To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Geo Milev, 1917

  MOUNTAIN OF BONES

  ‘You say you’re leaving tomorrow, but you’ll be back, you’ll see,’ Angelo said. ‘It’s the lake. It pulls you back.’

  Angelo from the beach with the dead cow. We had met again.

  In his twenties, Angelo had owned a trucking company that did business with Western Europe via Bosnia and Croatia, but then the Yugoslav Wars began, and after one close encounter too many with boozy paramilitaries at road blocks, he folded. Then he had a scrap-metal business and employed dozens of people.

  ‘Lots of Gypsies. In Ohrid they speak Albanian, in other places they speak Romani. They work hard and they’re ace people. Never trust stereotypes, trust experience.’ But some years ago, he lost his business overnight to a shady company linked to the then-ruling party.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to lose forty thousand euros in one night?’

  The similarities between the outgoing government and the pashas of yesteryear were unmissable: Ali Pasha, Djeladin Bey, Tito and the creepily smiling ex-prime minister had treated this land as a private reserve, to be sliced up among their cronies like a cherry pie.

  A mate of Angelo’s suffered a similar fate with his business and shot himself with an army pistol. But Angelo was a survivor. Out of work, out of pocket and out of luck, he’d decided to lie low for a while and dedicate himself to his passions: mountaineering and paragliding. He was a mountain guide, and this is what we were doing today – preparing to trek to the top of Galicica Mountain where you could see both lakes, and where you didn’t go alone unless you were Angelo. I had brought food that he packed into a rucksack.

  Angelo spent the summers fishing and trekking, making a buck here and there from adventurous tourists. In the winter, he shut himself in the family house in the Village of Mean People, stocked up on logs, and carved objects out of cherry wood. This is where we were: at the family house at the foot of the mountain. Figs, black and white, mulberries, and even a pomegranate tree and a friendly sharplaninec called Hazel. It was paradise with a lake view. But the balcony was hanging off the house and the garden had gone wild.

  ‘There used to be vines. My grandfather loved his vines.’

  The indigenous grape is called taljanka, ‘the Italian’. But the Serbs banned it and introduced another type of vine, the correct vine, he said.

  ‘My grandfather kept growing his taljanka and ended up in jail.’

  Angelo wanted to live here full-time, but how to make a living out of paradise?

  The Village of Mean People had been prosperous for centuries. Above the village was Vojtino, today a wild hillside but once a Roman trading station and hub where travellers changed horses. The village had fat fields by the lake, and well into the mid-twentieth century had been the property of the monastery estate of St Naum. Twice a year, the fields were flooded by the mountain springs, which made them even more fertile. But in the 1990s when state-run factories in the region closed down and war raged next door in Serbia and Kosovo, people started emigrating en masse.

  ‘Let me know if you have ideas how to make the garden pay for itself,’ Angelo said, and started producing warm socks and jackets. It was a brilliant sunny day; I couldn’t see why we needed them. You’ll see, he said.

  Angelo’s distant ancestors had come to the lake on the ultimate one-way ticket: fleeing a Sicilian vendetta.

  ‘There was a young man in Palermo, called Lazaro. One day, they called him up with an order: to kill such and such a Muslim. Some old vendetta. Sicilian vendettas are nothing to laugh about. He gave his besa, but the Muslim he was supposed to kill turned out to be his friend. What to do? He warned his friend and his friend skipped town. Lazaro told them he’d done the deed. His friend didn’t come back for thirty years. ’Cause he knew they had a long memory.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I said.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  True. But when did it take place?

  ‘When, when. Do I look like some boring historian?’

  He certainly didn’t.

  ‘Then let me finish my story.’

  When the friend came back thirty years later, they remembered. And this time, both Lazaro and the friend had to skip town. By now, Lazaro had grown-up sons and daughters. They sailed to Albania, followed the Via Egnatia and arrived at St Naum Monastery. This is where the two sons remained, to work on the estate. The rest moved on east. It is not known what happened to Lazaro and his wife, but it is believed that they followed the daughters and murdered them. The only one who left progeny was one of the sons. That was Angelo’s ancestor. That’s why his surname is Lazaroski and his first name is Italian.

