Sara Wheeler explores the mountains and little-visited towns of Macedonia
The ranger stooped to pick a black, conical mushroom from the forest floor. “It’s an aphrodisiac,” he said, as he slipped it in his pocket. The scent of wild thyme hung in the air and a pair of wild ducks hovered overhead, wings whirring.We were bear-watching in Mavrovo, a mountainous national park in west Macedonia. The small expedition began at 5am, when mist lingered low, threaded beneath spiky peaks. Mountains faded into violet heights and a golden eagle circled.Following the Adzina, a stream close to the border with Albania, my ranger, Hamlet, picked up traces of bears. He estimated the park population of the European brown bear to be 150 and, having worked there for 15 years, could recognise many individually. Wild lilies sprouted among the beech trees, and in the meadows Shar mountain dogs roamed with flocks of up to 2,000 long-legged sheep. The dog is so strong that it can deal with a wolf; three can bring down a bear.
We had already seen two bear cubs close to the road (they like to lick the salt that is put down to clear ice). At about 10am, 200m off among a stand of oak trees, we saw an adult female that Hamlet estimated to weigh about 300kg (660lb). She was pawing the ground, grubbing up ants. A pair of two-year-old cubs truffled in a desultory way near by.
That night we slept in a hide above the apple orchards of Brajcino. An infrared night-vision camera, hooked up to a battery-powered screen, and a removable window meant that we could lie on bunks, swaddled in blankets, watching a procession of roe deer, wild boar, hares and a bear. The proprietress of our guesthouse had prepared a picnic dinner. As with every meal in Macedonia it included four types of red and green pepper. “How does a Macedonian who doesn’t like pepper cope?” I whispered to Hamlet (he insisted on silence in the hide). “There is no such person,” he whispered back.
The next day I did more bear-watching in the 170 sq km Pelister National Park, in the Baba mountains, spreading from the Pelagonia and Prespa valleys, dividing the Aegean and Adriatic basins. We observed paw prints, grass-clogged spoor and roots that bears had torn up. At one point I heard a low growl, seemingly close by. I raised my binoculars, my heart pounding. The ranger, Pavel, had an admission to make: “It’s my tummy rumbling.”
We didn’t see a bear that day, but we did follow the high-pitched bark of a male roe deer. As we crunched as quietly as we could up the slope, he appeared, antlers proud against the blue sky, watching us. The Pelister landscape differed sharply from that of Mavrovo. Two glacial lakes, known as Pelister’s Eyes, glittered at an altitude of 2,000m, and moraines, called stone rivers in Macedonia, streamed down, especially on the north flank of Mount Pelister above Red Rock (Crveni Steni), named — so it is said — after blood shed by 6,000 French and Bulgarian soldiers who perished there during the First World War.
The star of Pelister, however, is not the bear, but the molika pine (Pinus peuce Grisebach), indigenous to the central Balkans but almost nowhere else, and as tall in Pelister as 40m. The ancients recognised its unique characteristic compared with other pines — it is the only species with five needles. We know this from the mosaics at Heraclea Lyncestis, a site close to Pelister founded by Philip II, the king of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great, in the 4th century BC. The archaeological site is remarkably well excavated and preserved — think Pompeii without the crowds — and includes an amphitheatre (not discovered until 1968) where prisoners faced death by wild beast. The largest of the Roman and early Byzantine mosaics displaying the five-needled molika appears on the 5,000 denar note.
Tourism is in its infancy in Macedonia. It is about twice the size of Northern Ireland with a population of just over two million, a quarter of whom are ethnic Albanian. It sits on a crossroads in the Balkan peninsula, buffeted by the swirling chaos of that region: for 400 years under Ottoman rule; during the first Balkan war; in two world wars; and post-1991, when the collapse of Yugoslavia ushered in independence. Bulgaria and Greece still believe that Macedonia is part of their territory, and it is unsurprising that nationalism and national identity feature prominently in the consciousness of the country.
Bitola, Macedonia’s second city, 15km west of Pelister, was once an important post on the Via Egnatia Roman trade route, and later the diplomatic and cultural centre of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans. After the Turks the city prospered — in 1900 more than 1,000 private houses had a piano. Unlike the capital, Skopje, Bitola has remained largely immune to modern development. A curious government spending spree between 2009 and 2013 plonked wedding-cake buildings in Skopje on a scale of Soviet gigantism, even in the old quarter, obliterating greenery and annoying residents.
To complete the trip I travelled through driving rain to Ohrid, a resort on the shores of its eponymous lake, a third of which belongs to Albania. The streets are so narrow that the upper floors of the houses protrude over the ground floors. In the new town behind the lake, shops displayed frocks reminiscent of the Yugoslavian past and plastic shoes. On the lakeshore, former fishing boats touted cruises and souvenir stalls flogged the fabled Ohrid pearls. These don’t come from oysters — Ohridians fashion them, using a secret method handed down within two families, from the scales of the plasica fish.
It was May and teachers were marching hordes of children around the historical sites. At the amphitheatre (2nd century AD) two boys sat picking nits out of one another’s hair. In the nearby Saint Sophia church 11th-century frescoes depicted haloed figures and angelic hosts, as clear and as moving as they must have been to the first churchgoers.
The Ottomans, who turned the church into a mosque, did Macedonia a favour by plastering the ceiling and walls with mortar, preserving the frescoes. However, the Turks had desecrated the saints’ faces with sharp stones. Is there a more powerful visual image of the clash between Islam and Christianity than a row of saints staring blindly from gouged-out eyes?
SOURCE: The Times
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