Heed the Hollow: Poems

The crossroads of the lake led four ways. North to Kosovo, Serbia and Bulgaria. South to Epirus and Greece. West to Elbasan and the Adriatic. And east to Pelagonia and the Aegean.

If you head north and keep going upstream of the second major river after the Drim that empties into the lake, you glimpse a dark topography. A closed world of black-green forests casts a shadow over you for days after.

What looks like a gigantic unbroken chain of mountains unfolds – but it is several distinct ranges, just as the villages huddled within them are distinct cultures. The Christian villages are sparsely populated and unremarkable in appearance, with ruined houses in the hills. And every village harbours a secret. During the First World War when a road was built by the Bulgarian army, extraordinary necropolises full of golden masks and artefacts were found, dating from the seventh century BC (the Trebenishta gold), and locals are certain that there’s more where that came from. In a village scattered over several hills as it crept down the mountain over time, the hilltop monastery holds Celtic stone crosses possibly a thousand years old, of unknown provenance. Here too is Belchista Wetland: a geological remnant from the great Dessaret basin of the Pliocene era five to three million years ago, whose other surviving descendants are Lakes Ohrid and Prespa. It has what is considered by conservationists Europe’s cleanest water.

Then come the villages where a sombre flag flaps – black double-headed eagle on red. The further north you go, the more thin white minarets pierce the skyline. This is Muslim-Albanian-majority country. But nothing here is quite what it seems. I visited villages that identify as Albanian but speak Macedonian. In the outlying Struga villages, I saw families where the parents speak Macedonian and the kids Albanian – after local politicians had bribed the poor parents to send their kids to local Albanian-language schools. Many of these people were and still are Slavic-speaking Muslims, or Torbesh, who over time and under pressure (poverty, the contempt of the Macedonian state) took an Albanian identity. This process of cultural assimilation is not new. It is called ‘Albanisation’ by both Christian and Muslim Macedonians, and is seen by them as an existential threat. With around a hundred thousand Albanian Kosovar refugees housed in Macedonia during and after the Kosovo War, Kosovo-Albanian ethno-nationalism is feared for potentially driving a wedge into the Republic, which could not withstand fragmentation.

At the edge of Mavrovo National Park, sharplaninec, sheepdogs, lay in the middle of the road basking in the sun, and you drove around them – because this is their terrain, not yours. On the western side of the Park is the Debar region with its lake and a monastery that ‘cures’ addictions. The road continues north along a tributary of the great Vardar River. If you cross into Kosovo, you’ll see the whole length of the rocky Shar Mountains, almost nine thousand feet high and entering the border wedge where Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania meet. This triangle is Gora, the realm of the Slav Muslims known as Gorani, mountain people. Even if you glimpse them from a distance, you see why the Shar Mountains were known in the Middle Ages as Catena Mundi, Chain of the World.

At Skopje, if you veer east towards Bulgaria, the alpine Osogovo Mountains come as a new surprise; from the highroad the rare villages look as if they’ve been tossed into the abyss. The mountain ridges, like the backs of prehistoric beasts on their glacial way somewhere, are a faded blue that seeps into you like weather, a Balkan blue.

This road I travelled by bus, one day. I wanted to see it because Anastassia travelled it countless times: by train, bus, and later in my grandfather’s Skoda. The mountains are not welcoming. She liked nature, but in a romantic way, as a backdrop to personal drama. These mountains were also the wall between her Ohrid and her Sofia, between her sensual lake self and her intellectual metropolitan self.

It took seven hours from Ohrid to the Bulgarian border. The potholed Skopje–Sofia motorway was unmended since the 1970s, when Yugoslavia had her back turned to the poor cousin in the east, as if in an attempt to prove that there was no reason to fix the road, that all roads led to Belgrade, that Yugoslavia was forever. But the only thing that is forever are the mountains.

All her life, Anastassia would not let others be alone. When I’d lock myself in the bathroom, she’d press the door handle. Because to be alive was to be in constant relationship. To struggle, demand, reject, seek release and not find it. I always thought this was the way we are conditioned to be women – invasive or invaded, ever-pressured or self-pressured. But the longer I spent here, the more I saw that this was more broadly the Eastern way. To be oppressed and oppressive was the norm. The men were just as needy. I met men who confided details of their private lives within hours. Friendships and alliances were quick. Intimacies were like an assault. Conspiratorial and paranoid thinking was the norm. Exuberant warmth and vicious gossip alternated. Everyone was enmeshed in everyone’s business, without being answerable for their own.