  ‘I had Icarus syndrome,’ he said when I asked him about the paragliders in the house, folded up into coloured packs. He had had a near-fatal fall which had broken his back, and didn’t fly any more.

  We rode up the mountain road to the starting point of the trek on his lightweight motorbike with a Bulgarian number plate; Macedonians bought cars across the border because it was cheaper. No spare helmet for me. After many hairpin turns in the road, we reached a lookout point. Coloured ribbons tied to the scrubby bushes flapped in the wind – reference points for paragliders. As the road climbed past 1,000 metres, the scenery changed – the walnut and wild fig trees gave way to moorland. It was all bone-bleached stones, mosses, and low-lying vegetation. The hill beneath was the Big Shadow that I’d glimpsed from the deepest part of the lake at Zaum Monastery. Despite the heat of the sun, the air was crisp and the wind pinched your face. From here, you could see the entire lake and it made you speechless. But not Angelo.

  ‘Do you see now?’ he said. ‘The lake can’t be taken in isolation. It works together with Galicica Mountain and Prespa. They are a system, ecological and spiritual. See the cross?’

  Many Lake people were intent on seeing meaningful geometrical shapes and spiritual ley lines. Everybody’s version was slightly different, but the most common belief was that a cross-shape was made by four manmade sites on the lake rim: St Naum Monastery to the south and St Erasmus cave church to the north; Ohrid town to the east and the cave church of Archangel Michael to the west.

  Two bright paragliders passed overhead, noiselessly. One was doing pirouettes.

  ‘Watch that, it’s an air spiral!’

  A friend of Angelo’s had been sucked into an air spiral, lost consciousness and fallen to his death.

  ‘There’s a high mortality rate among paragliders,’ he said; and looking at the pirouetting figure, I believed it.

  ‘You never fly over the lake though, because it sucks you down. If you want to be over the lake, it’s got to be over two kilometres high. The lowest you can go is eight hundred metres.’

  If you fall into the lake from a great height, it can break your back. Like it had broken his. He had recovered, but had a permanent hump and breathing problems.

  The starting point for the trek was halfway along the high road between the two lakes. We parked in a shadowy mountain dip called Mean Valley. I thought Angelo was making it up – mean village, mean valley – but then I looked at the map. The toponyms on Galicica were all like that. Beyond the peak we were scaling was another one named Coffin. Overlooking the Village of Mean People was a peak called the Abyss, and if we kept going east towards Prespa, we’d pass the ridge of Wolf’s Lair.

  ‘It’s Mean Valley because the soldiers who fought here went through hell. Can you imagine scaling that mountain in deep snow, with heavy equipment?’

  Mean Valley was a geological fracture in the massif, between two peaks of 2,270 and 2,254 metres. We were aiming for the second one.

  ‘See those?’ He pointed to aerials on a peak above St Naum Monastery. ‘That’s Albania. Those used to be their eyes and ears.’

  We began the steep walk along a goat path. The craggy slope ahead looked almost vertical, but it was better than the shadowy side of Mean Valley towards Albania. There were no other paths. You had to know where you were going.

>   It was midday and I was hungry.

  ‘Didn’t you have breakfast?’ Angelo said, without slowing down. ‘Something you should know about Pogradec and Tushemisht,’ he went on. Tushemisht was the first Albanian village after the St Naum checkpoint. ‘They’re all our people there.’

  What do you mean, our people? I asked.

  ‘We’re all the same people on this lake, that’s what I mean. Macedonians.’

  Ironically, his Village of Mean People was first settled by Albanians, but Angelo was proudly Macedonian (even if he had a Bulgarian passport and number plate). Of course, he was right: the natural state of lake towns and border towns is to have ‘our people’ on both sides.

  ‘Pogradec was wrecked by Hoxha. It used to be the richest place around. But in the 1950s, people were going hungry. That’s because instead of fishing and harvesting, they were building bunkers. So there was this arrangement between families in my village and those on the other side. They’d send their children to us, to be fed. Over Mean Valley.’

