To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  But chewing gum was banned as an imperialist product, and the conversation had been overheard by an older boy, the neighbourhood snitch, who reported to the local Party Committee. He’d gone to Lazar’s house at once to let his parents know that their son was in trouble, without saying what the matter was, relishing the power he had – not only over children, but over parents too.

  ‘When I went home, my parents were white as ghosts. What did the girls give you? Chewing gum, I said, but I spat it out, I didn’t like it! It was imperialist chewing gum.’

  In the end nothing happened, but Lazar’s parents didn’t sleep that night, fearing a knock on the door. Lazar’s mother had been a Party member, but no one was safe. At school, there had been frequent alarms – for no specific reason, just to remind the kids that ‘You should be vigilant at all times’, as the slogan went.

  ‘And whenever the alarm went off, a sinister voice accompanied it: “This is an alarm! Be alert! Be alert!”’

  Lazar remembers the day in 1985 when the beginning of the end was felt by the whole nation. The day of Enver Hoxha’s death was tinged with nightmarish hysteria. ‘I went to school and all the teachers were crying. Classes were suspended, and a voice made an announcement on the loudspeakers: “Today, at 12:00, our dearest leader left this life.” Then the wailing began. The whole school was wailing. It spread like an epidemic. My best friend was crying. So I started crying too. It felt like the world was ending.’

  When he went home, his grandfather, the former border army colonel who’d been wounded during his partisan years and had a rod in his leg, consoled him: ‘Don’t worry my boy, our Leader is gone but our Party is strong.’ But Lazar thought he caught a sardonic note in his voice. In a few years, Albania’s borders would open and the long, painful ‘transition’, which hasn’t yet ended, would begin.

  ‘You know the funny thing?’ Lazar said. ‘We were asked to write a poem for our dear leader. And I did. It even rhymed!’ He laughed. ‘Of course it wasn’t a poem, it was recycled propaganda, but you could say that the death of Hoxha made me into a poet.’

  Later we drove over to Villa Arte, the former summer residence of the dictator at the Drilon Springs, and sipped Korçë beers by the water, Lazar busy photographing the swans, and Liridon and I gazing at the springs’ mesmerising green pond. The water looked and felt cold, with a bubbling energy beneath. Amazingly, it came from Lake Prespa. It was filtered through the limestone of the Dry Mountain, that’s why it was so limpid.

  ‘The flow is seven cubic metres per second,’ Liridon said. ‘In Prespa, look for a place called Zaver. A karst cave where the water of Prespa is sucked into the mountain.’

  Drilon Springs had a microclimate.

  ‘Thirty degrees max. During Hoxha’s visits here, giant fans were installed in the hills, to cool the air to the desired temperature. So he wouldn’t be too hot.’

  ‘The Macedonians complained that the fans were killing birds!’ Lazar said. Of course, the locals had no right to complain about anything. They had no rights full stop.

  The staff at the Villa had been vetted and there was a professional taster, to ensure Hoxha was not poisoned. Every year, during his month-long holidays here, the people of Pogradec would be treated to a month of Italian television’s Channel One – a gesture of dictatorial munificence.

  But the area around Drilon Springs was off limits to the people of Pogradec, though it was in their back yard. ‘Except on 25 April each year – Border Day,’ Lazar said. ‘On that day, we could visit the Drilon Springs. It was full of barricades and soldiers. And cars of the Sigurimi. I didn’t feel safe here.’

  Ordinary Albanians were prohibited from owning private cars, so cars belonged to the Party elite and the Sigurimi. The Party elite drove a make called Aero, while a make called Gas 69 was used by the Sigurimi – and popularly known as makina e tmerrshme, the cars of terror. On the road between Drilon Springs and Pogradec was a complex of ‘Villas’ that had been used as holiday residences by Hoxha’s entourage. The whole complex had been full of roses until 1991, when the gates to the Villas were opened for the first time to the public and the mob destroyed the rose gardens.

  ‘It was sad,’ Lazar said. ‘Of course I understand that people were angry and fed up. But those rose gardens were beautiful.’

  ‘Dictators like beautiful things,’ Liridon smiled.

