[North] Macedonia — Rising Son Travels

August 31st - September 4th

As I worked my way through the Balkans, my second stop was North Macedonia, which until earlier this year was called Macedonia. It is one of the six countries in the Balkans that formerly comprised the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. It was the second country to declare independence after Slovenia, and was able to do so without any violence, thanks to its lack of a large Serbian population.

I first heard about Macedonia’s name drama when I was en route to Greece from the US and sitting next to an American woman who was ethnically Greece and visited Greece frequently. She referred to the country as FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and advised that if I was trying to go to FYROM from Greece that I make sure there are buses running, as tensions have been high.

The naming conflict between Macedonia and Greece can seem so trivial from an outsider’s perspective. It’s just a name, get over it! In reality it gets into deep questions about identity, history, and who gets to claim history. Macedonia was home to perhaps the greatest military commander of all time, someone who literally has “great” in his name, Alexander the Great. Greece has a region and ethnic group called Macedonians, so they view their neighbors to the north as appropriating their proud history and culture. Greek Macedonians would say it’s as if Canadians trying to claim American History and George Washington as a part of their history.

After decades of FYROM being shut out of the EU and NATO due to their name dispute with Greece, they signed the Prespa agreement with Greece in 2018, changing the name to the Republic of North Macedonia. I expected this would be deeply unpopular with people in North Macedonia, but it turns out it’s enraged Greek Macedonians as well. My tour guide in Skopje referred to it as “selling out our name and our culture.”

Lake Ohrid

I started my time in North Macedonia at Lake Ohrid, which was just a few hours away from Tirana. It’s considered to be the longest continuously inhabited city in Europe. When I got to my hostel I realized that I had booked a tent spot at Sunny Lake Hostel without realizing that it was more of a BYOT situation. This was no problem as the hostel had a bed outside that I could use if I was interested. It was worth it to save a few euros.

It was a pretty social hostel, and shortly after arriving a found a group of people to go out to dinner with. Ohrid has some very cute restaurants that sit on the river, and to get to them you had to walk on a boardwalk adjacent to some rock cliffs. I ordered one of my favorite Balkan soups, taratur, which is basically tzatziki gazpacho.

When I woke up the next morning I walked over to a little swimming area with a girl from the hostel. It was nice to have fellow travelers to hang out with after a bit of a stretch in less social hostels. It can feel exhausting to be constantly introducing yourself to people. A lot of time it can feel like the kind of conversations you have on a first date where you’re just trying to put your biography on the table. I missed interacting with people who knew who I was and didn’t need me to lay out my backstory.

I walked back down to where the restaurants were and saw that one of them was renting out kayaks for something like $3/hour. It was too good of a deal to pass up so I fumbled my way out into the water. It wasn’t the most comfortable kayak, but I guess you get what you pay for.

Saint Sophia Church

Paragliding

I woke up early to go paragliding. I figured it was something I had never done before, and it was probably cheaper and more scenic than most paragliding. We drove out over a rocky road up a hill to the launch point. After my shoe almost fell off during lift off, we jumped off. The sensation of paragliding was not as exhilarating as I was hoping, but it was beautiful.. My arm started to get tired holding the selfie stick recording the experience. When we landed in a field there were a ton of blackberry bushes. While we waited for the truck to drive us back we ate blackberries and chatted. There were also a couple of empty tortoise shells. Apparently hawks pick them up, eat the inside, and then discard the shell when they’re done. Nature is cruel.

Lake Ohrid Boat Ride

When I got back to the hostel I ran into a group of people that were looking to rent a boat to go out on the water. They needed to get a group of 10 together for the economics to make sense for the boat versus joining one of the existing boat tours.

One of my life philosophies is to never say no to a boat, and so I went. One of the girls had been hawking the boat rental down by the harbor, which led the skipper to joke that she should come back and work for him. We had our group and headed out on the water.

Bay of Bones Museum

The stop I was most excited to see was the Bay of Bones museum. It’s an archaeological complex that recreates an actual ancient village that lived on the lakes. Each of the huts had a hole in the middle for access to the water. My favorite detail was that they would tie a string around the foot of babies so that the baby didn’t fall into the water. The museum didn’t have a ton of explanatory information, but it sure made for some great pictures. It looked to me like something from Polynesia.

The weather started to turn, but luckily we’d already gotten a swim in. We were unfortunately trapped at the Southern part of the lake until things cleared up. This wasn’t too big of a deal except for the fact that I had a bus to Skopje I needed to catch. I shared a cab back with some of the others in the interest of time. I’m sure I missed a choppy ride back to town on the boat.

Skopje

The thing I consistently kept hearing about Skopje was that it had a ton of statues. It lived up to that part of its reputation.

Mother Teresa

Greece and North Macedonia may fight over Alexander the Great, but there’s another figure under dispute: Mother Teresa. After my trip to Tirana and hearing about how Mother Theresa was Albanian, my tour guide in Skopje claimed that not only was that not true, but that she’d never even set foot in Albania except in the airport. A quick Google search determined that not only had she been to Albania, but she visited the grave of its tyrannical dictator, Enver Hoxha.

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje to Albanian parents and lived there for the first eight years of her life. There’s a small museum to Mother Teresa in Skopje. It has some of her personal effects and a certified copy of her Nobel Peace Prize. There was also a small chapel.

My favorite part of Skopje was the Old Bazaar, a marketplace that’s been operating for hundreds of years in Skopje. While it has seen empires come and go, it’s clearly the Ottoman empire that’s left the largest impact on the area. It reminded me a lot of Istanbul.

I went out to a Rakia Bar with some of the other people from the hostel. It served 40 types of rakia, which is 39 more types of rakia than I knew existed. A Polish girl from our hostel had some pretty awesome tats.

I wasn’t such a huge fan of Skopje. There aren’t a ton of compelling things to do there. Its crazed aesthetic full of monuments copied from other countries seems almost too pat as a metaphor for the country itself.

Before I left Skopje I took advantage of North Macedonia’s loose restrictions on pharmaceutical drugs and picked up some essentials. I had a long trip ahead to get to Romania.