Yesterday morning we bid farewell to Bob’s Pestani family and drove into Ohrid. I experienced it as a hip resort town, with all ages visiting it, lots of music and arts going on, and a big enough old town that it still felt alive and with a soul (I didn’t feel this way about Bankso, for example, although I don’t it as well). There are still the pedestrian walkways with modern shops, the innumerable sidewalk cafes and disco bars (here and in Plovdiv, similar to what Sandra and I found in Ioannina), and you can escape some of this by walking up to the old town, where it was surprisingly quiet. They are still excavating around some of the picturesque churches. A couple of the churches are perfectly situated, and one cannot help but admire how the ancients knew a spiritual spot when they found one. The Christians jumped on the bandwagon, with location and holidays, but if you get beyond that and work your way back, you cal still capture some of what led folks to these spots in the first place. That’s my main interest in seeing churches here in the Balkans; it’s what’s not immediately visible that counts.
We walked around and enjoyed the upper city, then took a water taxi back to the center. We figured a way to get out of Dodge and headed north of Stuga toward Debar. I had wanted to take this route for a couple of reasons. At the Ohrid festival in 1974, I had loved the Debar regional costumes. I had never made it up there, and the road through it hugged the mountains south of the Sar Planina, which I could at least look at if not hike in this trip. Plus, being so close to the Albanian border meant a different cultural experience.
What was first evident once we turned north was that the road signs listed places in Albanian first, then in Macedonian. Also, towns seemed to have more mosques than churches (I counted 6 in Debar alone). Kerchiefs on younger women were more in evidence, and more older men wore the tight white skullcaps. People stil drove like lunatics, however (I’ve been working on improving my driving in the states, trying to drive more safely and less aggressively, and let me tell you, this entire trip has been a good consciousness raiser).
The road followed the Drin river, which is dammed in at least two places, creating lakes which are good for photographs, but probably not so good for fish (as in the Pacific NW). At one section, workers were paving the road, and we had to take an unmarked detour around the job. This led us onto a very narrow road through a couple of out-of-the-way villages that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. At times the “road” was more of a lane, and you had to just hope no one was coming around the corner in the other direction. There was a small car in front of us, and I told Bob that they would run interference for us would go first if someone barrelled around a blind spot. Not very charitable of me, but that’s where I was on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my evolutionary status.
We stopped frequently to take pcitures, of the towering mountains across the way, of villages perched on them in the distance (Galicnik was out of sight over the nearer ones, but I felt its presence). We reached Debar and stopped for lunch. Mostly men around, or grandmothers, nice trees near the center to cool off this hot day. I had some kind of hamburger with kashkaval mixed up in the middle and fried, it was pretty good.
Oftentimes during meals in the Balkans, someone, usually a Roma, will come by trying to sell you things you don’t really need, like roses, or hats, or pirated CDs, etc. While we were eating today, a man came up to us and tried to sell us a chainsaw! This was a first for me, but I gracefully declined. Turns out it might have come in handy, as minutes later, a horse-drawn carriage labelled “Taxi” and filled with wood rolled by and then returned on the sidewalk in front of the cafe. A group of employees started unloading the wood, which was destined for the pizza oven above the restaurant. All in all, a memorable sequence of events.
We finished lunch, and Bob bought a lot of CDs at a store I spotted near the car parking place. I’m sure he made the owner’s day, if not week. We continued on, playing Albanian music on the CD player. There’s some of this that I really love, and it was wonderful to be driving through this area listening to it. the Macedonians are in the minority here, but it’s hard to pick up on any tensions left over from the troubles of 2002. After Debar the road followed the river Radika, which is a very sweet stream.
We stopped at the famous Jovan Bigorski monastery. Again, well-situated, and a living monastery. A van drove up packed with groceries, and the monks unloaded them and carried them to their quarters. There were lots of pipes gushing water from the spring that mut be here, and it tasted great. We were met at the church by a monk who looked like a shorter version of my friend Craig, with a beard. The church, while having an elaborate wooden iconastasion a la Rila, was less heavily painted than church, and for me was thereby less opprressive. We saw a beautiful tree of life oil lamp in one corner. The monk said it was a gift from Ohrid, and I’m guessing idt is a one-of-a-kind. I wanted to photograph it for Sandra, but no photos allowed.
Back on the road, we soon joined up with the Mavrovo dam, and we found ourselves back in Skopje shortly. Bob had gotten his phone working, so we were greeted by the Alachkis. Bob and I wanted to take them out to eat, so we went to the Debar Maalo, a section of the city famous for its restaurants, and had a nice meal outside. We then went to a different restaurant, Nostalgia, for drinks. Adrijana will sing her tonight and tomorrow, and Bajsa has played here. The musicians were upstairs, kind of walled off, and played new-ish Macedonian tunes; at least they are still hiring live musicians. The restuarant kept things cool by spraying the dining area with mist from water pipes built into the ceiling. It worked pretty well.
