EUROPE – PART 6 

Elva and I commandeered the back seat of the bus just like we did 55 years ago when we first started hanging out and going bowling and to high school hockey games together. Our antique bus drove through picturesque hilly country framed on both sides by snow-capped mountains. After a long four-hour trip, we arrived in Ohrid. Taxis to and from the bus stations in Skopje and Ohrid and the bus ride itself set us back the grand sum of $50!

Oh my God, what a beautiful place! Ohrid is the prettiest location I’ve seen on this trip; more beautiful even than Lake Bled. The city, about the size of Charlottetown, lies on the eastern shore of the lake of the same name, with Albania on the western side.

The old town and the lake are listed as a UNESCO Cultural Landscape (as is Grand-Pré) and Ohrid is one of the oldest human settlements in Europe, built mostly between the sixth and nineteenth centuries. The lake contains 200 species of flora and fauna that are found only there. Ruins of Christian basilicas have been found that date from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The streets run along the hillside and are narrow and cobble-stoned, connected vertically by stone stairways. It’s one of those rare places where you feel comfortable walking at any time of day or night, and you can’t wait to see what lies around the next corner.

We checked into our cute, little hotel with a balcony overlooking the lake and took a stroll along the lakeside promenade, thinking it went only a half kilometer or so. And it just kept going… We tried to imagine what Victoria Park would look like if the seawall were built up, the roadway removed, and the boardwalk replaced by something like you see in the photo below: a central promenade with benches and greenery, framed by bike paths on either side. Remember that North Macedonia is a poor country by our standards. We think we’ve got a great thing going with the Charlottetown and Summerside boardwalks, but we could do so much better!

After breakfast, we walked to Samuel’s Fortress, high above the city, to find that it was closed on Mondays. Ah well, many other places to visit, Elva said, so we walked down to the Church of Saints Clement and Pantaleimon. After being pestered by several guides, we wandered around the place and made our way back to where we’d paid our entry fee. I asked the attendant whether the newer buildings surrounding the complex were part of a monastery. “Yes, they are”, he replied, before telling us the whole story of the place without trying to impress us with details we’d never remember anyway.

As with so many other places in Europe, this one has many layers of history, beginning with a massive, football-field-sized early Christian Basilica built there in the late fourth or early fifth century. The ruins were excavated, and large sections of the elaborate floor mosaics have been preserved and are displayed. The Ottomans destroyed everything that looked remotely Christian and built mosques over the ruins in the centuries during which they ruled the area. The young man’s face lit up when we asked what all the new construction was for. “We’re building a university to teach Orthodox Christian theology”. We asked whether he was a student and he told us that he will soon be ordained as a priest, “But first I had to get married!”, he said proudly, flashing his wedding band. What a hell of an idea!

The Church of Saint John the Theologian, a small fifteenth-century Orthodox chapel, is the image you usually see when you Google Ohrid. To get there, we walked past many beautiful houses with panoramic views of the lake. The setting of the church is striking, as it sits high above the lake at the tip of the peninsula. We followed the path that leads from the church, all the way around the base of the hilltop fortress, until we arrived back in the lower town, passing by a Roman-era theatre along the way, beautiful gardens like the one shown below, and the Church of St. Sofija. And, by the way, houses are built right over the streets in the old town. How cool is that?

On our last day in Ohrid, we visited Samuel’s Fortress, so named for Tsar Samoel of Bulgaria who had it built and ruled the area from there in the eleventh century. As with so many other fortifications in this part of the world, it was built atop the ruins of another one, the fortress of Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, the guy on the enormous statue in Skopje’s main square. A nice young couple from Turkiye took our picture on the fortress wall. Later, we dropped into the local museum which is housed in the palatial former home of the Robevci family. Our guide, an archaeologist, gave us a wonderful tour.

We took one last walk out to the peninsula to see St. John the Theologian “under the lights”. We just sat there and took it all in; just the two of us with no one else around.

We could spend more time in Ohrid. It has everything we look for in a place to park for a month or so: character, cleanliness, value for money, magnificent water views, nice people, and a positive vibe. I’ll check for available apartments should we decide to come back here.

Five minutes after crossing the border from North Macedonia, we saw the first ones: a large one overlooking the main road and ten or so smaller ones. The infamous concrete bunkers built during the reign of Enver Hoxha dot the landscape. This nut ruled the country from 1945 until his death in 1985 according to the Soviet Communist model, only more authoritarian and isolationist. Until it freed itself from the Communists, Albania was the European version of North Korea. By the time the last bunker was built in 1983, 175,000 of them were scattered across the countryside. That’s one for every woman, man, and child living on Prince Edward Island! The country is now on a path towards westernization with ambitions to join all the prestigious international clubs, especially the European Union. Still, Albania is Europe’s poorest country and will likely be for some time to come.

This was not technically our first visit to Albania. While on a Mediterranean cruise in 2013, we took a day tour from the island of Korfu in Greece to Butrint, site of a Roman fortress, in the southern part of the country.