  On the same day in 1991, the border with Yugoslavia was opened – for just twenty-four hours – and Lazar, aged twenty, walked with his parents to St Naum Monastery. It was an exodus, he said. Some walked all the way to Ohrid, others rode on their bikes. Their family had taken a picnic to the monastery grounds. Emotions ran so high that what was meant to be a day of happiness felt like a crisis.

  ‘We had wanted this for so long,’ Lazar said, ‘that when it was actually happening, it didn’t feel real. We almost couldn’t cope with it.’

  Then they had walked back to Pogradec, past the military barricades and armed soldiers, past the dictator’s Villa, past the ravaged rose gardens.

  When we stopped by the locked gates of the complex where the Villas had been, two unfriendly armed guards pointed at a sign by the gates saying that the site belonged – still – to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. An ominous silence hung over it.

  The next day we set off for the monumental Illyrian tombs of Selcë, a remote part of the mountain west of the lake. Past the disused scenic railway which was supposed to be restored with a grant that never materialised, past the spooky abandoned factories up on the hills with their faded giant letters – GANIZIM, what was left of a typically meaningless slogan, Dituri-Praktike-Organizim, or Knowledge-Practice-Organisation – past the Chafassan border checkpoint and the Hotel Odessa fork in the road, winding up and down in low gear while the valley of the River Shkumbin opened up below.

  ‘The lowest point of the Via Egnatia.’ Liridon pointed at the faint ridge above the modern road. ‘The Romans came from the west, the Turks from the east. Along the same road.’

  We passed a village with a couple of mosques.

  ‘Bektashi and Muslims,’ Liridon said. ‘It was wholly Bektashi, but at some point when Bektashism fell out of favour, people converted to Islam. Just to survive. There’s still the turbe [tomb] of the founder here.’

  His clear distinction between Sufi Bektashism and mainstream Islam surprised me.

  ‘Bektashism was a liberalising influence in Sunni Islam,’ he explained. ‘A social movement. That’s why it gained ground among people in the Balkans. And that’s why it was persecuted by the establishment, eventually.’

  This was in fact his mother’s home village. Her family, before converting to mainstream Islam, had been Bektashis for generations. And before that, Christians. And before that?

  ‘See the cliffs above the Rruga Egnatia?’ Liridon said. ‘There’s a village there called Orakli. Named after the Cave of the Oracle nearby, an ancient pagan site. That’s what there was before Christianity.’ But the Cave of the Oracle had been destroyed during the rebuilding of this road, in the post-Communist years.

  Later, Liridon showed me a photo of a girl with a large crucifix at her throat: his niece. Twenty-five years ago, his older brother had left home, aged fifteen, and walked to Greece in the first great exodus of Albanian men in search of work. He’d stayed in Greece, and now, under the influence of the Greek schooling system, his daughter had turned Greek Orthodox. It had far more social capital in Greece than being a Muslim Albanian.

  ‘Nobody in the family minds,’ Liridon said. Because they were the people of the vanished Cave of the Oracle and understood what it meant to go with the prevailing winds in order to survive.

  As we turned our backs to the lake and continued up the mountain road, I felt we were entering a truly ancient realm.

  ‘Yes,’ Liridon said, ‘this landscape is i thyerne moshe, broken by age. You say this of very old people but sometimes the land too. Because the land reflects the human experience.’ Liridon was animated to
day, while Lazar was subdued – he was a lake soul, whereas Liridon was returning to his ancestral mountain.

  In the hills above the road, the oak forest was an eerie rusty-red colour, no leaves, like premature winter. There had been forest fires in southern Europe all summer, and though the lake rim had been mostly spared, some forests had been quietly parched. Soon, the real climbing began, and with it – the vertigo.

  Lazar and Liridon had mentioned that the old village road to the tombs was being renovated, but it wasn’t until we reached what looked like a massive churned-up quarry with trucks, diggers and other heavy machinery that I grasped their meaning of ‘renovation’. It was raining now, and the freshly sliced ridges of earth above were raining debris on us – rocks, stones, clumps of earth. The site was still open to private traffic – because it was the only access to the higher mountain villages – and seeing there was no turning back, I followed the trucks up the clay road, trying not to stall the engine.

