REBELS OF MODERNITY
Maverick spirit survives along the shores of Macedonia’s Ohrid, Daniel Wood writes.
OHRID, MACEDONIA Here in this obscure corner of southeast Europe, where conquerors like Alexander the Great have come and gone for millennia, the land beyond Ohrid is now peaceful and green. The series of Balkan civil wars ended more than a decade ago. Yugoslavia is long gone. In its place today are seven new European countries, including rural, southernmost Macedonia. Still relatively poor compared with western Europe, still unknown to most travellers, the country lies at the intersection of faiths and history — as the skyline of modern Ohrid illustrates.
Here, a mosque’s white minaret issues daily calls to prayer; there, a centuries-old Eastern Orthodox church full of guttering candles; and over there, the golden arches of McDonald’s. Travellers are drawn to Ohrid (pop. 42,000) and its mountain lake, by the region’s cultural sites and adventure opportunities. The medieval town and jewel-like, cobalt-blue Lake Ohrid are combined into a single historical-natural UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is the leading tourism attraction in Macedonia.
Enter Ohrid’s Old City, situated along a bluff overlooking Lake Ohrid, and cobblestone Tsar Samoil Street ascends amid evidence of past occupations: a Roman amphitheatre (now used for summer arts festivals); 14thcentury, votive-filled, Orthodox churches; and crooked, centuriesold houses that look like the whimsical creations of Dr. Seuss. Ohrid’s unusual architecture reflects the fact that during four centuries of Ottoman rule, the town’s Christian population was prohibited by their Islamic overlords from building outside their hillside enclave. So they built up and out: the whitewashed buildings growing wider — with balconies and lane-spanning bridges — above their stone foundations, like tiered, upside-down wedding cakes.
Adjacent to one of the town’s best examples of this odd architecture is a sign that reads National Workshop for Homemade Paper.
Inside, 56-year-old Ljupco Panevski is one of the few men in Europe to make paper using a method unaltered since the Chinese invented the process 2,000 years ago.
Stewing wood pulp or straw for a month in his medieval-looking workshop, Panevski then adds flakes of spices, dried flowers, tobacco, chips of straw, or natural dyes to the marinating tub before removing the sludge with a large, fine-meshed screen. Drained, dried, and flattened over the course of the follow- ing week, his paper is then inserted into an exact replica of Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century wooden printing press. Add printing plates, hand-set Gothic lettering, and muscle power, and the press yields colourful religious icons for framing, or exquisite illustrated books ready for leather bindings.
Still higher, on a ridgeline above the town, magnificent, red-roofed Sveti Kliment i Pantelejmon (St. Clement’s Church) sits amid the sprawling archeological ruins of the first university (AD 900) in Europe.
It was here that Eastern Europe’s Cyrillic alphabet was invented. From the hillside vantage point, Lake Ohrid stretches 30 kilometres toward the misty blue ridgelines of Albania and Greece that fill the horizon to the southwest. In the mornings on the lake, there are fishermen hauling their nets, and kayakers and water taxis, destined for nearby beaches; in the late afternoons, there are often lightning storms. And in the evenings, crowds fill the town’s medieval streets and waterfront restaurants below; and amplified muezzins call the worshipful to prayer.
But few events capture the character of Macedonia more than the comic story of the nearby Republic of Vevchani, located just north of Ohrid, toward the Serbia-Kosovo border. Disgusted with the Balkans’ descent into chaos two decades ago, the 2,000 people of the village of Vevchani held a plebiscite in the ’90s, and voted overwhelmingly to declare themselves independent from everyone, including surrounding Macedonia. They became, instead, the Republic of Vevchani.
They blocked the two-lane road that climbs to the village’s main square. They stopped paying federal taxes. They issued their own passports, printed their own money — called Licnik — and set about being the world’s only satirical nation.
Say the people today who crowd a local Vevchani market to answer a stranger’s questions: “It’s just for fun. We like having our own country. Why killing? Why not laughter?”
Outside the village square, children’s laughter ricochets across the adjacent school playground, and mustachioed men drinking Turkish coffee shout directions to passersby, pointing out the local hiking trails that ascend to abandoned monasteries on ridgelines far above.
It’s much quieter in the precincts of Sveti Jovan Bigorski, a working Eastern Orthodox monastery dedicated to John the Baptist and located in the forested Bistra Mountains farther north of Ohrid.
With an ossuary full of the skulls of its former inhabitants, and alleged relics of both Jesus and of the Holy Cross, the fresco and icon-filled monastic complex — looking like a miniature version of Lhasa’s hilltop Potala Palace — is astounding. Moving amid the monastery’s grounds, bearded, black-robed, their heads often bent in silent meditation, are the 22 Orthodox monks who occupy the sanctuary. They live, they say, far removed from the tug of television or modern events. The Balkan wars passed them by.
“We’re isolated from the world,” explains one young monk, pausing to describe his routine of abstinence, submission and prayer. “We live the day. Everything’s here. The only truth is Jesus Christ.”
Then he catches the scowling expression of his abbot nearby, quickly stuffs his hands into his sleeves and withdraws into silence.
To the east of Ohrid, located high in the 2,600-metre mountains of Pelister National Park on Macedonia’s border with Greece, sits the tiny alpine town of Maloviste. With its fiercely independent Vlach people (a branch of the nomadic Roma) and its traditional two-storey stone and slate-roofed homes, the village offers a unique window on the life of Macedonia’s now-settled Gypsies.
Driven into the remotest places by the 15th-century Ottoman invasion of the Balkans, the Vlach have — like the rebellious residents of Vevchani and the monks of Sveti Jovan Bigorski — chosen to resist the modern. The Shemnica River rushes through Maloviste. Wisteria grows on trellised balconies. Dogs and chickens patrol the village square. Kerchiefed women tend garden patches, and hiking and horseback-riding trails lead upward toward the 40 derelict monasteries and Orthodox churches on the forested ridges above.
Perched on a newly emptied beehive box, amid the chickens and dogs, Chris Gasovski, 76, says he likes the quiet and simplicity of Maloviste. But the 20th century has exacted a toll on his town, he admits. The wars. The lure of cities. The young people moving away. The town’s fresco-filled Sveti Petka Cathedral once held 1,000 people on Sundays but is now empty of parishioners. The local school is closed.
“It’s dying. There are only 100 people left,” Gasovski says. “In 20 years, it’ll be gone.” Gasovski’s 93-year-old, one-toothed father, Jovan — the village’s oldest resident — nods stoically at his son’s translated words.
In a mountainous country that lies at the crossroads of history and was once the homeland of Alexander the Great and Mother Teresa, it’s often easier to leave than to arrive. Change today is coming fast. The monasteries and rural villages are depopulating. And with Balkan peace, the first adventure travellers are starting to appear. The women in the fields may be dressed in colourful head scarves and paisley skirts, but Gasovski’s T-shirt reads in English: Sports Hero.
In Macedonia, time is running out for the iconoclasts and the old ways.