  They had a communication code from hill to hill – by means of horses and whistles. Naum Monastery had been the children’s hiding-place on this side of the border, before they were sent to the Village of Mean People to eat for a few days. They were conveyed back the same way – via the monastery, over the mountains, out of sight of border patrol, with a local guide, as their families waited on the other side. But one day, it went badly wrong.

  ‘Bastard of a priest in the monastery betrayed them and sent them right back over the border and the Albanian border patrol saw them and gunned them down.’

  They gunned the children down, their own side’s children.

  The Village of Mean People was distressed. They felt responsible – those kids had been their responsibility.

  ‘So a band of men, including my great-uncle, took their guns and came up here, to wait for the priest. They knew he was headed for Prespa.’

  The priest had loaded donkeys with loot stolen from the monastery. They shot him on the spot and took the loot.

  ‘The loot they donated to the village headquarters of the Yugoslav Communist Party. And the Party bosses built themselves houses with it. With blood money. I still have that gun. I hope I never have to use it.’

  We passed various animal droppings: wild goat, wolf, and large dung that looked like—

  ‘Bear.’ He ran his fingers through it. It was dry and full of half-digested rosehips.

  The trick was to keep to the main path (which I couldn’t see) and not veer off it; bears keep to themselves except when surprised. From the height we’d already scaled I could appreciate the full sweep of Mean Valley, forested and deep in shadow, with pockets of snow. The peaks ahead were lit by the sun of early summer. Mean Valley and the cliff above it – called Bloodied Stone – had a current history in addition to their war history.

  ‘One winter,’ Angelo said, ‘friend and I went climbing. It was hard going. Halfway up Mean Valley, we see this guy buried in snow up to the waist, as good as dead. He’d come over the mountain from Albania but his contact had stood him up. And he stood there waiting, the tears frozen on his face. With twenty kilos of marijuana strapped to his body.’

  They gave him some rakia to warm him up and guided him to a safe crossing point, so he could make it back. He offered them two kilos as payment, but Angelo declined. And now – now they’re best friends.

  ‘There’s been a lot of drugs with the Albanians. Drugs and arms. Mind you, Macedonian peasant houses always had a cake of top-quality afiyon. Sometimes a good hundred years old.’

  What’s afiyon?

  ‘Opium, from poppies. Traditionally grown in the Vardar River valley.’

  The expansive Vardar valley is the most fertile part of geographic Macedonia. Afiyon is an old Ottoman word, derived from the Hellenic ofion.

  ‘People always had a stash, to calm the kids down, relieve the pain of the dying and the ill, sleep better. And of course, Alexander the Great’s army used liquid afiyon to smear on their shields, and strategically positioning themselves in relation to the sun, they’d dazzle the enemy with their shiny shields. That’s how they defeated larger armies. Now, see this?’

  The face of the mountain began to show manmade scars. We’d come to a shallow cave in the rocky slope. The rock itself had been chiselled away painstakingly.

  ‘Soldiers passing the time,’ Angelo said, as if it had been yesterday.

  During the First World War, the highly strategic Macedonian Front (1915–18) passed through here. It ran roughly along today’s border with Greece, and over three major mountain ranges: in the east, Belasitsa above Lake Doiran; the Baba-Pelister Mountains on the eastern shore of Lake Prespa; and Galicica here, between the two lakes.

  These three majestic mountain ranges are the southernmost glacial massifs of Europe, the southernmost alpine habitats, and a haven for rare species. And only a hundred years ago they were sites of catastrophic multinational battles. English, Welsh, Scots and Indian soldiers, alongside Serb, French, French Oriental and Greek troops, were deployed to the south of the Macedonian Front. They fought the formidable Austrian-backed Bulgarian army to the north (800,000 men fought on the Bulgarian side), who had entrenched themselves on one mountain peak after another. My great-grandfather Kosta was among those who answered the Bulgarian call for volunteers, though I have no idea where he fought.

