Sept 2 - As with the previous border crossing a few weeks ago, our passports are collected by the bus assistant and carried in a big pile to immigration, while we languish on board. He returns with the passports out like cards in a deck. Pick a card, any card! Again, no stamps out or in.
Some heavy rain as we skirt around the north end of the lake. Houses here are the standard two or three story, blocky structures, some with outside stairways. But there is a sense of poverty here, a bit more than in Albania. Gone are the omnipresent old Mercedes Benz, replaced by beat up Yugos and Fiats.
Stop in Struga, a resort town at the north end of the lake, to let off an old man who is connecting with a bus for Vienna. Why would trans European buses go east to here rather than directly north from Tiranë? My guess is that all routings to central or northern Europe go through the root highway that connects Istanbul-Sofia-Belgrade-Zagreb-Maribor and on into places north and west. Along the coast, it is smaller, twisty roads, that all have to negotiate the Dinaric Alps.
Dumped off at Ohrid, to a tiny, quiet bus station. It is markedly colder than we are accustomed to, with rain clouds threatening. By the time we get some Macedonian dinar from the bank machine (about 60 dinar to one Euro), all the taxis have been whisked away. There are three still parked out front, but are mysteriously empty. I see a group of taxi-diver looking men sitting in a cafe nearby, but none of them make a move to help the foreign family, as we shiver in the rain. We stand around for a bit, along with some other hapless souls, then decide to get out the umbrellas and walk the 25 minutes to the apartment.
Wind our way through neighborhoods with many newly constructed homes, all the standard three story blocks, interspersed with those still being built. The one thing I do not see here is the occasional turret or ostentatious entrance gate. Our apartment is new, overlooking a garden full of red pepper plants and squash.
On into town. The main drag east-west (P-1301) is standard fare, with plenty of manly barber shops, bakeries, money exchange facilities, and mini-casinos. I get rid of all my remaining lek. We turn down St. Clement of Ohrid, a pleasant pedestrian walkway of marble and limestone. Here is all the touristy stuff and restaurants. There is an incredibly old tree called the Ohrid Plane (Platanus orientalus), at the plaza. The truck is now in fragments, with two pieces growing independently. It has an estimated age of 800 years.
Sit by the tree for a bit, it is starting to get dark but there are many people out, similar to what we saw in Albania. It has a low key, relaxed feel. Eat a simple dinner and stop by a few day tour companies to see what we can organize for our time here.
Walk all the way down to the lake, where some ferries are still moving around. A large open area here with flowerbeds and potted plants suspended over the walkways.
So, why is the country called North Macedonia and not just Macedonia, given that there is no other country with a related name? The answer to that is a little-bitty introduction to the complexity of this little landlocked country:
Macedon, of course, was the name of an ancient kingdom, at one point led by one of the most famous warrior-kings of all time, Alexander the Great. He left a really long shadow, one that is still important for cultural identity today. The enormous empire that Alexander forged fragmented after his death, but left a long cultural and political shadow. Most of northern Greece (including the city of Thessaloniki) is known as Macedonia today, and many people in this region identify themselves and Macedonians. In 1991, when Yugoslavia broke up and the area we are now in declared itself independent ‘Macedonia’, Greece disputed this nomenclature, as they felt it attempted to inspire a unification of all places identifying as ‘Macedonia’. This argument went on from for almost 20 years. In the meantime, the provisional name used for the country, for acceptance into the UN, was “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. In 2019, the issue was finally resolved when the name “North Macedonia” was accepted in a referendum by the citizens. This was important, as without this resolution, it probably would not have been possible for North Macedonia to continue their application to join the EU. Without the incentive for EU membership, its hard to know whether it would ever have been resolved.
The region labeled ‘geographical Macedonia’ does not only include portions of northern Greece, but also bits of Albania and Bulgaria.
North MacedoniaAlbania