Ohrid

Ohrid is a lake older than most mountains — three million years, one of the handful of ancient lakes on Earth, so clear you can see twenty metres down and so old that two hundred of its species live nowhere else — with a town on its north-eastern shore that once claimed a church for every day of the year. Some sixty remain, and one of them, St. John at Kaneo, stands on its cliff above the water in the photograph every visitor takes and no visitor regrets. Above the town, Samuel's fortress keeps eighteen towers on the hill; below it, an ancient theatre still fills for the summer festival; and thirty kilometres down the eastern shore, at the Albanian border, the monastery of St. Naum sits over springs so clear the boats seem to float on air.

The traveller walks the old town's lanes to Kaneo in the early evening, when the light comes across the lake from Albania and the church glows; climbs to the fortress for the whole lake at once; sees the frescoes of the Perivleptos and the icons of St. Sophia; buys a string of Ohrid pearls, made from fish scales by a secret two families keep; takes the boat, not the road, to St. Naum, for the springs, the peacocks and the monastery, and swims from its beach; drives up Galičica for the view of two lakes at once, Ohrid on one side and Prespa on the other; and eats by the water in the evening — but not the trout, which is protected, whatever the menu says.

The Guide's honesty: Ohrid is North Macedonia's summer and the whole Balkans come in August — the quays are full, the music is loud, the beds are booked — so June and September are the months, and the town belongs to itself again by ten in the evening in any case; the lake trout, the koran, is endangered and the ban is real: refuse it kindly; the churches keep irregular hours and small fees — carry coins and patience; the boats to St. Naum are the way to go and come back, and the road along the shore is slower than it looks; and Skopje is three hours away and Tirana four — the lake sits at the meeting of countries and is, in the end, its own.