  There was one particularly terrible battle along this front, at Doiran (even though hunting dogs were passed between the Bulgarian and British enemy lines quite happily!). Appallingly, there were five battles of Doiran, and in each the Bulgarians were attacked by different armies. Over the winter and spring of 1917, despite being outnumbered, the Bulgarians repelled the British, inflicting devastating losses. Twelve thousand British soldiers died in just the First and Second Battles of Doiran. The Bulgarians lost two thousand men. That’s fourteen thousand men in just two battles. At the end of hostilities, the Bulgarians buried as many of the British dead as they could, with their own, and the British cemetery at Doiran can be visited today. Some of these men rest in a military section of Sofia’s Central Cemetery.

  These numbers are hard to grasp. I can’t even say fourteen thousand men without choking. And the Third Battle of Doiran was yet to come, the following autumn, again ending with Bulgarian victory and many more thousands of dead, this time Greek and French too.

  One of Europe’s finest Expressionist poets, Geo Milev, who fought in the Bulgarian ranks, wrote a poignant war diary, By Lake Doiran, where he describes how ‘[w]hen the night becomes a mirror in which we see the faces of distant sorrowful mothers and beloved women waiting for us, the night itself is sorrow’; and how ‘[s]ometimes, at night, the French sing. We listen to them. It gives me strange joy to write the French sing. I too would like to sing. I’d like to sing the Song of Solveig: “If you are in heaven now waiting for me …”. How I’d like to sing it, in this moist, moonlit night. But we are all silent. Only the French are singing.’

  At night, instead of the fishing boats with their dim fires, there was ‘the broad radiance of a strange moon, the eye of the enemy projector, a foreign, roaming eye that sweeps lake and mountain, knowing not what it looks for’. That was the British and the French. Like the Highlander who was brought to the field hospital, Milev was wounded in the head and lost an eye. He survived the Macedonian Front – to be murdered by right-wing royalist police a few years later in Sofia, for his Socialist sympathies.

  Here, on Galicica, to hold off the French Armée d’Orient from the south-east, the Bulgarians had hacked trenches in the rock, a Sisyphean achievement, and lived in temperatures of −25° Celsius along with cholera and malaria outbreaks. Malaria, typically rife in swampy marshes and the reedbeds of the lakes, was a major cause of death for all nationalities along the Macedonian Front. Amazingly, the remains of trenches were still here. You could see how the face of the mountain had been carved, and the trenches shored up with rocks. The sight left me speechless. I’d n
ever before seen trench remains from the First World War.

  ‘The French Oriental Army on the other side of Mean Valley shelled the Bulgarians but they didn’t budge,’ Angelo said. ‘For four years. It was deadlock until the end of the war.’

  I couldn’t find any writing by combatants on Galicica, but the Scottish officer Edward P. Stebbing visited the equivalent of these trenches on Kaimakchalan Peak to the east, only hours after a particularly heavy battle which the attacking Serbs won at the cost of over 4,600 men. Stebbing graphically described the ‘ghastly’ scene of numberless dead Bulgarian and Macedonian men in the trenches, many killed by gas, hoping that his account would warn readers against future wars.

  The Battle of Kaimakchalan changed the tide of the war on the Macedonian Front, and therefore in the Balkans. Mass desertions followed in the Bulgarian ranks. Men walked away, demented, gunned down by their own command. After all the victories. This war is known as the Second National Catastrophe in Bulgaria. The First National Catastrophe was the preceding Balkan War of 1913.

  ‘I’ll tell you a war story,’ Angelo said. ‘My great-grandfather hadn’t been conscripted by either side in the Balkan Wars, don’t know how he got out of it. Maybe his mother broke his legs. These things happened, you know.’

  The anvil.

  ‘One day in the latter stages of the war, a deserter turns up at our village house. A Bulgarian soldier. Or maybe a Serb. I can’t remember. He says he can’t kill his own kind, and begs the family to hide him.’

  Angelo’s great-grandparents hid the soldier and gave him clothes and food to start him on his long journey home. Who knows how he made it back to Bulgaria or Serbia, but he did. Because a few years later, when the First World War shook this mountain again, Angelo’s great-grandfather and a cousin were conscripted by the Serbs, or perhaps the Bulgarians. They escaped the front, but were captured and dispatched to a POW camp near Salonica (which tells us the deserter must have been a Serb, because the ‘Salonica Army’ was composed of the Allied nations). And there, an officer recognised the man who’d saved his life.