Today we were tourists. After a breakfast of bread, jam, yogurt, sliced meat, cheese, coffee and juice (served to us in our room), we headed out on a walking tour of Ohrid. The tour was downloaded from a Dutch person on the internet and supplemented by the Bradt guide for Macedonia which recommended it. The Bradt guide is very good if you ever need one for Macedonia…
Ohrid has an interesting history – like the rest of Macedonia’s history, fairly complicated. The lake itself is the oldest continually existing lake in Europe (3 to 5 million years old), and areas near the town have been inhabited at least since about 10,000BC. It has been part of many empires including Phoenician (from the 14th C. BC), Macedonians under Philip II (4th C. BC), Romans, Normans, it was the capital of Tsar Samoil’s empire (a Macedonian born Bulgarian who managed to take back most of Macedonia and Bulgaria from the Byzantines to found a kingdom in the late 11th C. only lasting until his death), then retaken by the Byzantine Empire, then the Ottomans (except for some small periods under the Bulgarians, Serbians, and Byzantines again), until the 20th C when it spent most of its time as part of Yugoslavia (except when occupied by Bulgaria during WW2). Something like that anyway.
Along the shore of the lake are many small and large boats offering tours, cafes, parks, restaurants and pedestrian streets. It’s quite lovely – although we were there in the shoulder season and high season must be pretty crazy. This part of town is absolutely for the tourists.
The walk took us a little up the hill past two old churches near our guesthouse (both closed) and a number of shops/ateliers selling handmade paper, jewellery etc, to the 11th C. St Sofia church and its remaining frescoes. No photography allowed, but well worth the MKD100 entry fee. When this church was converted to a mosque in the 1400s by the Ottomans, they whitewashed the walls of the church, which ended up protecting and saving many of the frescoes. The back of the church has an amphitheatre and is used for concerts – Ohrid in summer has many arts festivals in this and other outdoor venues.
We then walked up to the Greek/Roman amphitheatre. To be honest, it was hard to make out which (if any) bits were original as it has been ‘restored’ for use for performances, with a fairly nasty stage erected in front of it. Whilst we were there a couple of groups of kids in groups were brought to see it.
Little churches everywhere - on the way to the Roman amphitheatre
We next went to the icon gallery in a building next to the Sv Bogotodica Perivleptos Church, which contained a wonderful collection of icons from the 11th to the 19th C. There was an archaeological dig in the grounds of the church. We next walked up to the upper gate of the old town wall and watched the cars from each direction negotiating their turn through the gap only just big enough for one car. The 3km long wall once enclosed the whole town. It was only in the late 14th C., when the Ottomans arrived, that the town started to expand – with Christians inside the walls and the Ottoman Turkish population outside.
It was starting to spit and certainly looked like rain, so we thought it time for lunch. The restaurant Gladiator was OK, without being great, once again with excellent reviews on TripAdvisor! We sat upstairs on a protected balcony and the views were stunning – worth it for that. In the end it barely rained in town, although we could see the storms out over the lake.
Looking across to the Tsar Samoil's Fortress - this one dates from the end of the 10th C. although the site had been a fortress since at least the 3rd C. BC.
The new St Kliment church (2002) and the works rebuilding a version of St Kliment's monastery (turned into a mosque by the Ottomans and left in ruins). It is to become a branch of one of the Macedonian universities (and a hotel) once completed.
The site is pretty chaotic, with building works and archaeological digs in progress. I have mixed feelings about new buildings, constructed to replicate the old style, so that the age of something becomes confused. Although if people didn’t ‘rebuild’ in this way, most of the old centres of towns throughout Europe, for example, would simply not exist after WW1 & 2. But I felt pretty cheated on realising the church was only just over 10 years old!
We continued our walk through residential streets back down to the west of town to St Jovan Kaneo, a ‘real’ old church. It position on the cliffs is totally beautiful. Many of the houses, and the church grounds, had spectacular rose bushes in bloom. There were also lots of cats, but very shy compared to the cats of Istanbul.
In all our wanderings we had only seen a handful of other people checking out the historical sites, often the same families and couples making an anti-clockwise circuit through the town, similar to ours. Compared to the throngs around the shopping and café streets, there was no-one in the rest of the town. People are disappointing!
Afternoon tea! The bottom cake was labelled as 'Ohrid Torte' and was a yummy mix of walnuts and chocolate.
After cups of tea and cake, a session writing and sending postcards (old-skool), and a little hotel break, we headed to an area at the end of the pedestrian streets catering to Turkish tourists and found a grill selling köfte and rotisserie chickens.
It was pretty good and cheaper than the other restaurants we had eaten in so far in Ohrid. Around the time we were eating dinner we saw shop workers breaking their fasts through the windows. After dinner, during which we indulged in lots of excellent people watching, we stumbled on a folk festival and watched two Turkish and one Slovak group perform. The performances and the crown were both great fun and entertaining. The kids were dancing to each other’s music from the side of the stage and at one point in a lively Turkish performance the audience joined in, even joining the dancers on the stage. Very happy crowd.
A folk festival in the square at the junction of some of the pedestrian streets. On two separate nights we were able to enjoy young people from all over the Balkans playing, dancing and singing. The turks were the best! The took it VERY seriously, with more nationalistic flag waving and groups named after Atatürk for example!
