sets you free, at least for a moment – and sometimes a moment is enough.

  The lake is a crystal … It reflects the high vault of the October sky and the plunging mountain peaks where huge autumnal crocuses blossom, and wild cyclamens. When the sun sets, in the waves of the lake a ghostly palace of coral rises, and just as soon begins to disintegrate in the declining light …

  A Scotsman from the Black Watch was brought into the field hospital. They called me in, to question him, but he is barely conscious. With a broken leg and a hole in his head, tall and gaunt, he lies upon the stretcher. Poor son of the Highlands, whose good-hearted father was a shepherd with melodious, green-lined bagpipes! … Perhaps a vision of the native mountains roams in his darkening mind, of handsome white herds scattered upon it … a cottage hearth, and the old Scottish song, Burns’s song. ‘My heart’s in the Highlands. My heart is not here.’