Book of the week
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova (Granta, $40)
Three years ago, the poet Kapka Kassabova, who lives in the Scottish Highlands, enjoyed tremendous success with her book Border, which explored the frontier zone between Turkey, Greece and her native Bulgaria. Her new book, another extraordinarily haunting mixture of travelogue, history and family memoir, takes her to the oldest lakes in Europe.
Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa sit at the heart of the western Balkans, on the cultural and ethnic fissures that divide Albania, Greece and North Macedonia. From the air, writes Kassabova, this looks like a timeless paradise: a ‘‘mythical landscape’’ of ‘‘mountain upon mountain, the hide of the land like hard-worn velvet’’, in which the two lakes glitter like perfect blue eyes. In reality, it is a land steeped in history and soaked in blood, a craggy, sunbaked world of Byzantine monasteries, Ottoman mosques and Cold War bunkers.
Formerly part of the Roman and Byzantine empires, this area was the heart of a famous peasant uprising against the Ottoman empire in 1903, and it has never really recovered. A few years later, it was the focus of the appallingly savage Balkan Wars, in which the Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs fought over the Ottoman debris. In World War I, it was part of the Macedonian front, where tens of thousands of French and British service personel died fighting the Turks and the Bulgarians.
Afterwards, Ohrid itself became part of Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, then Yugoslavia again. Today it belongs to North Macedonia, but nationalism still hangs heavy. The lake is divided between Macedonia and Albania, and border regulations mean you cannot take a boat from one side to the other.
As for Lake Prespa, just a few miles away, the picture is even more confused. Most of the lake is in Macedonia, but the southwest corner is in Albania and the southeast in Greece. Yet as Kassabova observes, you cannot buy a local map that shows the whole lake properly. Each country’s publication only gives details for its own corner, and the Greek map erases the Albanian and Macedonian parts completely.
For Kassabova, this perfectly captures the narrow-minded nationalism that has long blighted this gorgeous, poor and much misunderstood corner of Europe. Yet as she travels around the lakes, following in the footsteps of Roman legionaries, medieval crusaders, Ottoman viziers and Sufi dervishes, she finds that, contrary to the stereotype, many ordinary people rub along perfectly well.
For Kassabova, the tragedy of history is that with the collapse of the Ottoman empire, people were
forced to pick a side. ‘‘Whose are you?’’ people keep asking her in Ohrid, and the question hangs over the book.
It is to Kassabova’s credit that far from being heavy or depressing, her book is a delight, exquisitely written and brimming with compassion. Some of her stories seem almost surreal: the child reported to the authorities in Communist Albania for accepting capitalist chewing gum from Greek visitors; or the family who built their own boat, held together with nylon stockings, to escape across the lake from Albania to Yugoslavia. – Dominica Sandbrook,
The Sunday Times
It is a land steeped in history and soaked in blood, a craggy, sunbaked world.