  Relaxed and snacking on walnuts we’d bought from a roadside stall at the lowest point in the Via Egnatia, Liridon and Lazar kept chatting as if we were on some dull motorway rather than clinging to a slippery ribbon of a track. Which in my mind made them truly Albanian. This was no country for the faint-hearted; the faint-hearted were the visitors.

  We rejoined the old road which was one lane wide, passing one or two severe out-of-time villages where the stone houses were tower-like and windowless, with just slits, reminiscent of the kullas of the Accursed Mountains in the north where men marked by the Kanun would hide for months, years, as if buried alive, until the Furies caught up with them. Neatly stacked straw bales awaited winter, and sheep and goats grazed the hills. There was the odd church. The sprawling valley of the River Shkumbin opened up below. The coloured squares of the cultivated fields made it look like the earth was resting under a patchwork quilt.

  ‘Praise the Lord, we made it,’ Lazar said, but more out of politeness – for he hadn’t looked worried at all. I was the only one with my stomach in a knot.

  We abandoned the car by the roadside and took a path to a forested mound, snacking on wild sour cherries from the trees as we went. This was Selcë, or Settlement – yet another Slavic place name. Place names are barometers of changing political winds. In the 1970s, the Albanian regime had changed old Slavic place names in their campaign of ‘Albanisation’. But since the fall of the regime, many had been returned to their original names. It was notable that the Albanians as a modern nation had been tolerant enough to keep at least some original Slavic names of the lake region, while next door in Greece they were systematically ‘hellenised’.

  A stunning series of monumental tombs made from gigantic stone slabs lined the ridge, telling a story of the rise and fall of civilisations.

  Excavations began only in 1948, but villagers had known about the tombs for hundreds of years, and by the time twentieth-century archaeologists got here they had been partially raided and locals had long used them for sheltering livestock. The most impressive tomb, Number One, was two-storey. The lower part had been found only in the 1970s by a local worker. Liridon showed us an image from that time – the giant slab that functioned as a door was still in place, closed. It had been untouched for two thousand years. Today, all the tombs were open to the elements, and unprotected from the depredations of treasure hunters.

  ‘This is new.’ Liridon kicked a broken slab lying on the floor, upset to see that the treasure hunters had been at work. ‘I was here last week and it was intact.’

  In the upper chamber was an indentation in the stone where the slave of the buried master had been chained, entombed and left to die of asphyxiation.

  There were four tombs, each built in a different style and a different era, more than a generation apart, and their structural and decorative details told the story of the gradual decline of the Enkelana people – an Illyrian civilisation from the fourth century BC who were invaded by the army of Alexander the Great. The epic battle of 335 BC had lasted for months, and King Cleitus ‘the Dardanian’ of the Enkelana was holding out well until the Macedonians severed their water supply. Thus weakened, the besieged people had been overrun by the soldiers of Alexander, freshly enthroned after the murder of his father Philip the previous year, and bound for the conquest of the known world. It started with the Balkans.

  One of the tombs had what Liridon described as a ‘pagan cross’ carved over the doorway, and the Albanian word KISHA, church. Liridon thought the tomb might have housed a makeshift church in Ottoman times. When we climbed up above the tombs to where the fortified antique town of Pelion might have been, we saw the remains of fortification walls and dwellings. It had barely been touched by archaeologists since 1950.

  ‘After the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s’ – Liridon pushed up his glasses – ‘this hill was treated not like cultural heritage, but like any other hill. It was turned into agricultural land. All the antiquities dug up by the peasants were discarded.’

  He had a calm manner, but I saw him flinch as he said this.

  ‘Liridon’s pain is that he can’t have this hill excavated, studied, and turned into a proper tourist sight, while in the meantime treasure hunters are destroying it,’ Lazar summed up. ‘And my pain is that I can’t preserve old Pogradec.’

  I felt their pain. In another country, Selcë would be a major site of excavation, and of cultural and rural tourism. The tombs were spectacular, the panorama of the river valley glorious, and the possibility that the remains might be from Pelion where one of the biggest battles in Alexander’s Balkan campaigns was fought made this a highly significant site.

