Lakes Ohrid and Prespa, the twin waterways that caress the borders of Albania, North Macedonia and Greece, don’t get much attention these days. In the past however, they formed the ‘nerve centre’ of the Balkans, a strategic respite along the Roman Via Egnatia that ran from the Adriatic coast to Istanbul. Their remoteness led them to being places of exile, but also of pilgrimage (the town of Ohrid once had 365 churches – one for each day of the year), and centres of incredible power (Tsar Samuel ruled his vast First Bulgarian Empire from a tiny island on Lake Prespa).
In 1913, the lakes were divided between Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia, ostensibly in an effort to make sure no one state controlled such a sensitive region. By that time however, the lakes had lost all strategic value as advances in technology and geopolitics fragmented the centres of power in the Balkans. War, repression and economic decline defined their twentieth centuries, and by the current era they had largely faded into obscurity.
Throughout To the Lake – Kapka Kassabova’s evocative look at these liquid borderlands and the people that inhabit them – the lakeside denizens repeatedly stress that ‘We are all the same, it’s the borders that divide us.’ And yet the experience of half a century under radically different systems (Greece - an anti-communist state, Yugoslavia - a socialist federation, Albania - a totalitarian dictatorship) has left the people divided, bitter and confused.
Kassabova is fascinated by borders. Not just the physical aspect, but also the human one. What happens to the people of a region when the borders come down? And more importantly, what happens to them once the borders come up again? Her previous book, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, was an engrossing journey through another Balkan borderland – the region of Thrace – that succeeded in engaging readers in the people and mythologies of Europe’s periphery.