Downtown Tirana, the capital city home to 600,000 of Albania’s 2.8 million residents, is a modern, bustling place. Unlike the other cities we’ve visited so far, it’s less friendly to pedestrians; here, cars rule! Still, there are nice restaurants, upscale stores, and malls. We started by visiting the local tourist information office to get our bearings and advice on what to see and do on an afternoon walking tour. The friendly young woman told us to go to Skanderbeg Square and find, you guessed it, “The man on the horse”, to use as our reference point. We got in our 10,000 steps before the worst of the rain, and I just had to pose beside one of the smaller bunkers in a park on the main drag.

There are two “must-dos” in Tirana, the Dajti Express cable car and Bunk’Art. We figured out how to get to the cable car by city bus and knew that Bunk’Art 1 was located nearby. The gondola took us from the base of the Express in the suburbs up to near the top of Mount Dajti in the national park of the same name. The ride up took almost twenty-five minutes, making it the longest cable car ride we’ve taken. It was a beautiful day and the views from the top were spectacular. We could see all the way to the Adriatic Sea, at least 40 kilometers to the west.

What looked like an abandoned hotel or dormitory up the hill from where we got off the Express piqued my curiosity. I guessed from the bas reliefs at each end showing an adolescent young woman and young man that it must have had something to do with the Communist régime. Sure enough, I learned it was there that party officials sent young Communist Pioneers for a bit of fun and brainwashing in the good old days! Not one of those things you’ll find on the “official” list of things to do, but interesting and thought provoking, nonetheless.

From the base of the cable car, we walked to Bunk’Art 1. This otherworldly monstrosity is a five-level underground bunker, built as a protective measure against nuclear fallout during the Communist régime of the paranoid Enver Hoxha. The bunker has a total area of 32,000 square feet and contains 106 rooms, including an assembly hall. The museum covers the history of Albania dating back to the Italian occupation in the 1930s, the Second World War period, and the Communist era that followed. The exhibits include old photographs and various artifacts. We learned that thousands died digging tunnels and building bunkers all around the country.

We explored the passageways, the areas provided for the meetings of the General Staff of the Army in case of war, the rooms where Enver Hoxha and the former Prime Minister would sleep, and the gigantic hall dedicated to the meetings of the Political Bureau. We couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there! The photos below show Hoxha’s sitting room and the assembly hall.

On our second full day in Tirana, we joined an organized tour. I’d planned to rent a car for the days we were here but thought better of it after reading how hard it is to drive in the city. Having witnessed the chaos with my own eyes, I’m damn glad I did. Our young and fearless guide and driver got us to our destinations and back home in one piece.

The countryside south of Tirana is a scenic patchwork of lakes, olive groves, vineyards, greenhouses, pasture, tilled land, and small farm holdings. It looks far more prosperous than the eastern part of the country we travelled through on our way from Ohrid to Tirana and has a Mediterranean feel to it.

We made a couple of stops during the day but the most interesting one, by far, was Berat Castle, a fortified town that is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Our guide walked us through the town, still inhabited today by a couple of hundred people, and we stopped for a visit to the Iconographic Museum of Onufri. Icons are religious images painted on wood. The collection we saw dates from the mid-1500s and is impressively displayed in the Orthodox Christian Church of Saint Mary. A fellow passenger took this photo of us standing on the castle wall and the second is of a scene in the fortified town of Berat.

Albania is a country just now emerging from a very dark period. We asked the young concierge at our hotel how many years it’s been since his parents, both near sixty, have felt free. “Since the late 1990s”, he replied. Twenty-five years is not long to get a country back on its feet and, there’s no question, they have a very long way to go. Tirana is a city on the move, but it has many challenges to overcome, traffic congestion being one of the main ones.

Elva and I have developed a very simple yardstick for measuring a country’s state of development. We look at three things: garbage, graffiti, and public transit. The first two are everywhere in the countries we’ve visited with the notable exceptions of Slovenia, parts of Croatia, and the city of Ohrid. And it’s ironic that the poorest country, Albania, has the biggest car congestion problem in its capital city and a very poor public transit system. It was the same story in Sarajevo. We’re hoping these places will look and feel better in another generation and can only hope that these good people will enjoy the stable government needed to get them there.

A travel day is a travel day. We boarded our bus in Tirana at 8:00 and left for Kotor, Montenegro, expecting a smooth six-hour ride. After leaving Podgorica, we climbed into the mountains and started meeting cars with snow on them. “Oh shit”, I thought. The further we drove the worse it got. By the time we reached the highest point, the traffic had slowed to a standstill, cars were in the ditch and splayed across the road, and big trucks were spinning on the spot, unable to move. It was obvious that our bus driver had driven through such conditions before. He was calm, patient, and very careful.

We were relieved to finally drive out of the snow and into the rain as we came down the other side of the mountain and approached the Adriatic Sea. We’d called into Kotor in the fall of 2013 on our very first cruise and loved the place. We checked into our hotel, the Monte Cristo, in the old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and saw this when we looked out our window!