It must be the way of societies where industrialisation came late and feudal paternalism continues to be the default style of governance. You never learn to stand on your own feet, you’re always leaning on loved ones, like a crutch. Poverty digs you deeper yet into dependency. In such a culture, there is nothing to challenge the supremacy of close relationship and clan loyalty – and the landscape only locked this further into place. Personal freedom had to be clawed back at great cost, almost against the grain of the land.

The East–West axis was, of course, the Via Egnatia. A section of this road – Ohrid–Elbasan – I travelled with my cousin Tino, Tatjana’s son. I wanted to see it because three generations of our male ancestors had spent their lives on it.

My first meeting with Tino was by the jetty. A slim guy with dark circles around his eyes got up from a bench and walked towards me unhurriedly, the way the locals walked.

‘I recognised you at once,’ he smiled, and we hugged. ‘You have something of the Gardeners about you.’

So did he. He had been seven at the time of his mother’s death. I liked him instantly and within an hour had the feeling that we’d known each other since childhood. But without feeling put upon; Tino had a measured quality, something I’d come to recognise as a lacustrine quality. He was an urbane person of mild manners. His speech was gently self-deprecating and he was mentally agile, with a capacity for hard work and quick learning. But I also sensed a deep well of sorrow inside him, and he wore his insomnia on his face, like a distinction. Years ago, just as I was leaving New Zealand, he’d been ready to emigrate there for a new life. It would have been a strange unconscious swap between us, had he emigrated, but he didn’t.

Since then he had pursued different jobs and businesses, moved to Malta, then returned to the lake and together with family ran Ohrid’s iconic jazz club and an international jazz festival – until they had to close the festival for financial reasons. The town’s former authorities had promised support but instead ended up filling their own pockets.

Tino was outwardly calm, but internally restless. Sometimes he stayed up all night working, or listening to jazz – anything so long as he wouldn’t be left alone with the past, he said.

‘I have spent my life running, forty years running from something,’ he said. ‘Yet here I am, by the lake.’

He and Nate, a social worker, lived in a flat with mountain views, in a tower block on the edge of town. I asked if they followed political events in the country.

Internal emigration, a mass practice during Communism, had been revived here: you live in your country but only up to a point. In your mind, you are someplace else, more just, more emancipated, the way your country should be.

Tino shrugged, not wishing to dramatise. ‘Isn’t it like that everywhere? It’s the times we live in.’ During Macedonia’s war up north, he had stayed here and followed events from a distance. He had no aggression, his anger had a tendency to turn inwards.

Tino had no memory of my family’s visit in the oppressive summer of 1989. His childhood and youth had passed in a dark place. The more sensitive of the boys, he had been bullied at home after his mother’s death, and had taken refuge with relatives. He’d moved out at fourteen to live in an abandoned house. His father had remarried immediately (he meant well, he wanted to have a woman to look after us, Tino said). The second wife destroyed the family albums before she tried to destroy what Tatjana had loved the most, her boys, so that Tatjana would not continue to eclipse her from beyond the grave. But she did. The town talked of Tatjana as if she died yesterday. The town loved its beautiful dead women.

‘Yes,’ Tino said. ‘Everybody knew her except me. I’ve missed her all my life. Yet I carry so much of her. The restlessness is from her, and the creativity.’

Perhaps staying in Ohrid was for Tino an act of loyalty towards his mother who had loved the Lake, and him, as no one would love him again.

Loyalty carries especially heavy undertones in these parts. In northern Albania, the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini was a feudal law laid down in the mid-1400s by the chieftain of the Dukagjini clan, though its practice dated to earlier times. In the Kanun, a besa is a pact, a bond, a word of honour, an oath that can’t be broken (though in reality, it often is). The Kanun included rules about hospitality to strangers and, more importantly, a set of loyalty rules – to the family and the clan. If you break it, you pay with your life, or with the life of another of your blood. There may be a period of grace, during which the feud goes dormant, but once that period is over, there is no place in the land where the marked can hide. The Kanun was at the root of long-lasting blood feuds that stripped families of their sons. It was outlawed in the 1930s, but continues to this day in parts of Albania and Kosovo.

Although I was about to visit Albania for the first time, I already knew the besa and the Kanun. I think we all do. The Kanun is Cronos devouring his children.