  We stood at a lookout point to take in the Shkumbin valley – you could see why there had been a fort here. The visibility was 360 degrees: the Via Egnatia could have been seen, with its approaching enemy armies, caravans and pilgrims. When Cleitus had realised that all hope was lost, he burnt his own town, so as not to have it fall into the hands of the Macedonians.

  Liridon handed me a small piece of brick-red ceramic he’d just picked up. It was at least two thousand years old, perhaps three, and though it felt wrong to take it, I have it still.

  Lazar had a favourite hang-out in Pogradec, at the less visited end of the waterfront, where the town petered out and the rocky western coastline began. He called it The Club; it was a quiet cafe in the last house on the waterfront with tables by the beach. The customs building was visible from here, manned by two border policemen and operating boats between Albania and Macedonia – but not for passengers, only for goods. There were no passenger boats because of the water border.

  The Club sat on the last unspoilt bit of old Pogradec. We could see the thin stretch of sand that remained of Lazar’s childhood beach, reclaimed by a widened road.

  ‘We’d look up at the fortesas in the hills, the Italian ones and our ones, and when you wanted to explain distances, you said “between the second and third fortesa”.’ There were half a million concrete bunkers across Albania. They were difficult to destroy and remained in the landscape like eyeless witnesses to a false apocalypse.

  ‘Anyway,’ Liridon said, ‘your tour with me ends here. There is an Albanian saying: Any more would be too much.’

  I had one more day in Pogradec, and this was a formal release, the closure of his responsibility. It was the Albanian way: greetings and farewells felt ritualised – the idea of host and guest was still central. They had explained that while I was in Pogradec, I was their responsibility.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I said. I didn’t want to be anybody’s responsibility.

  ‘It’s Albanian tradition,’ Liridon said. ‘There’s an expression: my house belongs to God and to my guest.’

  The Kanun was still a force, even in this lakeside town of grapes and roses.

  ‘The Kanun had two main branches’ – Liridon pushed up his glasses – ‘loyalty to the clan and hospitality.’ If a stranger came to your house, you were obliged to take them in and look after them for as long as they
wished. If something happened to your guest, you had to avenge them – starting a vendetta if necessary. Families who had the misfortune of something bad happening to their guest and failed to avenge him would be expelled by their community, their houses burnt.

  ‘The cornerstones of the house were removed,’ Liridon said, ‘as a symbolic gesture of uprooting, so the family couldn’t rebuild it. They were exiled because by letting misfortune strike their guest, they had brought disgrace on the community.’

  If your guest was killed while on your watch, you were bound to avenge his blood by killing the murderer in turn. You still had a measure of choice whether to avenge the killing of a family member – but with a guest, there was no choice. A guest was more important to your honour than a blood relation. In these multigenerational honour murders, the gesture of murder soon becomes impersonal, detached from the man who commits it.

  The Kanun represents a major archetypal aspect of the human condition: our collective death wish. It is our urge for self-destruction, masked as self-preservation. I’d much rather it had been exotic, confined to the Accursed Mountains, but instead it reminded me of our family, of many other Balkan families I knew, and more broadly – of human strife.

  The Kanun was the anvil. It was the punishment for walking down the same street twice on the same day and the demand for absolute loyalty from clan members. It was the guilt, the shame, the pride, the love that maims, the projection of inner darkness by the old onto their young; the rage, the sorrow, the entombing of the spirit inside sunless towers, the adding of suffering to the family accounts already brimming with it. The Kanun made sure that repetition supplanted growth.

  And all for reasons long forgotten but not forgiven. This is how we run out of goodness – when we act out of an inherited belief that we don’t have the right to be at peace. As individuals, as families, as nations. That we must be constantly at war. The Kanun was the enshrinement of what Tibetan Buddhism calls samsara. Samsara, or the suffering-driven cycle of birth, death and rebirth, was defined by the legendary yogi Milarepa as ‘a fortress of pain’. Milarepa himself had been an ancestral avenger–killer who renounced the tribal ways in favour of an individuated seeker’s path.