‘I think I’ve been running from things too,’ I said to Tino in the car once we left Ohrid behind. ‘But some things follow you. Like Furies.’

Tino got on with everyone. I would have found it difficult to see faces from my past all around me, and to stay loyal to my town, especially after that experience with the town authorities.

‘Ohrid is beyond that,’ he said. ‘This lake is older than any authority.’

‘You are loyal to intangible things,’ Tino said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

We’d reached the last lakeside village before the border, past the Black Madonna monastery. The houses looked out towards the lake, like old people remembering. Behind them rose white cliffs, and a steep stairwell to the top.

‘We built it ourselves,’ said the owner of the fish restaurant on the water. ‘And now people come to see the cave church from all over Europe.’ He was tall and fair – another ‘Celt’. Once a worker in the textile factory in Struga, he’d found himself jobless when the factory closed, and opened this restaurant. Business was good but, he nodded darkly at the establishment next door, his cousin was jealous.

‘Typical,’ Tino said during our breathless ascent to the cave church. The cousin had given us the heavy key. ‘Envy, pride.’

If you had any breath left by the time you reached the top, the view took it away. The lake unfolded with careless magnificence, as if to say: there is enough for everyone, stop bickering. There is enough sky, enough water, enough air, enough earth, even enough trout. The rocky platform of the cave was plastered with guano, and someone had left a rolled-up kilim of the kind used in Muslim prayer, unexpected at the Church of the Archangel Michael. Inside were some of the last surviving frescoes of the days of artistic flowering on the lake, before the Ottomans. Those saints around the archangel whose faces hadn’t been scratched out had their eyes closed, something I’d never seen before. The blinded and the wilfully blind.

But when we looked again, their eyes were open. It was disconcerting. We laughed it away, but the uncanny impression remained.

Above the village was the Via Egnatia, a small section of cobblestones still visible in the forest. We walked the white stones smoothed by two thousand years of feet and hooves.

‘There were more,’ said an old man who materialised from the forest, loaded with herbs. ‘But folks used them for walls and barns. Blessings to you.’ And he disappeared round the bend, a figure out of time.

This is how history looks on the ground – not a parade of great events but a quiet chain of recycling.

We drove on. Because the lake was already 2,500 feet above sea level, the road had to climb only another thousand, through a tunnel of leafy forest, to reach the mountain pass of Qafë Thanë (Chafassan) where a border checkpoint had opened twenty years ago. I was about to cross into Albania for the first time.

Today Chafassan was sleepy, but this pass had an eventful history. Since antiquity, it has been the boundary between Illyria and Macedonia. Chafassan is mentioned in most lake journeys over the centuries. It was involved in every siege, invasion and military movement in the vicinity of the lake. Qafë means neck in Albanian. There was a legend about a travelling monk from Mount Athos who claimed to have special powers. To verify his claims but also rob him of the precious icons he carried, brigands cut off his head here, at the neck of the mountain. It is not said whether the head miraculously reconnected with the neck.

A fine drizzle started. This was not Tino’s first time in Albania. He’d even commuted to Tirana for work at one point, though you’d never associate the landscape ahead with commuting. Not unless you were a drover or a brigand.

The first thing I saw on Albanian soil was beehives. Bunkers and goats scattered over the crags. A shepherd propped on his stick, a woman gathering herbs. A statue of the Skoje-born Albanian Mother Teresa, stark against the scrubland, her hands in prayer. Here a spectacular crossroads opened up – one leg ran west to the Adriatic, over a switchback road and in the plains a patchwork of tilled land; another ran south, snaking downhill back to the lake.

We took the road west. Once we’d passed the clusters of fields and houses in the valley, and the fruit- and nut-selling roadside stalls, we started climbing again. We entered a landscape of brooding starkness. The road was overlooked by white cliffs and dark glades. Several times, the sight of vertiginously high aqueducts bridging gorges made me brake and pull over. We got out of the car and stood under the gigantic structures, these ghosts of feudal Communism built by political prisoners for the railway that would pass through this impassable landscape – and which had been out of use since the late 1990s.

The odd lone figure could be glimpsed walking along the disused railway bridge some two hundred metres above, crossing from one tunnel to another over the chasm, on some obscure errand, because if you were on foot the disused railway was a shortcut. But to where, it was not clear.

The landscape was like one of Escher’s riddle drawings, asking: is this possible, or is it in your mind? You looked at it from all angles and still you had no answer.

Trees sprouted from the roofs of abandoned factories in the hillside – brick factories, cement factories, gaping quarries – scenes of neo-Gothic desolation. The soil was a clay-red, and everywhere there was water. As if the earth had opened its flanks after a tremor, and was churning out its subterranean humours. Lavazhes, stations for washing your car, attempted to harness the water to profit, and skinny young men tinkering with mobile phones stood by hoses attached to taps as the mineral water flowed freely down the road, but traffic was sparse.

The only other activity along the road was the odd figure selling whole fresh walnuts out of sacks – an act so dwarfed by the mountains that at once I grasped why Albania is called Shqipëria, which is sometimes (incorrectly but memorably) translated as Land of Eagles. Because this was no place for humans. The humans had absorbed the qualities of the mountain – a stone-like endurance, a stealth, and a stubbornness that has ensured survival against impossible odds.

Bone-white Communist-era monuments, recently repainted in an attempt to rescue them from post-Communist contempt, perched atop rocky outcrops. They commemorated the resistance fighters who had sporadically fought first the Italians, then the Germans, and most viciously each other. Once the Albanian Communist Party assumed power, and under the leadership of Enver Hoxha who’d already entrenched himself as secretary of the Central Committee of the Party before the Second World War, they began a merciless purge. Thousands of non-Communist partisans who had spent years fighting the occupiers were imprisoned, tortured and executed for having ‘collaborated with the British’ during the war. Which of course they had, as had the Communist partisans; without the help of British commandos flown in from Cairo, the resistance mightn’t have succeeded.

The other kind of commemoration was the small gravestones along the road, where young men had died. We saw why, as drivers overtook in dangerous bends, heading blindly into the oncoming traffic. It was a Russian roulette that for some was exhilarating and for us a nerve-shredder.

Bunkers, car lavazhes and Communist-era ruins aside, this must be exactly what Edward Lear saw in 1848, when he rode with his dragoman Giorgio to Elbasan. His descriptions and sketches match what I saw one hundred and seventy years later:

‘A most desolate and wild country does this part of Albania seem, with scarcely a single habitation visible in so great a space.’ After the first crossing of the River Shkumbin, ‘the landscape began to assume a character of grand melancholy not to be easily forgotten’.

He drew some of it. Lear did not follow the Via Egnatia, or not all the way, as it was almost completely destroyed by then. He used a combination of rough tracks and no tracks at all, really a mad scramble up and down muddy valleys, his horses laden with his drawings and frequently tumbling with their cargo. It was September. They forded rivers either by braving currents and getting sodden or using Ottoman and Roman bridges. At times he and Giorgio, like all travellers, used the ‘government post-road’, an unevenly paved causeway two or three feet above the ground, from which you could easily be dislodged by oncoming caravans and horsemen, down into the mud – or worse, into a ravine.

The terrain was so hard to pave or even shore up against floods that by 1900 the Ottoman authorities had given up. ‘It was just as Nature and the Romans left it,’ wrote another traveller. Foreign visitors were discouraged from journeying by land altogether.

The most gripping description of this roadless road is by the Scot John Foster Fraser in his Pictures from the Balkans (1906). He travelled with a dragoman and Turkish soldiers as escorts against brigands in the dangerous years after the Ilinden Uprising, when kidnappings and killings by komitas of all stripes were an everyday occurrence in Macedonia. The Ottoman administration gave escorts free of charge to Western visitors, to prevent expensive kidnap.

Once past Chafassan, Fraser’s party started encountering ‘tall, fearless-eyed Albanians’, and became anxious. In Albania you were unlikely to be kidnapped or robbed, but more likely to be shot for no reason. In Byronic spirit, Fraser compares the Highlands of Albania with the Scottish Highlands: the view from Chafassan was ‘like a Scotch moorland – humped, and for miles covered with bracken’.

They overnighted in Kukës, once a Roman station called Tres Tabernas and now a quiet scenic town with its back turned to the visitor. Its name had stuck in my mind after learning that a few of the twenty thousand girls and women of Kosovo who were raped during the Yugoslav Wars had come here, where nobody knew them, for abortions or to give birth to babies who were often abandoned. These survivors of horrific violence continue to live in silence, stigmatised by a culture of cognitive dissonance where cause and effect are conflated so that guilt and its enabler, shame, are collectively projected onto the victim, who must carry that burden alone so as not to ‘dishonour’ the collective. Together with her physical and psychic wounds.

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.

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

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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

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

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.

BESA